~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Katie Tarasov / CNBC: A look at TSMC's $20B Arizona fab, which the company says is “dang near back on the original schedule” and is set to produce 4nm chips at 20K wafers per month  —  WATCH NOW  —  TSMC says first advanced U.S. chip fab ‘dang near back’ on schedule.  Here's an inside look.

Reuters: Document: Trump's transition team seeks to repeal a crash-reporting rule opposed by Tesla and other car makers and “liberalize” autonomous vehicle regulation  —  The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk's Tesla …

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Evinced, which helps companies build accessible websites and apps, raised a $55M Series C led by Insight Partners, bringing its total funding to $112M  —  Making sure your software is accessible is fast becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have, and Evinced is one of a wave of startups helping make that happen.

Daniel Kuhn / The Block: Justin Sun's BiT Global, which recently became a key stakeholder in the wBTC ecosystem, sues Coinbase for planning to delist wBTC after launching rival cbBTC  —  - Justin Sun's BiT Global is suing Coinbase for delisting wBTC and launching a competing product.

Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: How Viam, founded in 2020 by MongoDB co-founder Eliot Horowitz, uses AI to help companies make anything “smart”, including pizza buffets and bathroom lines  —  Entrepreneur Eliot Horowitz, who founded $22 billion database company MongoDB, is betting on artificial intelligence in the physical world

Financial Times: Duolingo has bucked edtech's post-pandemic blues, with its stock price more than tripling from its 2021 IPO price of $102, giving the company a ~$15B market cap  —  The language learning app sees big growth opportunities ahead  —  Education technology companies became sought after properties during …

Ryan Naraine / SecurityWeek: Tel Aviv-based Astrix Security, which helps firms secure non-human identities like API keys and service accounts, raised a $45M Series B led by Menlo Ventures  —  Tel Aviv company building software to secure non-human identities banks a $45 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures.

George Winslow / Tv Technology: The FCC opens all 1,200 megahertz of the 6GHz band for unlicensed use by very-low-power devices, citing growth in wearables, AR/VR, and other cutting-edge tech  —  The move, which the agency says will spur innovation, had been opposed by the NAB for its potential impact on newsgathering

Julie Bort / TechCrunch: Montreal-based Flare, a threat exposure management startup that develops tech to thwart info-stealer malware, raised a $30M Series B led by Base10 Partners  —  Cybercrime became easier in 2024 with the rise of info-stealer malware, or software that collects login credentials.

Bloomberg: Sources: Nvidia added ~200 staff to its self-driving R&D team in Beijing and will end the year with ~4,000 staff in China, up from ~3,000 at the start of 2024  —  - Company added roughly 200 to its Beijing headcount in R&D push  — AI chips leader has long sought to develop autonomous car tech

Kate Knibbs / Wired: Harvard says it's releasing a high-quality dataset of ~1M public-domain books, created with funding from Microsoft and OpenAI, to help train LLMs and AI tools  —  The project's leader says that allowing everyone to access the collection of public-domain books will help “level the playing field” in the AI industry.

Wall Street Journal: Meta donates $1M to president-elect Trump's inaugural fund; sources: Mark Zuckerberg gifted Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on November 27  —  President-elect had blasted the tech tycoon during the presidential campaign, but ties have been improving

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: NeuBird, which is using generative AI to automate IT site reliability operations, raised a $22.5M seed extension led by M12, following a $22M seed in April  —  Late last year, Gou Rao and Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird to automate IT site reliability operations tasks with generative AI.

Shoya Okinaga / Nikkei Asia: Honda plans to dissolve a self-driving vehicle partnership with GM after GM announced plans to exit robotaxi development; Honda had invested $852M in Cruise  —  TOKYO — Honda Motor will dissolve a self-driving vehicle partnership with General Motors after the U.S. automaker said it would pull …

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: OpenAI says ChatGPT, API, and Sora traffic has largely recovered, after a multi-hour outage, and that it is monitoring the situation to ensure full resolution  —  OpenAI says ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API experienced a major outage starting at around 3pm PT on Wednesday, according to the company's status page.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: ServiceTitan, which offers cloud software to contractors, prices its IPO at $71 per share, above the expected range, raising almost $625M at a ~$6.3B valuation  —  ServiceTitan, a provider of cloud software to contractors, priced its IPO at $71 a share on Wednesday, above the expected range.

Muyao Shen / Bloomberg: Binance and Circle partner to promote USDC; Binance plans to list more crypto trading pairs denominated in USDC and hold USDC for its own corporate treasury  —  - Circle faces increased challenges in the stablecoin market  — Binance will support more USDC usage on its platform

Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters: Filing: Microsoft expects an ~$800M charge in Q2 2025 over GM's exit of the Cruise robotaxi business, after acquiring a minority stake in Cruise in January 2021  —  Microsoft (MSFT.O) expects to record an impairment charge of around $800 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2025 over General Motors' …

Ari Levy / CNBC: The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closes up 1.8% to pass 20,000 for the first time, pushing it up 33% in 2024 so far; Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta close at record highs  —  Alphabet and Tesla climbed to fresh records on Wednesday, closing at all-time highs alongside Amazon and Meta as the tech megacaps lifted …

Katie Robertson / New York Times: The NYT Tech Guild and its 600+ members reach a tentative deal with management on a contract enhancing job security, setting flexible hybrid schedules, and more  —  The union, which represents some 600 tech workers at the publication, had been negotiating for a contract for more than two years.

Sheena Vasani / The Verge: Google rolls out two updates to Android's unknown tracker alerts feature, letting users pause location updates from their phone and pinpoint unfamiliar trackers  —  Google is rolling out two new updates to its unknown tracker alerts feature that should make it easier for Android device owners …

Financial Times: Sources: EU regulators asked Google for more info in October about a secret ads partnership with Meta which skirted Google's own rules for targeting minors  —  Regulators request information after FT investigation into partnership that skirted search giant's rules on minors

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: A growing cohort of AI startups are recruiting scores of experts to train models on highly specialized tasks for sensitive sectors like defense and health care  —  From spotting weeds in cotton fields to scanning the bush for signs of poachers, AI startups are recruiting scores of experts for highly specialized tasks.

Kali Hays / Fortune: Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju says the startup, now focused on its API and licensing, has seen “triple digit growth” and has “a clean balance sheet, no debt”  —  Stability AI's CEO said the company' was back in growth mode after a rough period, with business …