~techmeme | Bookmarks (1014)

Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter: Division in Hollywood's approach to AI is growing, as some studios want to use AI tools more often in production, while unions aim to establish guardrails  —  While unions aim to establish guardrails and artists are going to court, studios are looking to use AI tools more often in production.

Forbes: How Les Wexner, Victoria's Secret billionaire owner, made early investments in Atlantic Crypto, which then turned into CoreWeave, netting him a $720M stake  —  A lawsuit reveals that an early bet on the company that would later become $19 billion startup Coreweave has made Les Wexner …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: KNIME, an open-source data science and AI platform used by AMD, Audi, and ~400 other customers, raised $30M from Invus, taking its total funding to $50M  —  It's not easy for organizations to become data-driven, despite the aspirations many have to get there.

Annie Palmer / CNBC: Supermicro shares drop 13% after hours after the company reported Q4 earnings missing analyst expectations, and announces a 10-for-1 stock split  —  Shares of server company Super Micro Computer plunged 13% on Tuesday after the company announced fiscal fourth-quarter earnings that missed analyst expectations.

Jessica Lyons / The Register: CrowdStrike shares a root cause analysis of the July 19 outage, and says it's working with two third-party software security vendors to conduct further review  —  And reveals the small mistake that bricked 8.5M Windows boxes  —  CrowdStrike has hired two outside security firms to review …

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: Coupang reports Q2 revenue up 25% YoY to $7.3B and a net loss of $77M, its first loss since 2022, due to its Farfetch deal and a South Korean regulatory fine  —  - The Farfetch deal and a government fine weighed on results  — The company is investing in safeguarding its delivery network

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Brian Chesky says Airbnb plans to expand into new products and services, including co-hosting this fall, guest services, and a relaunch of experiences next year  —  Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky suggested on Tuesday's Q2 earnings call with investors that the company will soon expand into new products and services …

Michelle Pokrass / OpenAI: OpenAI unveils Structure Outputs in the API, a feature to ensure model-generated outputs match JSON Schemas, and lower pricing for a new version of GPT-4o  —  We are introducing Structured Outputs in the API—model outputs now reliably adhere to developer-supplied JSON Schemas.

Fei-Fei Li / Fortune: California's AI safety bill will harm developers, open-source development, the public sector, and academia, while failing to address the potential harms of AI  —  Fei-Fei Li, PhD, is a computer scientist who is widely credited with being the ‘Godmother of AI’. … Today, AI is more advanced than ever.

Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: Reddit says it plans to test AI-powered search result pages later this year, using a combination of first- and third-party tech to power the feature  —  Reddit users will soon see AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.  —  Reddit CFO Drew Vollero told investors during …

The Verge: US v. Google: Eddy Cue said there's no price Microsoft could offer to make Bing Safari's default search engine, stating “they offered to give us Bing for free”  —  Finally, a legal ruling on whether TikTok is a real search engine.  (It's not.)

Evan Gorelick / Bloomberg: Instacart reports Q2 revenue up 15% YoY to $823M, vs. $806M est., gross transaction value up 10% to $8.19B; CART jumps 7%+ after hours  —  - Revenue and value of orders beat Wall Street's expectations  — Advertising and other non-delivery sales exceeded estimates

Zach Dorfman / Politico: A look at Operation Intering, an FBI-led sabotage campaign in the 1980s to secretly ship millions worth of faulty chips to the Soviet Bloc  —  During the early days of Silicon Valley, a tech industry entrepreneur teamed up with the FBI to ship faulty devices to Moscow.

David Shepardson / Reuters: Sources: the US Dept. of Commerce plans to propose barring Chinese software in autonomous vehicles and some Chinese wireless communications hardware in US cars  —  The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to propose barring Chinese software in autonomous and connected vehicles in the coming weeks …

Wall Street Journal: Despite a weak earnings report, corporations are still buying from Intel, which continues to dominate market share for non-AI computing workloads on servers  —  Intel remains a go-to for enterprise purchasers of PCs and laptops—even as CIOs say they're watching the company stumble

Rishav Chatterjee / Reuters: Mynt, the parent company of Philippines-based e-wallet GCash, more than doubled its valuation to $5B after investments from Ayala Corp, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial  —  Mynt, which operates the Philippine e-wallet brand and IPO-hopeful GCash, has more than doubled its valuation …

Nicholas Carlini: A Google DeepMind research scientist details some LLM use cases, argues LLMs are not overhyped and should be judged on what they can do, not what they can't  —  Background on me  —  How I use AI  —  I don't think that “AI” models [a]  —  (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped.

Dave Lee / Bloomberg: A look at the flurry of so-called Zoom rallies supporting the campaign to elect Kamala Harris; one Zoom call reportedly attracted 190K people and raised $4M  —  Online rallies give the vice president a platform her opponent can't match.  —  Advancements in technology can play a defining role in how an election cycle plays out.

New York Times: An investigation finds an active trade in Nvidia chips in China despite US restrictions; some Chinese orgs with state military ties have bought restricted chips  —  The U.S. is trying to stop China from getting Nvidia microchips to advance its military.  The private sector is fighting back.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: OpenAI developed a watermarking method for detecting text written by ChatGPT with 99.9% reliability, but its launch has been mired in internal debates  —  Technology that can detect text written by artificial intelligence with 99.9% certainty has been debated internally for two years

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Thoughts on new Apple Intelligence features, which do not yet live up to the excitement, Apple's design team leadership reshuffle, and Apple's Q3 earnings  —  The first preview of Apple Intelligence for developers shows just how far the company has to go to live up to the hype.

Jason Snell / Six Colors: Apple Services Q3 revenue topped Mac, iPad, and wearables combined and may soon exceed hardware profits, but its services can't ever have priority over hardware  —  Apple's latest quarterly results were about as boring as you can get while still featuring $21.4 billion in profit and setting an all-time third-quarter record.

Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: Sources: JD.com founder and chair Richard Liu has been quietly leading the company from overseas, primarily in London, despite stepping down as the CEO in 2022  —  Despite stepping down as chief in 2022, Richard Liu has continued to quietly steer the business from London

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled and tells users to switch to other ad blockers before deprecation of Manifest V2 extensions  —  Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.