Bookmarks (1045)

Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal: ByteDance says it has no plans to sell TikTok, responding to a report suggesting that it is considering scenarios for selling a majority stake in US TikTok  —  The company was responding to a report by The Information that it is considering scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok's U.S. business

Vlad Savov / Bloomberg: TechInsights teardown: Huawei's Pura 70 uses a 7nm chip, similar to the Mate 60, and a Kirin 9010 processor, a newer version of the Mate 60 Pro's Kirin 9000s  —  - The Pura 70 relies on a 7nm chip similar to the Mate 60's  — Washington has stepped up efforts to curb Chinese chipmaking

Financial Times: Sources: the US is urging Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands to tighten export controls to China, including stopping engineers from servicing Chinese fabs  —  Washington urges Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands to tighten supply of tools and technology

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk: New rules that allow UK law enforcement agencies to seize, destroy, or transfer crypto holdings used for crime before making an arrest take effect  —  Law enforcement agencies will no longer need to wait for an arrest to seize crypto.  — New powers that will make it easier …

Katie Robertson / New York Times: Former Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson buys The Onion from G/O Media, via his new company Global Tetrahedron; Lawson had long wanted to buy the site  —  The satirical news website was bought by a new firm in Chicago that took inspiration for its name, Global Tetrahedron, from a book written by The Onion's staff.

CoinDesk: Consensys sues the US SEC over what it calls the “unlawful seizure of authority” over ethereum, after receiving a Wells notice for its MetaMask wallet product  —  By offering their MetaMask wallet software, the SEC says Consensys is acting as an unregistered securities broker.

Chris Miller / Financial Times: The CHIPS Act has been surprisingly successful so far, giving the US greater scope to meet critical infrastructure needs in the event of a crisis in East Asia  —  More than halfway through its incentives spending, the US will have far greater scope to manage shocks

Bloomberg: In a subpoena, Elon Musk asked Helen Toner to hand over documents about her departure from OpenAI's board and how OpenAI decides when a technology achieves AGI  —  Elon Musk has stepped up his court fight with OpenAI by demanding documents from ex-board member Helen Toner …

Jennifer Maas / Variety: Roku reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $882M, vs. $848.62M est., a net loss of $50.9M, compared to $193.6M YoY, and 81.6M active accounts, up 1.6M from Q4 2023  —  Roku reported its first-quarter 2024 earnings Thursday, revealing the company reached 81.6 million active accounts …

Scott Farquhar / Work Life: Atlassian's co-CEO Scott Farquhar plans to step down on August 31, 2024, after 23 years at the company; he will remain a board member and a special advisor  —  Sharing a note I sent to our Atlassian employees earlier today  —  It's with a full but heavy heart that I share with you all today …

Ashley Capoot / CNBC: Snap reports Q1 revenue up 21% YoY to $1.19B, vs. $1.12B est., DAUs up 10% YoY to 422M, a net loss of $305M, compared to $329M YoY; SNAP jumps 24%+ after hours  —  WATCH NOW  —  Snap stock soars following beat on revenue, earnings and daily active users  —  Snap reported first-quarter results …

Akash Sriram / Reuters: Alphabet announces its first-ever dividend and authorizes the repurchase of up to an additional $70B of its Class A and Class C shares  —  Alphabet (GOOGL.O) announced its first-ever dividend of 20 cents per share on Thursday, returning capital when the Google parent is spending billions …

Todd Spangler / Variety: YouTube's Q1 ad revenue climbs 21% YoY to $8.1B, vs. $7.72B estimated, its highest Q1 total to date  —  YouTube keeps eating up more share of the advertising pie: The Google-owned video giant posted $8.1 billion in ad sales for the first quarter of 2024, its highest Q1 total to date.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Microsoft reports Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue up 21% YoY to $26.71B, vs. $26.26B est., with Azure and other cloud services revenue up 31% YoY  —  WATCH NOW  —  Microsoft beats on top and bottom line, Azure continues to accelerate  —  Microsoft shares rose 5% in extended trading on Thursday …

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Intel reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to $12.72B, vs. $12.78B est., Data Center and AI up 5% to $3B, and Q2 revenue guidance below est.; INTC drops 7%+ after hours  —  Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, holding an Intel chip, speaks during the 54th Annual Meeting of The Semafor 2024 World Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2024.

