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Danial Azhar / Reuters: Oracle plans to invest over $6.5B in Malaysia to set up a public cloud region, its first in the country and third in Southeast Asia, after two in Singapore  —  Oracle (ORCL.N) plans to invest more than $6.5 billion to set up its first public cloud region in Malaysia, the company said on Wednesday …

The Economic Times: Sources: Peak XV cut its $2.85B fund by $465M, or ~16%, over a year after its Sequoia split, with most of the reduction coming in its growth-stage allocation  —  Venture capital firm Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia Capital India, has pared the size of its $2.85 billion fund by 16% …

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Nvidia details LLM family NVLM 1.0, which can handle vision and language tasks while enhancing text-only capabilities and is led by the 72B-parameter NVLM-D-72B  —  Nvidia has released a powerful open-source artificial intelligence model that competes with proprietary systems from industry leaders like OpenAI and Google.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Numa, which uses AI to automate tasks for auto dealerships and has 600 customers in the US and Canada, raised a $32M Series B led by Touring Capital and Mitsui  —  Sometimes, a pivot ends up being the smartest decision company leaders can make.  See Netflix's pivot from DVDs to streaming …

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica: Open-source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has been removed from GitHub, and its team has reportedly ceased development after Nintendo contacted its creator  —  GitHub removal comes months after a Nintendo lawsuit took down the Yuzu emulator.  —  Popular open source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx …

Gali Weinreb / Globes Online: Nym, which helps US health care providers automate the medical coding process, raised a $47M growth investment led by PSG, bringing its total raised to $92M  —  Nym has automated the entire US healthcare medical coding process to deliver a faster, more cost-effective solution that outperforms traditional manual coding.

Wired: Pig butchering operations that are offshoots of the Southeast Asian activity have emerged in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa  —  Scamming operations that once originated in Southeast Asia are now proliferating around the world, likely raking in billions of dollars in the process.

TechCrunch: Sources: 11x.ai, which makes AI sales reps, raised a ~$50M Series B led by a16z at a ~$350M valuation; source: a $24M Series A earlier in 2024 valued it at $90M  —  11x.ai, a startup that develops AI-powered sales development bots, has secured roughly $50 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has learned.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is planning a new iPad mini, possibly for 2024, and nearing production of an iPhone SE without a home button and iPad Air models for early 2025  —  - New SE will use modernized design to entice budget shoppers  — Company also preparing iPad mini for this year, Air for 2025

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma, who spent years as a doctoral fellow at Google before joining OpenAI's founding team as a research scientist  —  Durk Kingma, one of the lesser-known co-founders of OpenAI, today announced that he'll be joining Anthropic.

Cristina Criddle / Financial Times: An interview with WhatsApp Product Director Alice Newton-Rex on end-to-end encryption, spotting misinformation, the UK's Online Safety Act, Telegram, and more  —  The messaging platform's director of product discusses privacy issues, AI and new features for the app's 2bn users

Kate Knibbs / Wired: A look at Calliope Networks, a content licensing company whose License to Scrape program is targeting YouTubers to strike their own AI training data agreements  —  While big platforms like Reddit have signed deals with the AI giants, YouTube leaves licensing in the hands of individual creators.

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: In the past year, one researcher reported vulnerabilities in 19 commercial services used by hundreds of courts, state agencies, and police departments in the US  —  With hundreds of courts and agencies affected, chances are one near you is, too.  —  Public records systems that courts …

Rozanna Latiff / Reuters: Google starts construction of a new $2B data center in Malaysia, says its investments would create 26,500 jobs and contribute $3B+ to Malaysian economy by 2030  —  Google (GOOGL.O) said on Tuesday its investments in Malaysia would create 26,500 jobs and contribute more than $3 billion …

Kevin Collier / NBC News: FCC's connectivity data in counties affected by Hurricane Helene: as of Sept. 30, 370 of North Carolina's 1,452 cell sites are out because of a lack of power  —  In some counties, fewer than 10% of all cellphone service sites are fully functioning.  —  Some of the victims of Hurricane Helene are cut off from the outside world.

Julie Bort / TechCrunch: YC-backed PearAI criticized for forking another AI code editor covered under the Apache license and changing the license to its own made-up closed license  —  A Y Combinator startup named PearAI launched with an X post thread and YouTube video on Saturday and created immediate controversy.

Jody Godoy / Reuters: A US court awards Amazon a partial dismissal of FTC's lawsuit accusing it of illegal monopolies, in a sealed ruling whose details weren't immediately clear  —  Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) won partial dismissal of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit accusing it of maintaining illegal monopolies …

Mike Scarcella / Reuters: Apple asks a judge to throw out or narrow an App Store anti-steering injunction, saying rulings in two unrelated cases undermine an order Epic won in its suit  —  Apple (AAPL.O) has asked a U.S. judge to throw out or narrow a decision governing its lucrative App Store, saying …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: MIT spinoff Liquid AI debuts its non-transformer AI models LFM 1B, 3B, and 40B MoE, and claims they achieve “state-of-the-art performance at every scale”  —  Liquid AI, a startup co-founded by former researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) …

New York Times: Filing: UAE-based G42 accounted for 87% of Cerebras' H1 2024 revenue and has committed to buy $335M worth of its stock by April 2025, giving G42 a 5%+ stake  —  Cerebras makes a chip that is 56 times the size of a chip commonly used for artificial intelligence, with the potential to crunch data …

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: Notes on Google NotebookLM's Audio Overview feature, which generates a podcast with two AI hosts discussing user-provided content and is surprisingly effective  —  Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google's NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now.

Jonathan Stempel / Reuters: A US judge dismisses a DOJ lawsuit accusing eBay of violating environmental laws by allowing the sale of harmful products, citing Section 230 protections  —  A federal judge dismissed a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit accusing eBay (EBAY.O) of violating environmental laws by allowing …

CNBC: AI chip startup Cerebras Systems files for an IPO, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq as CBRS, and reports a net loss of $66.6M on $136.4M in sales in H1 2024  —  Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Monday filed its prospectus for an initial public offering …

Jason Koebler / 404 Media: Udemy uses opt-out windows, the first of which lasted three weeks and just ended, that its creators must use to prevent their videos from being used to train AI  —  Teachers are surprised they have been opted into having their classes scraped for AI training.