Techmeme
January 26, 2025, 12:55 PM

Top News

Bobby Allyn / NPR:
Sources: the Trump admin is in talks for Oracle and a group of US investors to take over TikTok's global operations, with ByteDance retaining a minority stake  —  The Trump administration is working on a plan to save TikTok that involves tapping software company Oracle and a group …
Reuters:
Trump denies talks with Oracle about a TikTok deal, says “I have spoken to many people about TikTok” and expects a decision in the next 30 days  —  U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was in talks with multiple people over buying TikTok and would likely have a decision …
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Caiwei Chen / MIT Technology Review:
Rather than weakening China's AI capabilities, US sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate by prioritizing efficiency and collaboration  —  The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model.  —  The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek …
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng told Chinese Premier Li Qiang in a Jan. 20 meeting that US export controls on advanced chips to China were still a bottleneck  —  DeepSeek is called ‘amazing and impressive’ despite working with less-advanced chips  —  SINGAPORE—A Chinese artificial-intelligence company …
Zeyi Yang / Wired:
DeepSeek, which started as a deep-learning research branch of Chinese quant hedge fund High-Flyer, is now giving US AI giants a run for their money  —  When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent.
Financial Times:
More: Marcus on AI, Forbes, VentureBeat, Business Insider, The Decoder, Tech Startups, Daily Sabah, The Indian Express, Constellation Research, Bloomberg, ChinaTalk, Hindustan Times, Moneycontrol, VentureBeat, Neowin, and Big Technology
Bloomberg:
Sources: people affiliated with DOGE have met with representatives of various public blockchains as they explore using a blockchain to track federal spending  —  - Conversations said to be held with multiple public blockchains  — The technology may be used to track government spending
New York Times:
Elon Musk's first moves suggest DOGE will be closer to an IT project than the sweeping operation to slash $2T+ from the federal budget that he once predicted  —  The rebranding of a former White House digital office into the new Department of Government Efficiency signals its potential limits, budget experts said.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Siri with Apple Intelligence is a massive regression from the old Siri, which recognized its limitations and provided a list of search links to answer a query  —  Writing about the current state of Apple Intelligence yesterday, I mentioned how utterly stupid and laughably wrong Siri is when asked …
Martin Matishak / The Record:
Sources: US State Dept.'s freeze on foreign aid applies to a bureau that uses cyber diplomacy to fight threats and pursues international norms for emerging tech  —  The U.S. State Department's move to halt nearly all existing foreign assistance applies to the programs and funds …
Brian Armstrong / @brian_armstrong:
CEO Brian Armstrong says Coinbase needs to rethink its listing process for new tokens to keep up with “~1m tokens a week being created now, and growing”  —  We need to rethink our listing process at @coinbase given there are ~1m tokens a week being created now, and growing. High quality problem to have, but evaluating each one by one is no longer feasible. And regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one is
New York Times:
Wall Street Journal:
Despite assurances, advertisers worry Meta's tools may not prevent ads from appearing near offensive content as the new content moderation approach takes effect  —  Social-media giant's loosening of speech restrictions is unsettling advertisers, who say a decade of efforts to protect their reputations is at risk

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Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: