~techmeme | Bookmarks (999)

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.

Josh Noble / Financial Times: How YouTube, NBC, Eurosport, and others are enlisting creators to cover the Paris Olympics, to fill in storytelling gaps and captivate a younger generation  —  NBC and Eurosport among those using ‘creators’ to spur interest and reach wider audiences  —  Sandra Kwon's life …

Allison Johnson / The Verge: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 review: all-day battery, seven years of updates, and widgets for the outer screen are helpful but hard to run full apps  —  It's not the most fun, but reliability goes a long way. … Look, fun is fun and all, but sometimes boring is better.

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: A look at Bungie's future after it laid off 220 staffers, as current and former employees say it grew too fast and tried to develop too many projects at once  —  The creator of Halo and Destiny laid off more than 200 people this week including several top executives  —  Hi everyone.

Eric Platt / Financial Times: Filings: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway slashed its stake in Apple by ~50% in Q2, following a 13% cut in Q1, leaving it with a position worth $84.2B  —  Cash holdings hit a record high as billionaire investor dumps $76bn of stocks  —  Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has slashed …

Financial Times: Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta boosted capex by 50% to a total of $106B in H1 2024, as they build AI infrastructure and pledge more investment hikes  —  Technology stocks have been volatile as Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Google report huge increases in their investments in artificial intelligence

Riley Griffin / Bloomberg: How AI-formulated bioweapons became a security obsession inside Washington, DC, forcing officials to take tech advances in weaponizing disease seriously  —  A stunt got White House officials to take technological advances in weaponizing disease seriously.  —  Rocco Casagrande entered …