~techmeme | Bookmarks (1058)

Emily Rose / Reuters: How Israeli startups like Xtend are helping the country's Hamas war effort, with ~50% of anti-drone tech used since the October 7 attacks coming from startups  —  The drone that tracked Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and filmed him as he lay dying in footage beamed around the world last October …

Ryan Browne / CNBC: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and other experts say startups like DeepSeek and the rise of AI agents may erode the value of LLMs from OpenAI and Big Tech companies  —  Large language models like those developed by Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI are set to become commoditized this year amid rapid …

Thomas Seal / Bloomberg: Instagram and Facebook, which blocked news links in Canada, are hosting hundreds of scam ads pretending to be from news outlets ahead of Canadian elections  —  - Images of public figures and billionaire used in fake ads  — Bogus ads fuel foreign interference fear before election

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: MLCommons and Hugging Face release Unsupervised People's Speech, a dataset for AI research containing more than 1M hours of audio spanning at least 89 languages  —  MLCommons, a nonprofit AI safety working group, has teamed up with AI dev platform Hugging Face to release …

Vlad Savov / Bloomberg: Appfigures: DeepSeek has topped the list of the most downloaded mobile apps across 140 markets, with India accounting for 15.6% of all downloads since launch  —  - The chatbot is most-downloaded app across Android and iPhone  — Chinese startup has upended thinking about AI development

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: California DMV: a total of 4.5M autonomous vehicle test miles were logged in 2024, down 50% YoY, with driverless testing falling 83% YoY to just 552,895 miles  —  Tech companies developing self-driving vehicle technology have tapped the brakes on testing on California's public roads …

MK Manoylov / The Block: Web3 domain infrastructure firm D3 Global raised a $25M Series A led by Paradigm, and plans to launch a decentralized network called Doma Protocol  —  - D3 Global is building tools for domain-based lending, fractional ownership, digital identity and other financial use cases.

Daniel Kuhn / The Block: Coinbase acquires Spindl, the on-chain advertising platform founded by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, an ex-Facebook staffer and the author of the book Chaos Monkeys  —  - Coinbase has acquired Spindl, the onchain advertising platform founded by famous tech commentator Antonio Garcia-Martinez.

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: When asked in an AMA if OpenAI would release model weights and research, Sam Altman said “we are discussing” and “it's also not our current highest priority”  —  CEO of the ChatGPT maker says his company has been ‘on the wrong side of history’ with open-source software

The Information: OpenAI told some shareholders ChatGPT had 15.5M paid subscribers in 2024, up from 5.8M in 2023, and usage of OpenAI's API increased seven times  —  Paid subscribers to ChatGPT nearly tripled to 15.5 million last year from 5.8 million a year earlier, OpenAI recently told some shareholders …

Simon Willison's Weblog: OpenAI's o3-mini costs $1.10 per 1M input tokens and $4.40 per 1M output tokens, cheaper than GPT-4o, which costs $2.50 and $10, and o1, which costs $15 and $60  —  OpenAI's o3-mini is out today.  As with other o-series models it's a slightly difficult one to evaluate …

Bloomberg: Docs: Amazon will spend $16B to build two Mississippi data center campuses, up from $10B it announced a year ago, underscoring rising AI infrastructure costs  —  - Project tally includes $7.2 billion for servers and other gear  — Majority of 1,000 data center jobs created will be contractors

Austin American-Statesman: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issues a ban on the use of Chinese-backed apps DeepSeek, Lemon8, Moomoo, RedNote, Tiger Brokers, and Webull on government-issued devices  —  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a ban on the use of Chinese-backed artificial intelligence and social media apps on government-issued devices Friday afternoon.

Jamie Crawley / CoinDesk: CCData: the supply of stablecoins on Solana jumped by 112% in January to a record high of $11.1B, as the launch of the TRUMP memecoin caused a wave of inflows  —  This coincided with the launch of Donald Trump's memecoin $TRUMP which caused a wave of inflows to the network  —  What to know:

Wired: Researchers: DeepSeek's R1 failed to detect or block any of the 50 malicious prompts that were tested; Adversa: R1 is vulnerable to many jailbreaking tactics  —  Security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek's popular new AI chatbot.  It didn't stop a single one.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple canceled a project to build AR glasses that would pair with the Mac; the company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro  —  - Headset group struggles to find path forward after Vision Pro  — Canceled device would have rivaled Meta's future AR glasses

Tom Warren / The Verge: O3-mini will be available to all ChatGPT users, the first time free users of the chatbot will be able to try out OpenAI's reasoning models  —  o3-mini should outperform o1 and provide faster, more accurate answers.  —  o3-mini should outperform o1 and provide faster, more accurate answers.

Wall Street Journal: SoftBank, which sources say is in talks to invest $15B-$25B in OpenAI and $18B in Stargate, could borrow against its $140B+ Arm stake to fund the investments  —  Japanese conglomerate is in talks to spend up to $43 billion to boost the ChatGPT developer  —  In his newly built palace near Tokyo …

Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Tel Aviv-based Oligo Security, which offers cybersecurity tools for enterprises to monitor their applications, raised a $50M Series B led by Greenfield Partners  —  Cybersecurity startup Oligo Security Ltd. today announced that it has closed a $50 million funding round led by Greenfield Partners.

Bloomberg: Sources: US officials are investigating whether DeepSeek bought advanced Nvidia chips from third parties in Singapore, circumventing US restrictions on AI chips  —  - Nvidia says it ‘insists’ that customers comply with laws  — Singapore accounts for about 20% of Nvidia's revenue

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: The Allen Institute for AI releases Tulu 3 405B, an open source model that it claims outperforms DeepSeek V3 and OpenAI's GPT-4o on certain benchmarks  —  Move over, DeepSeek.  There's a new AI champion in town — and they're American.  —  On Thursday, Ai2, a nonprofit AI research institute based …

Bloomberg: Sources: Samsung's 8-layer HBM3E was cleared by Nvidia in December for use in Nvidia's less powerful AI processors tailored for the Chinese market  —  - Company's 8-layer HBM3E was cleared by Nvidia in December  — Samsung is still behind SK Hynix, supplier of 12-layer HBM3E

Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch: Interim co-CEO David Zinsner says Intel has already received $2.2B in federal grants through the CHIPS Act, of the $7.86B awarded to build chips in the US  —  Semiconductor giant Intel Corporation has already received $2.2 billion in federal grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce through …

Business Insider: In a leaked recording of an all-hands meeting, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was slow to respond to TikTok's rise because “we didn't think TikTok was social”  —  - Mark Zuckerberg addressed several recent policy changes in a company all-hands meeting on Thursday.