~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Wired: A review of Character.AI finds several instances of AI personas being created without a person's consent, seemingly violating the company's terms of service  —  Character.AI lets users create bots in the likeness of any person—without requiring their consent.

Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post: A profile of Ben Nimmo, OpenAI's principal threat investigator who found evidence that Russia and China were using ChatGPT to sway political discourse online  —  Ben Nimmo brings a literary bent to the serious business of keeping ChatGPT from being an engine of misinformation.

Wired: How scammers in Southeast Asia are using generative AI, crypto drainers, Starlink terminals, and other tools to expand their pig butchering operations  —  Scammers in Southeast Asia are increasingly turning to AI, deepfakes, and dangerous malware in a way that makes their pig butchering operations even more convincing.

Lim Yu Qian / CoinGecko: Analysis: US regulators have secured $19.45B across eight settlements from crypto firms so far in 2024, including FTX's $12.7B, and ~$32B since January 1, 2019  —  What Are the Top Crypto Enforcement Actions in the US? … FTX and Alameda's lawsuit was led by the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission …

Evan Halper / Washington Post: An energy crunch is forcing continued coal burning in a low-income area in North Omaha, Nebraska, as Meta and Google data centers strain regional power supply  —  An energy crunch forces continued coal burning in a low-income area as data centers strain the regional power supply.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: A look at Apple's new home strategy and plans for a ~$2K headset in 2025, Vision Pro 2 in 2026, and Ray-Ban Meta-like glasses and AirPods with cameras in 2027  —  Apple is finally preparing to compete for the smart home market after falling behind Amazon and Google.

Victoria Woodcock / Financial Times: How some architects and designers are creating photorealistic virtual spaces in the metaverse; report: 41% of architectural practices use AI to some degree  —  The metaverse is changing the face of contemporary design  —  In 2020, artist and designer Charlotte Taylor and architect Riccardo Fornoni unveiled Villa Saraceni.

Samanth Subramanian / Bloomberg: A look at sports data tech companies like Sportradar, which set betting odds for sports gambling apps and websites, as they build models to keep people betting  —  Big-money data deals and advanced statistical models are helping to predict match outcomes and keep people betting.

Katherine Bourzac / IEEE Spectrum: The CA-Pacific-Northwest AI Hardware Hub, which is researching hybrid gain cell memory to blend DRAM's density with SRAM's speed, gets a $16.3M CHIPS Act grant  —  CHIPS Act funding boosts research into dense, speedy hybrid gain cell memory  —  Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco, Calif.

Ann Cao / South China Morning Post: Report: Chinese video surveillance tech supplier Hikvision plans to lay off 1,000+ employees in its R&D department; Hikvision denied any “large-scale lay-offs”  —  The Hangzhou-based company says it is optimising its research manpower, while denying large-scale lay-offs

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: Sources: Chinese social e-commerce app Xiaohongshu had $200M in net profit on $1B+ revenue in Q1 2024, up from $40M in net profit on ~$600M revenue in Q1 2023  —  Shanghai-based start-up has been a rare success story in a sector hit by bankruptcies and falling valuations

John Pavlus / Quanta Magazine: Q&A with physicist Lenka Zdeborová on how the physics of phase transitions in matter can help model the behavior of algorithms, understanding LLMs, and more  —  Quanta spoke with Zdeborová about the similarities between water and algorithms, using physics …

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg says WordPress is “forking” Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin developed by WP Engine; ACF team says the plugin was taken away “without consent”  —  The dispute between WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and hosting provider WP Engine continues …

Washington Post: Some Ukrainian soldiers say SpaceX has not done enough to crack down on illicit use of Starlink terminals by Russia to power its advance in Ukraine  —  Ukraine's outgunned and outmanned army had one major advantage over its enemy: internet through Starlink terminals.  Now the Russians have it, too.

Juli Clover / MacRumors: Apple adds an option in iOS 18.1 to let users set a “Primary” email address in Settings, letting users change the email associated with their Apple Account  —  In iOS 18.1, there is a new option to set a “Primary” email address in the Settings app, which means it is easier to change …

Wes Davis / The Verge: Threads users criticize Meta after the company posted AI-generated images of the Aurora Borealis on its Threads account  —  Meta has a suggestion for folks like me who forgot to go outside and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use AI to fake it!

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: A profile of, and interview with, Meta's Yann LeCun, who says today's AI models aren't intelligent and warnings about AI's existential peril are “complete B.S.”  —  Yann LeCun, an NYU professor and senior researcher at Meta Platforms, says warnings about the technology's existential peril are ‘complete B.S.’

Gary Marcus / Marcus on AI: Apple AI researchers say they found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models and their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching  —  Important new study from Apple  —  A superb new article on LLMs from six AI researchers at Apple who were brave enough …

Mathew Ingram / The Torment Nexus: Matt Mullenweg's feud with WP Engine not only presents a significant conflict of interest but has also dragged the WordPress community into a legal mess  —  Hi everyone!  Mathew Ingram here.  This is The Torment Nexus (you can find out more about me and this newsletter — and why I chose to call it that — in my...

Charlie Warzel / The Atlantic: The bleak online discourse about hurricanes Milton and Helene revealed not just a misinformation crisis in the US but a cultural assault on reality itself  —  The truth is, it's getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

Hannah Lang / Reuters: Adobe expects US BNPL spending to grow 11.4% YoY to $18.5B in Q4 2024; the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia says most BNPL users make their payments on time  —  As Amazon's Prime Day kicked off the holiday shopping season this week, U.S. consumers are expected to spend a record $18.5 billion using buy …

Dan Primack / Axios: PitchBook: VCs in the US invested $37.5B via 2,794 deals in Q3 2024, down 32% QoQ, despite some big AI rounds, as a lack of exits restricts new deal activity  —  Venture capital's lack of exits is restricting new deal activity, according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

Bloomberg: A profile of FTC Chair Lina Khan, whose term ended in September 2024, as a bipartisan club of tech figures and VCs, including Reid Hoffman, call for her ouster  —  Biden's FTC chair has toughened merger oversight, taken on noncompetes and made the donor class crazy.

Helen Reid / Reuters: Ecommerce Europe: e-commerce turnover in Europe including the UK to rise 8% YoY to €958B in 2024, the first growth year since 2021 in inflation-adjusted terms  —  Recovering consumer confidence has boosted online shopping in Europe this year, industry group Ecommerce Europe said on Wednesday …