New York Times: A look at Saudi Arabia's spending blitz to become an AI superpower, which has put the kingdom in the middle of an escalating global competition over AI  —  More than 200,000 people converged on the Leap tech conference in the desert outside Riyadh in March.Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Filing: Swiggy, which has a ~45.8% share of the Indian food delivery market, secures shareholder approval for a potential $1.25B IPO, slated for later this year  —  Swiggy plans to raise $1.25 billion in an initial public offering and has secured approval from its shareholders …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: ByteDance execs have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth ~50% of the company's overall value, which would put it above $100B  —  The answer depends partly on whether TikTok bundles the U.S. and international businesses, and if it includes its coveted algorithm

Financial Times: K Krithivasan, the CEO of Indian IT giant TCS, says there'll be “minimal” need for call centers in as soon as a year, as AI chatbots take over much of the work  —  Chatbots will soon take over much of the work of human agents, forecasts chief of Indian IT group

Karissa Bell / Engadget: On Meta's Q1 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads now has more than 150M MAUs, up from 130M in February 2024  —  Mark Zuckerberg has speculated it could be Meta's next billion-user app.  —  Meta's Threads app now has more than 150 million monthly users, an increase of about 20 million new users since February.

Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat: Snowflake announces Arctic, an LLM optimized for enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, with an Apache 2.0 license  —  Today, Snowflake announced the launch of Arctic, a large language model (LLM) optimized for complex enterprise workloads such as SQL generation …

Alex Heath / The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI assistant has been “tried” by “tens of millions of people” and it will take Meta several years to make money from generative AI  —  The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don't expect it to create profits anytime soon.

Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia: TSMC unveils a new chip manufacturing technology called A16 and says it plans to start producing its ultra-advanced 1.6nm chips by 2026  —  Taiwan chip titan aims to secure leading position and capture AI demand  —  TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. says it will start production …

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: Reddit announces that its Dynamic Product Ads, which use “shopping signals” to automatically show relevant ads to users, are entering public beta globally  —  Reddit says its “communities are naturally commercial.”  —  Reddit has made it clear that it's an ad-first business.

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: SK Hynix reports Q1 revenue of ~$9B, more than doubling YoY, and ~$2B in operating income, above estimates of ~$1.3B and the biggest quarterly profit since 2022  —  Sales at the world's No. 2 maker of memory more than doubled to 12.4 trillion won ($9 billion) in the March quarter, beating expectations.

Annie Palmer / CNBC: Memo: Thrasio CEO Greg Greeley plans to resign and five other senior executives will “step down when Thrasio emerges from Chapter 11 in the coming weeks”  —  Thrasio, an early leader in the big business of Amazon aggregators, had a booth at the popular Prosper Show for Amazon sellers in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 14, 2021.

David Pierce / The Verge: Hands-on with the Rabbit R1: a fun and funky AI device that feels pretty nice and does a solid job with basic AI questions, but the Rabbithole app is unfinished  —  There were times I wasn't sure the Rabbit R1 was even a real thing.  The AI-powered, Teenage Engineering-designed device came …

Ken Yeung / VentureBeat: Nooks, whose AI tools can analyze sales calls and summarize customer interactions, raised a $22M Series A led by Lachy Groom, bringing its total funding to $27M  —  AI startup Nooks has raised a new round of funding.  It announced a $22 million Series A fundraising effort led …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: AI coding assistant startup Augment emerges from stealth with a $227M Series B at a $977M post-money valuation, following a $25M Series A led by Sutter Hill  —  AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.  —  In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers …

CNBC: Cloud data management startup Rubrik priced its NYSE IPO at $32 a share, above its expected $28-$31 range, raising $752M and valuing the company at $5.6B  —  Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO of data security software company Rubrik.  Sinha previously backed cloud management company Nutanix.

Mary Jo Foley / Directions on Microsoft: Microsoft must take security seriously again by being transparent about breaches and no longer charging its subscribers extra for must-have security features  —  Microsoft charges extra for many core security and compliance features.  What can customers do to try to minimize risk and save money?

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: Paris-based FlexAI, which is developing an on-demand cloud service for AI training, emerges from stealth with a $30M in seed funding  —  Nvidia, Apple, Tesla and Intel are on CEO Brijesh Tripathi's resume  —  A French startup has raised a hefty seed investment to “rearchitect compute infrastructure” …

Filipe Pacheco / Bloomberg: Mobvoi, a Google-backed Chinese smartwatch and AI company, fell as much as 22% in the first day of trading, after raising $41M in its Hong Kong IPO  —  - Mobvoi drops as much as 22% in first day of trading after IPO  — It's the city's third stock this week to drop in opening day

Edward Zitron / Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At: Emails released as part of US v. Google show how Google's finance and ad teams led by Prabhakar Raghavan made Search worse to make the company more money  —  This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.  —  The story begins on February 5th 2019 …

Bloomberg: China approves US listing of self-driving startup Pony.ai, which plans to sell up to 98M shares and list on Nasdaq or NYSE, signaling an ease on the crackdown  —  - Pony.ai plans to sell some 98 million shares on Nasdaq or NYSE  — Chinese tech IPOs in the US dwindled after crackdown in 2021

Reuters: Huawei unveils Qiankun, a new business unit focused on providing self-driving systems, marking the company's latest push to become a major EV industry player  —  Chinese tech company Huawei (HWT.UL) unveiled on Wednesday a new software brand for intelligent driving, marking its latest push …

Bloomberg: SenseTime's stock rises 30%+ after the company unveiled the latest version of its SenseNova AI model; SenseTime's stock is down 80%+ since its 2021 HK IPO  —  - US-blacklisted firm unveils fifth version of its AI platform  — The company is one of many racing to develop generative AI

Nami Matsuura / Nikkei Asia: Samsung starts mass production of its 9th-generation 286-layer 3D NAND memory chips, which increases data I/O speeds by 33% compared to 8th-gen 236-layer chips  —  286-layer product boosts data storage capacity by 50%, aiding AI  —  SEOUL — Samsung Electronics said Tuesday …

Tom Matsuda / Sifted: Paris-based Payflows, whose automated financial management SaaS could be deployed on top of existing ERP systems, raised a €25M Series A led by Balderton  —  The funding round is the latest sign that fintech investors are continuing to focus on the B2B segment

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: NY-based Campus, which is building an online alternative to traditional community colleges, raised a $23M Series A extension following a $29M Series A in 2023  —  Although many students in the United States enter community colleges intending to transfer to four-year universities …

Casey Newton / Platformer: Legal scholars discuss how the TikTok divestment bill could survive a First Amendment challenge and why the US will likely rely on a national security argument  —  The First Amendment is a major obstacle, scholars say — but it isn't insurmountable  —  On Tuesday, the Senate voted overwhelmingly …

Lauren Feiner / The Verge: The US Senate passes the TikTok divestment bill by a margin of 79-18; the legislation now heads to President Biden, who has committed to sign it into law  —  A bill that would force China-based company Bytedance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform …

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: Xaira Therapeutics, which aims to use AI models to find new drugs to treat diseases, emerged from stealth with $1B in commitments from Sequoia and others  —  - Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after controversy  — New startup has backing from high-wattage tech investors

Katie Deighton / Wall Street Journal: As software gets better at labeling photos, CAPTCHA designers are adopting more difficult logic-based prompts to thwart nefarious bots  —  Captchas that aim to distinguish humans from nefarious bots are demanding more brain power; ‘things are going to get even stranger’

MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: Block says it has finished the development of its own 3nm bitcoin mining chip and is working through the design with a “leading global semiconductor foundry”  —  Jack Dorsey says that his payments company, Block (formerly Square), is expanding its bitcoin mining ambitions …

Financial Times: Q&A with BCG CEO Christoph Schweizer, who says the consulting firm expects 20% of its 2024 and 40% of its 2026 revenue will come from helping firms integrate AI  —  CEO projects share of sales will double as companies integrate technology into operations

Akila Quinio / Financial Times: Revolut plans ad sales push, expects to derive a “proper chunk” of its revenue from targeted ads, and hires a former TikTok executive to lead its media strategy  —  The London-based fintech has hired a TikTok executive to lead a ‘media strategy’ as it seeks to diversify revenues

Lizette Chapman / Bloomberg: Nominal, which offers tools for data analysis, testing, and more to startups building advanced hardware like drones, emerges from stealth with $27.5M in funding  —  - Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund among investors  — Software platform aims to assist new manufacturing companies

TechCrunch: TabaPay, which offers instant payment services, agrees to acquire assets of banking-as-a-service startup Synapse, after Synapse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy  —  After a tumultuous year, banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its assets …

Annie Palmer / CNBC: Amazon ends drone deliveries in Lockeford, California, which began in 2022, and plans to expand them to Tolleson, Arizona, in 2024 and other US regions in 2025  —  An Amazon delivery drone is on display at Amazon's BOS27 Robotics Innovation Hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, on Nov. 10, 2022.