~techmeme | Bookmarks (999)

Joe Miller / Financial Times: The US SEC sues former IRL CEO Abraham Shafi, accusing him of a $170M fraud by misleading investors about the company's growth and concealing personal expenses  —  Abraham Shafi allegedly hoodwinked backers and spent millions of dollars on personal expenses  —  NEW

Anna Washenko / Engadget: US senators unveil the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would make individuals and companies liable for producing, hosting, or sharing unauthorized AI deepfakes  —  OpenAI joined several entertainment industry groups in backing the NO FAKES Act.  —  Today, a group of senators introduced the NO FAKES Act …

Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat: Ema, which helps companies set up and deploy no-code AI agents it calls “universal AI employees”, raised $36M as part of a Series A led by Accel and Section 32  —  San Francisco-based Ema, the AI agent startup founded by former Google and Okta employees, today announced it is raising …

Emma Hinchliffe / Fortune: New York-based Spring Health, which offers a mental health app that matches patients with care providers, raised a $100M Series E at a $3.3B valuation  —  Mental health company Spring Health, cofounded by CEO April Koh and Adam Chekroud, is now valued at $3.3 billion after raising a $100 million Series E round.

Jonathan Kemper / The Decoder: Google unveils updates to its Gemma family of open models, including Gemma 2 2B, which it claims surpasses GPT-3.5 and Mixtral 8x7B on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena  —  Google has unveiled updates to its Gemma 2 family of open-source language models, focusing on improved performance, safety, and transparency.

Alex Heath / The Verge: Reddit CEO says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity need to pay to scrape the site's data, and it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies”  —  After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data.

Akash Sriram / Reuters: eBay reports Q2 revenue up 1% YoY to $2.57B, vs. $2.53B est., GMV up 1% to $18.4B, net income up 31% to $226M, and forecasts Q3 revenue below estimates  —  EBay (EBAY.O) forecast third-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, a sign that demand is slowing down for collectible items, luxury handbags and watches.

Tekendra Parmar / Bloomberg: Scammers are using Meta's copyright protection tools to target influencers in the Middle East; creators see their content removed from Instagram unless they pay  —  Victims see their content removed from Instagram unless they pay steep ransoms.  —  In May 2023, Esaa Ahmed-Adnan …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: The US NTIA issues a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models like Meta's Llama 3.1, but recommends the government to monitor for potential risks  —  The U.S. Commerce Department today issued a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models like Meta's Llama 3.1 …

Financial Times: Temu faces backlash from its Chinese suppliers over its aggressive effort to recruit Amazon merchants who hold goods in warehouses in the US and the EU  —  Internet marketplace taking on Amazon and Shein aims to cut delivery times by storing goods closer to shoppers

Capital Brief: Canva acquires AI image generation service Leonardo.ai for an undisclosed amount; Leonardo.ai launched in December 2022 and has more than 19M registered users  —  Founded in December 2022, Leonardo.Ai has over 19 million users and its very own foundation AI model.

Bloomberg: Sources: Samsung is narrowing the gap with rival SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory chips and anticipates Nvidia's approval for its HBM3E chips by November 2024  —  - 'We've never seen Samsung in this position,' one analyst said  — Head of semiconductor unit was replaced after several setbacks

Alexandra Alper / Reuters: A US congressional spokesperson says UAE scuttled meetings this month between congressional staff and G42 after the US raised concerns about Microsoft-G42 deal  —  The United Arab Emirates scuttled meetings this month between U.S. Congressional staffers and G42 after U.S. lawmakers raised concerns …

Hadley Beeman / W3C: After Google said it wouldn't deprecate third-party cookies, W3C says third-party cookies must be removed as the invisible tracking “hurts everyone's privacy”  —  Author(s) and publish date  —  After reading Google's announcement that they no longer plan to deprecate third-party cookies …

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Meta releases Segment Anything Model 2 with support for object segmentation in videos and images; the code and weights are available under an Apache 2.0 license  —  Meta had a palpable hit last year with Segment Anything, a machine learning model that could quickly and reliably identify and outline just about anything in an image.

Karissa Bell / Engadget: Meta rolls out AI Studio in the US, letting users create and share AI chatbots, and Instagram creators set up chatbots to answer DM questions and story replies  —  Meta is rolling out its AI Studio tools for custom chatbots.  —  The next time you DM a creator on Instagram, you might get a reply from their AI.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Twitch rolls out a revamped iOS and Android app, which now shows a TikTok-like feed of recommended content when it's opened, instead of a “Following” list  —  Twitch's mobile app is getting a major update that puts its TikTok-like feed front and center.

Dvora Meyers / The Verge: A look at the AI-assisted Judging Support System for scoring in gymnastics that made its debut at the 2023 world championships and helps settle disputes  —  When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her.

Jason Koebler / 404 Media: Some popular sites like Condé Nast's titles and Reuters.com modified robots.txt to block Anthropic's bots, but Anthropic has just made new bots with other names  —  Hundreds of sites have put old Anthropic scrapers on their blocklist, while leaving a new one unblocked.

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Apple debuts Apple Intelligence in the iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 developer betas, with text generation and Siri updates, but missing some features  —  - Apple on Monday released the first version of Apple Intelligence, … Apple on Monday released the first version of Apple Intelligence …

Bloomberg: A look at ByteDance's CapCut, which has 318M+ MAUs outside China, vs. ~97.4M Canva MAUs, and has made $125M so far in 2024 on mobile, per Sensor Tower  —  - CapCut could be banned in US by same law threatening TikTok  — Adobe working on Premiere editing app that runs in browser

Sahil Patel / The Information: LinkedIn and Pinterest are testing programs that let publishers sell ads on their videos and pages, respectively, in exchange for a cut of the resulting revenue  —  Social media platforms such as Pinterest, TikTok and LinkedIn are trying a new tack to gain a bigger share of digital advertising …

New York Times: A dozen technologists and researchers at Chinese tech companies say open-source technologies were a key reason behind China narrowing the AI gap with the US  —  In recent weeks, Chinese tech companies have unveiled technologies that rival American systems — and they are already in the hands of consumers and software developers.

Financial Times: Study: the shipping industry faced 64+ cyber attacks in 2023, up from ~20 in 2022, as geopolitical disputes prompt state-linked hackers to target trade flows  —  State-backed hackers present a fresh threat to an industry that has long faced security concerns