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Techmeme
February 25, 2025, 3:25 PM
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Top News

Reuters:
Sources: Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and other Chinese companies are ramping up orders for Nvidia's H20 AI chip due to booming demand for DeepSeek's models  —  Chinese companies are ramping up orders for Nvidia's (NVDA.O) H20 artificial intelligence chip due to booming demand …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Trump's team plans tougher US chip curbs and have met with Dutch and Japanese counterparts, urging them to tighten restrictions on China's chip sector
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Google releases its free Gemini Code Assist globally in public preview for solo developers, with 180K code completions per month; GitHub Copilot offers 2,000  —  And provides 90 times more monthly code completions than GitHub Copilot's free tier. … A free version of Gemini Code Assist …
Brad Norton / Dexerto:
Activision confirms on Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Steam page that it “uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets”, after fan speculation  —  Activision has finally admitted to using AI-generated content in its games and Call of Duty players aren't the least bit surprised.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adobe launches an updated Photoshop app for iOS, including many design, editing, and AI tools from the desktop app; an Android app is coming “later this year”  —  It's free and available on iOS first, with an Android version coming later this year.
Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
Kate Bush and 1,000+ other musicians “co-write” a “silent” album to protest the UK's proposal to let AI train on their copyrighted work if they don't opt out  —  Recordings of empty studios represent impact on musicians of UK's plans to let AI train on their work without permission
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
New York's law requiring ISPs to offer $15 or $20/month broadband has inspired Vermont, Massachusetts, and California to guarantee affordable internet access
More: Route Fifty.  Bluesky: @sportshotchris.  Mastodon: @ax6761@freeradical.zone.  Forums: r/technology, Slashdot, and Ars OpenForum
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Apple investors reject outside shareholder proposals asking the company to cease its DEI efforts and write a report assessing the risks of its work on AI  —  Apple Inc. investors rejected outside shareholder proposals that asked the iPhone maker to cease its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts …
Associated Press:
Resignation letter: 21 DOGE staffers, who previously worked at the USDS, say they won't use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services”  —  More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency …
Faris Mokhtar / Bloomberg:
Sources: Indonesia and Apple agree a deal to lift the iPhone 16 ban, with Apple set to invest $1B; a memorandum of agreement may be signed this week  —  - Tech giant has promised to invest $1 billion in Indonesia  — Deal would be win for Prabowo after series of policy setbacks
Carly Page / TechCrunch:
Employee screening company DISA confirms a data breach in February 2024, found in April 2024, affecting 3.3M+ people and including Social Security numbers  —  DISA Global Solutions, a U.S.-based provider of employee screening services, has said it suffered a data breach that affects more than 3.3 million people.
Mike Butcher / TechCrunch:
Sweden-based Lovable, an AI-powered app builder, raised a $15M pre-Series A led by Creandum following a €6.8M pre-seed, says it has 500K users and $17M in ARR  —  Using generative AI to create software has been possibly the largest use case since it first appeared a couple years ago.
Suvashree Ghosh / Bloomberg:
Bitcoin falls below $90K, its lowest level since mid-November 2024, as the rally that followed Trump's election fades; ETH, XRP, SOL, and more also fell sharply  —  - Biggest token is now down almost 20% since Trump inauguration  — Macro factors and crypto blowups combine to erode confidence
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget:
OpenAI rolls out Deep Research to Plus, Team, Edu, and Enterprise users, a month after launching it to Pro subs; Plus users get 10 Deep Research queries/month  —  A $200 Pro subscription is no longer required to use the tool.  —  When OpenAI announced Deep Research at start of February …
More: Tom's Guide
Jonathan Stempel / Reuters:
A US judge says Meta must face a potential class action lawsuit claiming it prefers cheaper foreign workers over US citizen job applicants, citing Meta's stats  —  A federal judge on Tuesday said Meta Platforms (META.O) must face a lawsuit claiming that the Facebook and Instagram parent prefers …
More: MediaPost
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
A look at Claude 3.7 Sonnet's extended thinking mode and its 128K token output limit; long thinking runs are impressive but can take several minutes to complete  —  Claude 3.7 Sonnet is a very interesting new model.  I released llm-anthropic 0.14 last night adding support for the new model's features to LLM.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Italy wants to replace STMicro CEO Jean-Marc Chéry for poor performance, as the Franco-Italian chipmaker struggles to navigate a slump in chip demand  —  Italy's government wants to replace Jean-Marc Chéry, the man at the helm of Franco-Italian chipmaking joint-venture STMicroelectronics NV, for poor performance.
Bloomberg:
Sources: SpaceX seeks to deploy Starlink terminals for the FAA, raising questions about Elon Musk's conflicts of interest and Verizon's $2B FAA contract in 2023  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX is seeking to deploy Starlink satellite internet terminals to help accelerate an upgrade …

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UiPath:
UiPath Unveils 10 Innovations that Will Shape the Agentic Future  —  Orchestration engine, API workflows and agentic testing among key features of new UiPath Platform™ for agentic automation, launched at UiPath DevCon 2025
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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:25 PM ET, February 25, 2025.

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From Mediagazer

Sara Fischer / Axios:
PBS and one of its local affiliates sue the Trump administration, saying his executive order to cut federal funding violated PBS' First Amendment rights

Max Tani / Semafor:
The California State Senate launches an inquiry into whether Paramount's proposed $15M settlement with Trump violated bribery and unfair competition laws

The Bookseller:
Boundless, which bought crowdfunding publisher Unbound in March, tells authors that royalties accrued before March won't be paid until Boundless is cash stable

More News

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Israeli startup Quantum Machines, which offers hardware tools to other quantum computing companies, raised a $170M Series C led by PSG Equity

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Tesla starts rolling out a software update enabling driver-assistance features, similar to Full Self-Driving in the US, for Chinese customers who paid $8,800
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Epic v. Apple: Phil Schiller says he initially feared Apple's 27% App Store fee posed a compliance risk and could create “antagonistic” developer relations
Ethan Mollick / One Useful Thing:
Claude 3.7 and Grok-3 are the first “Gen3” models with big gains in handling complex tasks, using 10x more compute than GPT-4-class models, and better reasoning
Brendan Pierson / Reuters:
DoorDash agrees to pay $16.75M to settle a lawsuit by NY's AG accusing it of pocketing customers' tips for delivery drivers between May 2017 and September 2019
CNBC:
Chegg sues Google, saying AI Overviews hurt its traffic and revenue, as it mulls strategic options, including an acquisition; CHGG drops 30%+
NBC News:
Sources: the Elon Musk-directed OPM email asking federal staff about recent work requested no links or attachments as part of a plan to feed responses into AI
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