~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Wall Street Journal: Sources: xAI has told investors it raised $5B in a funding round valuing it at $50B and that its revenue has reached $100M on an annualized basis  —  The artificial intelligence startup has more than doubled its valuation from the spring  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup …

Hayden Field / CNBC: Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $13.8B in 2024, up from $2.3B in 2023; OpenAI's marketshare in enterprise AI declined from 50% to 34%  —  Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, a “reasoning” AI model that it claims is competitive with OpenAI's o1, and plans to open source it  —  A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI's o1.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Los Angeles-based Moonvalley, which is developing “transparent” generative AI video tools, raised a $70M seed co-led by General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures  —  The wide availability of tools to build generative AI has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups in the space.

Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine: Bluesky is booming partly because it isn't hindered by bad adtech, AI slop, throttled links, and largely hostile user experiences, unlike some of its big rivals  —  No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links.  Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not  —  Greetings all —

Jason Del Rey / Fortune: Memo: Amazon employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking a question to the new AI-based Alexa and getting a response or completing a task  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.  —  Amazon's race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags …

Faris Mokhtar / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has raised its offer to invest in Indonesia from about $10M to almost $100M, in a bid to persuade the government to lift its iPhone 16 sales ban  —  - Company increases investment proposal tenfold, sources say  — Indonesia banned sales of iPhone 16 over local content rules

NBC News: The US Library of Congress says hackers accessed some email communications between congressional offices and library staff between January and September 2024  —  The Library of Congress didn't specify who was behind the hack.  —  The Library of Congress said hackers broke into its communications systems …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Internal document: Amazon has held talks with several partners for handling specific tasks on the AI-powered Alexa, including Uber, Ticketmaster, and Instacart  —  - Amazon discussed partnerships with other companies for an AI-powered Alexa upgrade.  — Partners under consideration included Uber …

Daniel Wiessner / Reuters: Amazon and SpaceX argued the NLRB, which recently found issues at the companies, is unconstitutional; 5th Circuit judges questioned the timeline of the charges  —  A panel of U.S. judges on Monday seemed likely to rule that Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Elon Musk's SpaceX were too quick to bring …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Perplexity debuts a shopping feature offering product recommendations, one-click checkout, and more for Pro users in the US, alongside a merchant program  —  AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce.  On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature …

Bloomberg: Sources: DOJ antitrust officials plan to ask a judge to force Google to sell Chrome, license Search data, uncouple Android from Search and Google Play, and more  —  - Antitrust officials also to seek data licensing, AI measures  — Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers

CNN: Two Baltic Sea internet cables, connecting Lithuania with Sweden and Finland with Germany, were suddenly disrupted, sparking concerns of Russian sabotage  —  Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies …

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Xiaomi, the second largest smartphone vendor in India, plans to replace its app store there with one from PhonePe in January, amid ongoing geopolitical tensions  —  Xiaomi will replace its app store with fintech PhonePe's offering for customers in India starting in January.

Philip Stafford / Financial Times: Sources: Trump Media is nearing an all-share purchase of Intercontinental Exchange's crypto trading platform Bakkt; DJT closed up 16.65%, BKKT up 162.46%  —  Truth Social owner is close to an all-share takeover of Intercontinental Exchange's Bakkt  —  Donald Trump's social media company …

Kylie Robison / The Verge: A look at emails between Musk and Altman from the early days of OpenAI, discussing its partnership with Microsoft, fundraising, employee compensation, AGI, more  —  Emails in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI expose the startup's rocky origins. … As OpenAI was ironing out a new deal with Microsoft in 2016 …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Mistral adds web search, image generation, Canvas for in-line editing, more to its Le Chat chatbot, and unveils Pixtral Large, a 124B-parameter multimodal model  —  Mistral, the French startup that made waves last year with a record-setting seed funding amount for Europe …

Umar Shakir / The Verge: Telegram updates “mini-apps” to be able to run full screen and be pinned to homescreens; devs can now add subscription plans, a “gift” sending feature, and more  —  Full-screen mini-apps, including games such as Doom, can run in either portrait or landscape orientations inside Telegram …

Federal Trade Commission: The US FTC's DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021  —  FTC releases annual Do Not Call Registry Data Book showing total reports about unwanted calls decreased further in 2024

GovTech: US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks  —  A new series of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is designed to enable cloud providers, AI developers …

Bloomberg: Netflix says 60M households watched the Paul vs. Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65M concurrent streams  —  - Mike Tyson and Jake Paul faced off in heavily anticipated bout  — Users complained on social media of difficulty watching fight

Ben Quinn / The Guardian: FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK's Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners  —  Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine's drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion's tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming  —  Kyiv's drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can't be electronically jammed

Gavin Anderegg / anderegg.ca: Bluesky is working to become fully decentralized but it could take years amid financial concerns as it makes money only by selling domains for usernames  —  November has sucked so far.  One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky.