Bookmarks (999)

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: A look at OpenScholar, an LLM for scientific research built by the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington that outperforms GPT-4o on accuracy  —  Scientists are drowning in data.  With millions of research papers published every year, even the most dedicated experts struggle …

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: Filing: the US DOJ's proposal requires Google to allow websites more ability to opt-out of its AI products and provide more ad placement controls to advertisers  —  - Antitrust officials propose options in historic lawsuit  — Google says government pushing ‘radical agenda’ beyond case

Brian Fung / CNN: As part of its proposed remedies, the US DOJ says Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines for the next decade  —  The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale …

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press: Filing: DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome, restrict Android from favoring Google's search engine, ban default search deals on iOS and other devices  —  U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI releases a free online course for K-12 teachers to integrate ChatGPT into their classrooms, but some educators remain skeptical about the technology  —  OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students.

Rod McGuirk / Associated Press: Australia introduces a bill in Parliament to ban children younger than 16 from social media; companies would face fines of up to AU$50M for violations  —  Australia's communications minister introduced a world-first law into Parliament on Thursday that would ban children younger than 16 from social media …

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: Neuralink receives approval from Canada to launch clinical trials of its brain implants and plans to run its first non-US trial with Toronto Western Hospital  —  The billionaire's brain device company is currently recruiting patients in the US, UK and Canada.

Matt Swayne / The Quantum Insider: Google researchers introduce AlphaQubit, a machine-learning decoder that surpasses existing methods in identifying and correcting quantum computing errors  —  - Google researchers introduced AlphaQubit, an AI-powered decoder that improves quantum error correction, reducing errors by 6% compared …

Sara Fischer / Axios: Adtech company The Trade Desk announces Ventura, a smart TV operating system, and plans to partner with TV manufacturers for its rollout, expected in H2 2025  —  - “We're looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity,” Green said.

Claudia Assis / MarketWatch: Palo Alto Networks reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $2.14B, vs. $2.12B est., and projects FY 2025 sales in line with estimates; PANW drops ~5% after hours  —  Merely in-line outlook for fiscal 2025 weighs on the stock, down 5% after hours  —  Referenced Symbols

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: Snowflake reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $942.09M, vs. $898.46M est., unveils a deal with Anthropic to bring Claude to Cortex AI; SNOW jumps 18%+ after hours  —  Snowflake said it has inked a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic's Claude models to Snowflake Cortex AI.

Daniel Howley / Yahoo Finance: Nvidia reports Q3 revenue up 94% YoY to $35.1B, vs. $33.2B est., Data Center revenue up 112% to $30.8B, vs. $29B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  Nvidia (NVDA) reported its Q3 earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines …

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.

Ax Sharma / BleepingComputer: Some GitHub projects have been targeted with malicious commits; a Texas researcher claims someone is impersonating him to make the submissions and smear him  —  GitHub projects have been targeted with malicious commits and pull requests, in an attempt to inject backdoors into these projects.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300B as part of a recent buyback offer, one of its highest valuations ever  —  Investors see Trump victory as a positive with threat of TikTok ban looming in U.S.  —  TikTok parent ByteDance is valuing itself at about $300 billion …

Morgan Meaker / Wired: A profile of and an interview with Aura Salla, a former Meta lobbyist turned EU Parliament member, who says the EU's Big Tech regulation went too far, too fast  —  Aura Salla was once the tech giant's top lobbyist in Brussels.  Now, her presence as a regulator in the European Parliament is proving controversial.

Nandagopal Rajan / The Indian Express: An interview with Apple's Tim Millet and Tom Boger on Apple's chip strategy, making big changes to the Neural Engine after the 2017 transformer paper, and more  —  'No other platform can touch our power performance per watt.  That's the tangible benefit to users,' Tom Boger, Vice President of Mac Product Marketing at Apple, said.

ProPublica: Investigation: Microsoft offered the US government free cybersecurity upgrades in 2021, increasing government reliance on Microsoft due to high switching costs  —  - Raising the Bar: President Joe Biden asked tech companies to “raise the bar on cybersecurity.”

Dominic Patten / Deadline: Many Netflix viewers faced issues while watching the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight and the undercard bouts, including the stream glitching and losing sound  —  From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to reload.

Ellen Huet / Bloomberg: A look at the challenges facing the Trump administration for regulating AI; policy analysts suspect Trump will dismantle or reshape the US AI Safety Institute  —  There's a broad expectation the president-elect will reverse attempts to craft rules that put safety ahead of maximum speed in developing the technology.

Jonathan Greig / The Record: An Ohio man is sentenced to three years for running crypto mixer Helix, which laundered $311M+ from 2014 to 2017; he must forfeit $311M+ and assets worth $400M+  —  The operator of the cryptocurrency mixing service Helix was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: T-Mobile's network was among the systems hacked by the China-linked Salt Typhoon group, and some foreign telecommunications firms were also compromised  —  Carrier joins growing list of known victims, including AT&T and Verizon, of the major Chinese spying operation

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Report: Samsung plans to release its smart glasses in Q3 2025; the glasses will be powered by Qualcomm's AR1 chipset and use Google's Gemini to handle AI tasks  —  According to a new report, Samsung's upcoming XR glasses that are being developed in collaboration with Google won't arrive until …

Shakeel Hashim / Transformer: Musk v. Altman: email shows Brockman and Sutskever had concerns about Altman in 2017, Musk claims Altman proposed OpenAI sell its own cryptocurrency, and more  —  New emails released as part of Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI reveal that the company's fondness of drama is hardly new.

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg: One year after Sam Altman was dramatically ousted and reinstated, OpenAI remains dominant as it continues to push ahead on impressive new products  —  The ChatGPT maker is still the company to beat in AI despite going through a turbulent period.  —  One year after Sam Altman's dramatic …

Ari Levy / CNBC: Palantir stock jumps 11% after announcing a move from the NYSE to the Nasdaq; its stock is up 50%+ since reporting better-than-expected earnings on November 4  —  Palantir shares continued their torrid run on Friday, soaring 11% to a record, after the developer of software for the military announced plans …

Jay Peters / The Verge: Bluesky says it has “no intention” of taking user content to train AI tools, ahead of X implementing new terms of service that let it train AI on user content  —  ‘We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.’