~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: The product lead for Sora, Rohan Sahai, says OpenAI plans to integrate Sora into ChatGPT, but it may not offer the same level of control as Sora's web app  —  OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT …

Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE: Mimic, which offers a platform to detect, deflect, and facilitate recovery from ransomware attacks, raised a $50M Series A, bringing its total funding to $77M  —  Enterprise ransomware defense startup Mimic Networks Inc. announced today that it had raised $50 million in new funding to enhance …

Justin McCurry / The Guardian: The FBI says North Korea was responsible for the $1.5B Bybit Hack, referring to this particular form of North Korean malicious cyber activity as “TraderTraitor”  —  The US agency said it refers to this specific North Korean malicious cyber activity as ‘TraderTraitor’

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Researchers find fine-tuning AI models like GPT-4o on examples of insecure code resulted in the models misaligned on a range of topics unrelated to coding  —  On Monday, a group of university researchers released a new paper suggesting that fine-tuning an AI language model …

David Heaney / UploadVR: Meta for Education, launched in beta in Nov. 2024, is generally available, offering schools Quest 3 for $630 or 3S from $400, with two years of managed services  —  Meta for Education is now out of beta, offering schools and universities an “end-to-end solution” for adopting VR & mixed reality via Quest headsets.

Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Microsoft unveils the 3.8B-parameter text-only Phi-4-mini and 5.6B-parameter Phi-4-multimodal, claiming both outperform similar-sized models in certain tasks  —  Microsoft Corp. today expanded its Phi line of open-source language models with two new algorithms optimized for multimodal processing and hardware efficiency.

Mike Butcher / TechCrunch: London-based parcel delivery startup Relay, whose customers include Temu, TikTok, Vinted, and UK retailers like THG Fulfil, raised a $35M Series A led by Plural  —  Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce …

Olga Kharif / Bloomberg: Gemini says the SEC closed its investigation into the crypto exchange and won't pursue an enforcement action, after Gemini received a Wells notice in May 2024  —  A spokesperson for the SEC didn't respond to a request for comment.  Gemini also didn't respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News.

Allison Johnson / The Verge: iPhone 16e review: reliable performance, good camera, the C1 modem “seems fine”, but no MagSafe, no ultrawide camera, and $599 feels $100 too high  —  The iPhone 16E is everything I love and hate about iOS.  FaceTime at your fingertips.  A reliable camera.  Simplicity.  Familiarity.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet reportedly cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train, similar to Claude 3.5 and cheaper than GPT-4, which cost over $100M  —  Anthropic's newest flagship AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train using less than 10^26 FLOPs of computing power.

Paul Vieira / Wall Street Journal: Canada's broadcast regulator says that Google will be charged a fee to recover regulatory costs related to Canada's online news law, starting April 1  —  Google would be charged a fee to recover regulatory costs related to Canada's online news law  —  OTTAWA—Canada's broadcast regulator …

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Cellebrite suspends Serbia as a customer after a report alleged authorities used its tools to unlock phones of a journalist and an activist and plant spyware  —  Cellebrite announced on Tuesday that it stopped Serbia from using its technology, following allegations that Serbian police …

Karissa Bell / Engadget: Meta's Oversight Board says it will weigh in on Meta's hate speech policies, changed before Trump's inauguration, in a test of the enforceability of its powers  —  It's unclear how much the group will be able to influence the rules.  —  Less than two weeks before Donald Trump's inauguration …

The Information: Source: Instagram considers launching a standalone Reels app, improving recommendations, and distributing more three-minute-long videos, to compete with TikTok  —  Instagram is considering launching a stand-alone app for its short-form-video feature, Reels, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri told staff this week …

Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat: IBM releases its Granite 3.2 LLM family, featuring optional reasoning capabilities, a new vision model optimized for document processing, and time series models  —  In the wake of the disruptive debut of DeepSeek-R1, reasoning models have been all the rage so far in 2025.

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: Snowflake reports Q4 product revenue up 28% YoY to $943.3M, vs. $915.8M est., and forecasts FY 2026 product revenue above estimates; SNOW jumps 8%+ after hours  —  Snowflake Inc. projected better-than-expected revenue growth for the fiscal year, sending an optimistic signal about the adoption …

Juby Babu / Reuters: eBay reports Q4 revenue up 1% YoY to $2.6B, GMV up 4% YoY to $19.3B, and forecasts Q1 revenue below expectations; EBAY drops 7%+ after hours  —  E-commerce firm eBay (EBAY.O) forecast first-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Wednesday, signaling weak demand for products such as collector's items and refurbished goods.

Rafe Uddin / Financial Times: Analysts expect Amazon to spend up to $25B of its $100B capex in 2025 on its retail network, focusing on automation and efficiency, amid the AI spending boom  —  US tech giant expected to spend as much as $25bn on warehouse automation in broader efficiency drive

Wall Street Journal: Sources: in July 2024, Microsoft told top GOP officials that Chinese hackers had accessed the RNC email system for months; the RNC chose not to alert the FBI  —  The previously unreported intrusion came as the Trump campaign was hacked by Iranian operatives

Ina Fried / Axios: Access Now: 54 countries imposed internet shutdowns at least 296 times in 2024, led by Myanmar, displacing India from the top spot for the first time since 2018  —  - “As internet access becomes consistently weaponized, restricted, and precarious, we are seeing pervasive patterns …

Bloomberg: Documents and source: Indonesian agritech eFishery misrepresented financial figures for years; backers like SoftBank likely to recover under 10% of investments  —  - Startup's backers likely to recover under 10% of investments  — Indonesian firm allegedly misrepresented financials for years

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: How hackers of the $1.5B Bybit crypto heist used UI manipulation of employee devices and social engineering to gain control of ETH multisig cold wallets  —  The cryptocurrency industry and those responsible for securing it are still in shock following Friday's heist, likely by North Korea …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Sensor Tower: in 2024, TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, became the first non-game app to reach $6B in annual in-app purchase revenue  —  TikTok, including its Chinese counterpart Douyin, in 2024 became the first non-game app to reach $6 billion in in-app purchase revenue in a year.

Business Insider: Sources: Mira Murati's new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is aiming to raise $1B at a ~$9B valuation; the round is in progress and details could change  —  - OpenAI's former CTO, Mira Murati, debuted her new startup, Thinking Machine Labs, last week.  — The startup is aiming …