~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Robert Triggs / Android Authority: Qualcomm unveils the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile SoC, with two prime and six performance CPU cores, claiming 45% faster CPU and NPU over the 8 Gen 3, and more  —  The new name marks a major departure from previous Snapdragons.  —  •  —  After much speculation …

Brooks Barnes / New York Times: Blade Runner 2049's producer sues Musk, Tesla, and WBD for allegedly using AI to create imagery close to the film, despite a denied request, to promote Cybercab  —  Alcon Entertainment, the Hollywood company behind “Blade Runner 2049,” said it had denied a request to use images from the movie but that Mr. Musk did so anyway.

Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk: Stripe announces it has finalized a deal to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge; Michael Arrington says the deal was worth $1.1B  —  Bridge, which has raised $54 million in funding, previously said it aspired to become the blockchain version of Stripe, operating a global system in which other developers could integrate

Todd Spangler / Variety: Dow Jones and New York Post sue AI startup Perplexity for alleged copyright infringement and say it hasn't replied to a July 2024 letter about copyright issues  —  News Corp CEO accuses Perplexity of ‘content kleptocracy’ … “Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence company …

Anthropic: Anthropic evaluates four “sabotage” threat vectors for its Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models and finds that “minimal mitigations are sufficient”  —  Any industry where there are potential harms needs evaluations.  Nuclear power stations have continuous radiation monitoring …

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg: In a letter, key US lawmakers urged Japan to strengthen restrictions on sales of chipmaking equipment to China or risk facing US curbs on Japanese companies  —  - China Committee leaders write to Japan's ambassador to US  — Failure to act risks new US limits on Japanese firms, they say

Cate Lawrence / Tech.eu: Kazakhstan-based Kaspi.kz agrees to acquire a majority share, or 65.4%, of Turkish e-commerce platform Hepsiburada for ~$1.13B, expected to close in Q1 2025  —  The share acquisition is poised to benefit entrepreneurs and SMEs in Kazakhstan and Turkey.  —  Kazakhstan fintech Kaspi.kz …

Steven Levy / Wired: How Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming cracked an encrypted ZIP file containing the code for a system that helped ANC members communicate safely under apartheid  —  John Graham-Cumming, who happens to be Cloudflare's CTO, cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that had a role in rewriting South Africa's history.

Bloomberg: Students, academics, and developers say AI writing detectors are most likely to falsely flag essays written in a more generic manner as written by AI tools  —  About two-thirds of teachers report regularly using tools for detecting AI-generated content.  At that scale, even tiny error rates can add up quickly.

Shahram Mokhtari / iFixit News: Meta Quest 3S teardown: uses Quest 2's same LCD panel and cheap Fresnel optics, replaces Quest 3's depth sensor with two IR flood illuminators, and more  —  The Quest 3S is a curious device.  I think we were all expecting a budget version of the Quest 3, but that's not quite what this headset is.

David Pan / Bloomberg: Six months after the bitcoin halving, some miners hold their bitcoin, while others spend more on developing AI data centers and see the largest stock gains  —  - Shares of firms keeping tokens they mint are lagging Bitcoin  — Best performers are spending on developing AI data centers

Wall Street Journal: How Waymo is converting locals and attracting tourists in San Francisco to pull ahead in the robotaxi race, with ~300 vehicles in the city and global ambitions  —  Just last year, residents wanted to get rid of robotaxis.  Now locals and tourists can't get enough.

Om Malik / Crazy Stupid Tech: Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on how internet traffic surge during COVID helped it build an AI-ready “connectivity cloud”, internet balkanization, more  —  I first met Matthew Prince in 2010, the day he l aunched Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Marah Eakin / Wired: Inside the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative AI film competition sponsored by AWS and FBRC.ai giving filmmakers AI tools and three weeks to submit a short  —  Amazon is hosting AI filmmaking competitions.  Meta is letting directors test Movie Gen. As tech companies develop new tools …

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: A historical look at Microsoft's work in AI, from research to real-world applications, recent progress, competition, challenges, and the future  —  [Editor's Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant's past, present and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: 01.ai, DeepSeek, and other Chinese companies are reducing costs to create AI models by focusing on smaller training data sets, as they deal with export controls  —  01.ai, Alibaba and ByteDance have cut ‘inference’ costs despite Washington curbs on accessing cutting-edge chips

K Oanh Ha / Bloomberg: DJI sues the US DOD for adding the drone maker to a list designating it a Chinese military company, says the DOD didn't engage on the issue for over 16 months  —  - US added DJI to list designating it as a Chinese military firm  — List aimed at hindering China's access to advanced technology

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: In a filing, WP Engine asks a court in Northern California to issue a preliminary injunction and restore its access to the WordPress.org open source repository  —  Web hosting provider WP Engine has filed an injunction in a court in Northern California, asking it to intervene and restore …

Financial Times: Fuji Soft's board decided to keep backing KKR's ~$4B buyout offer despite Bain's $4.2B bid, in a rare battle between PE titans over a Japanese software company  —  Private equity titans cause a stir in the country, with a rare battle over Japanese software company

Todd Feathers / Gizmodo: The US Treasury says its enhanced detection tools, including AI, helped in the prevention and recovery of $4B+ in fraudulent payments in FY 2024, up over 6x YoY  —  The Treasury says it identified or recovered $4 billion in fraudulent payments last fiscal year, a sixfold increase over the previous year.

Reuters: Chinese robotaxi firm Pony.ai files for a Nasdaq IPO, says its H1 2024 revenue nearly doubled to $24.7M with a net loss of $51.3M, down from $69.4M in H1 2023  —  China-based autonomous driving firm Pony AI, backed by automaker Toyota (7203.T), filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. on Thursday …

Rohan Goswami / CNBC: Sources: Intel is looking to sell at least a minority stake, or possibly a majority stake, worth billions in its Altera subsidiary at a valuation of around $17B  —  Intel is looking to sell at least a minority stake in its Altera subsidiary that would raise several billion dollars in cash …

New York Times: Sources describe OpenAI and Microsoft's fraying relationship, OpenAI renegotiating its deal for more computing power, Microsoft's own LLM efforts, and more  —  The “best bromance in tech” has had a reality check as OpenAI has tried to change its deal with Microsoft and the software maker has tried to hedge its bet on the start-up.

Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: the US is probing if TSMC has been making AI or smartphone chips for Huawei in breach of US sanctions, including Huawei buying chips via intermediaries  —  The U.S. Commerce Department is investigating whether Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has been making artificial intelligence …