~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Debarghya Sil / Inc42 Media: Gensol's financial woes have cast doubt on the future of BluSmart, an Indian EV ride-hailing startup founded by Gensol's promoters, Anmol Jaggi and Puneet Jaggi  —  There seems to be no respite for Gensol Engineering and ride-hailing startup BluSmart.  In a fresh development …

Steven Church / Bloomberg: FTX tells a US bankruptcy judge it will make the first payment to its main creditors on May 30 using the $11.4B cash hoard it has collected since shutting down  —  Former cryptocurrency firm FTX will start paying its main creditors at the end of May using a cash hoard of $11.4 billion the company has collected since its shut...

Patience Haggin / Wall Street Journal: Adalytics: DoubleVerify, IAS, and Human Security, paid by advertisers to detect bots, regularly miss such traffic; DoubleVerify missed 21% of bot visits  —  Companies that claim to help brands avoid serving digital ads to bots regularly miss nonhuman traffic

Zac Bowden / Windows Central: In the latest Windows 11 preview build, Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” command, which let users skip signing into a Microsoft Account when installing Windows  —  The popular “bypassnro” command, which let users to skip connecting to the Internet and signing into a Microsoft Account, is being removed.

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: A US judge rejects Musk's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming he defrauded ex-Twitter shareholders by delaying the disclosure of his initial Twitter investment  —  A U.S. judge on Friday rejected billionaire Elon Musk's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming he defrauded former Twitter shareholders …

Bloomberg: Source: the new combined entity housing xAI and X is called XAI Holdings and is valued at more than $100B, not including debt  —  - New joint entity is valued at over $100 billion, person says  — X, xAI already partnered on data sharing and Grok distribution

Arsheeya Bajwa / Reuters: Filing: Intel says three board members will not stand for reelection at its 2025 annual meeting, shrinking the size of the board to 11 members  —  Three Intel (INTC.O) board members will not stand for reelection at its 2025 annual meeting, the chipmaker said in a regulatory filing on Thursday …

Bloomberg: Source: hackers broke into Oracle's Cerner servers sometime after January 22 and stole patient data to extort US medical providers; the FBI is investigating  —  - The FBI is investigating the incident from earlier this year  — Hacker used stolen logins to access old servers, Oracle said

Reuters: Sources: Blackstone is evaluating a small minority investment in TikTok's US operations, joining the front-running bid by ByteDance's non-Chinese shareholders  —  Private equity firm Blackstone is evaluating making a small minority investment in TikTok's U.S. operations, according to two people familiar with the matter.

CNBC: Elon Musk says xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $80B and X at $33B; xAI was reportedly in talks to raise funds in February at a $75B valuation  —  Elon Musk said on Friday that his startup xAI has merged with X, his social network, in an all-stock transaction that values …

Ben Bergman / Business Insider: Sources: ScaleAI is seeking a valuation as high as $25B in a potential tender offer; it was last valued at $13.8B in a $1B Series F round led by Accel in 2024  —  - Scale AI has become increasingly in demand as companies need to label and sort data to train AI models.

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg: The Trump administration cut $20M in funding from the Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees chip export controls, representing ~10% of BIS's budget  —  A White House move to cut 10% of the funding for the agency responsible for semiconductor export controls risks undermining US efforts …

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: Anthropic and Databricks ink a five-year deal, expected to jointly generate $100M in revenue, by selling AI tools to businesses developing their own AI agents  —  The AI startup and data company are working together to help businesses build their own artificial intelligence bots …

Dylan Butts / CNBC: Alibaba releases open-source multimodal AI model Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on Hugging Face and GitHub, saying the model can be deployed on edge devices like smartphones  —  Alibaba Cloud launched Thursday its latest AI model in its “Qwen series,” as large language model competition in China continues to heat up following the “DeepSeek moment.”

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Sam Altman says OpenAI will support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, an open-source standard that connects AI models to data for more relevant answers  —  OpenAI is embracing rival Anthropic's standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data resides.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger joins VC firm Playground Global as a GP and the board of portfolio company xLight, which develops lasers for chip manufacturing  —  After a tumultuous four years running Intel, Pat Gelsinger is going into venture capital.  —  Gelsinger, who was ousted …

Ryan Whitwam / Ars Technica: Nvidia releases G-Assist, an experimental, gaming-centric AI chatbot that runs locally and provides real-time system information for a given game  —  Most people use their Nvidia GPUs for games, but why not both?  Nvidia has a new AI you can run at the same time, having just released its experimental G-Assist AI.

Paige Smith / Bloomberg: Robinhood plans to roll out checking and savings accounts in 2025 for its paying Gold subscribers, aiming to provide more of a private banking-like experience  —  Now it's taking it a step further: It also wants to be your bank.  —  Robinhood will roll out checking and savings accounts later …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is promoting Vanessa Trigub to VP of stores and retail operations globally, as it streamlines management of its retail arm under Deirdre O'Brien  —  Apple Inc. is naming a global head of stores, a move meant to streamline management of its retail arm under senior executive Deirdre O'Brien …

Polly Thompson / Business Insider: Filing: Dell says it had about 108K employees as of January 31, 2025, down from 120K employees in February 2024, marking a 10% annual reduction in its workforce  —  - An SEC filing shows Dell's head count has fallen by 12,000 in the last year and 25,000 in the past two.

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: Oracle customers confirm the authenticity of data samples shared by a threat actor who allegedly breached Oracle Cloud servers, after Oracle denied the breach  —  Despite Oracle denying a breach of its Oracle Cloud federated SSO login servers and the theft of account data for 6 million people …

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority: Google says it plans to develop Android fully in private to streamline the development process but will continue to publish the source code for new releases  —  Android OS development will now fully happen behind closed doors, but Google says it's committed to releasing source code

Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today: xAI's Grok AI chatbot is now integrated with Telegram for Telegram Premium users, marking Grok's first big expansion beyond X  —  X is looking to expand the reach of its Grok chatbot, by partnering with messaging app Telegram on a new integration.  —  So now, if you're subscribed …

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signs a bill requiring Apple's and Google's mobile app stores to verify user ages and require parental consent for minors to use some apps  —  Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on Wednesday signed a bill that requires Apple and Google's mobile app stores to verify user ages …