Techmeme
December 19, 2024, 9:30 PM

Top News

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google releases Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, an experimental “reasoning” model that “explicitly shows its thoughts” and can use them to strengthen its reasoning  —  Google has released what it's calling a new “reasoning” AI model — but it's in the experimental stages …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Meta teases an AI editing tool powered by Movie Gen AI in Instagram that can change outfits, backgrounds, and more in videos using a text prompt, coming in 2025  —  Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos.”
Kiyoshi Takenaka / Reuters:
Sony buys ~$320M of shares in Japanese media powerhouse Kadokawa, which owns FromSoftware, taking its stake to ~10% and becoming Kadokawa's top shareholder  —  Sony Group (6758.T) said on Thursday it will invest about 50 billion yen ($320 million) to acquire new shares of Kadokawa (9468.T) …
Reuters:
Sources: Apple is in early-stage talks with Tencent and ByteDance about integrating their AI models into iPhones sold in China; ChatGPT is unavailable in China  —  Apple (AAPL.O) is in talks with Tencent (0700.HK) and TikTok owner ByteDance about integrating their artificial intelligence models …
New York Times:
In 150+ X posts, Elon Musk led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by sharing misinfo, which may lead to a government shutdown over Christmas  —  The world's richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.
Benj Edwards / Ars Technica:
Researchers unveil Genesis, an open-source generative physics engine that trains robots in simulated reality 430K times faster than in the real world  —  On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system …
Malcolm Owen / AppleInsider:
Apple researchers say the company's open-source ReDrafter method on Nvidia GPUs led to a 2.7x speed increase in generated tokens per second for greedy encoding  —  Apple's latest machine learning research could make creating models for Apple Intelligence faster, by coming up with a technique …
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
YouTube plans to start a crackdown on “egregious clickbait”, or videos where the titles or thumbnails make claims the videos don't back up, beginning in India  —  A lot of YouTube videos have flashy, misleading titles and thumbnails, such as “BREAKING NEWS” or “The president steps down …
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Oura raised a $200M Series D with participation from Fidelity and Dexcom at a $5.2B valuation and says sales grew 100%+ in 2024 to ~$500M with 2.5M+ rings sold  —  Finnish company's growing popularity has led to its sales more than doubling this year  —  Ōura, the maker …
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Anthropic demonstrates “alignment faking” in Claude 3 Opus to show how developers could be misled into thinking an LLM is more aligned than it may actually be  —  AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows.  They can pretend to have different views during training …
Charles Rollet / TechCrunch:
Backflip, which is building AI models that can generate 3D designs using text, sketches, or photos as prompts, raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and a16z  —  What if it were as easy to generate a usable 3D design as prompting ChatGPT?  That's the mission of Backflip …
Robert Booth / The Guardian:
A coalition of newspapers, writers, movie producers, and others rejects the UK's plans to create a copyright exemption for AI companies to train their models  —  Exclusive: Coalition of musicians, photographers and newspapers insist existing copyright laws must be respected
Chainalysis:
In 2024, hackers stole $2.2B in crypto across 303 hacks, up from $1.8B across 282 hacks in 2023; by July 2024, $1.58B had been stolen, but the pace slowed after  —  The Chainalysis 2025 Crypto Crime Report  —  Crypto hacking remains a persistent threat, with four years …

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