~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: DeepSeek says its V3 and R1 models' cost of inferencing relative to sales during a 24-hour-period on February 28 put “theoretical” profit margins at 545%  —  Chinese artificial intelligence phenomenon DeepSeek revealed some financial numbers on Saturday, saying its “theoretical” …

Richard Waters / Financial Times: Despite breakthroughs from Amazon and Microsoft, quantum computing is struggling to reach its silicon moment, with no consensus on the best way to build qubits  —  Despite breakthroughs from Amazon and Microsoft, the industry is still a long way from building practical machines

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Metronome, which offers APIs to help SaaS companies charge customers based on usage, raised a $50M Series C led by NEA, bringing its total funding to $128M  —  Metronomes have been keeping time for hundreds of years, rhythmically clicking back and forth at exact intervals.

PYMNTS.com: Auditoria.AI, which develops AI agents to automate tasks and provide insights for enterprise finance teams, raised a $38M Series B led by Innovius Capital  —  Auditoria.AI raised $38 million in a Series B funding round to grow its agentic artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise finance teams.

Benoit Berthelot / Bloomberg: Teleperformance, the world's largest call center operator, rolls out AI tech by startup Sanas to soften English-speaking Indian workers' accents in real time  —  Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence system …

Financial Times: China replaces tech minister Jin Zhuanglong, a key figure in its push to become a tech superpower, with Li Lecheng; sources: Jin faced a graft-related probe  —  Jin Zhuanglong had been missing from public view for 2 months, FT review shows  —  China's technology minister …

Julie Zhu / Bloomberg: Socure, a digital identity verification company, says bad actors are increasingly using social media selfies and generative AI to create more realistic fake ids  —  Generative AI has made it possible to create better fake IDs in minutes, and the ready availability of selfies on social media has aided those efforts.

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: Spamhaus: Prospero, a notorious provider of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” hosting for cybercriminals, is routing its operations through Kaspersky Lab's networks  —  One of the most notorious providers of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” web hosting for cybercriminals has started routing …

Teresa Xie / Bloomberg: Crypto reserve bills have failed in Montana, N. Dakota, S. Dakota, and Wyoming over the last month; Bitcoin Laws: such bills have been introduced in 24 states  —  - South Dakota's measure for a Bitcoin reserve failed this week  — Trump and Lummis first introduced the notion in July

Steven Levy / Wired: Taara, a project under Alphabet's moonshot X lab, unveils a new silicon photonic chip that uses light to transmit high-speed data through the air  —  The Alphabet “moonshot” project is launching a new chip to deliver high-speed internet with light instead of radio waves.

Sean Hollister / The Verge: Sesame, headed by Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, exits stealth with an undisclosed amount of funding, unveiling an AI speech model and plans for AI glasses  —  Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe's next act: AI glasses that carry a conversation. … I tell Amazon's Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis.

Natalie Lung / Bloomberg: Grubhub CEO Howard Migdal says the company is laying off about 500 employees, or ~23% of its workforce, following its takeover by Wonder in November 2024  —  Grubhub is cutting about 23% of its workforce and set the stage for more changes at the company following its takeover by Wonder Group Inc., the owner of Blue Apron.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Amnesty International says Google has fixed three zero-day vulnerabilities in Android, developed by Cellebrite and used by Serbia to unlock phones  —  Amnesty International said that Google fixed previously unknown flaws in Android that allowed authorities to unlock phones using forensic tools.

Steven Church / Bloomberg: A US court finds that Byju's and founder Byju Raveendran's brother violated a fiduciary duty to lenders by fraudulently hiding $533M from them  —  - Company, brother of Byju's founder wrongly hid $533 million  — Ruling is latest loss for Indian tech firm navigating US court

Stephanie Kirchgaessner / The Guardian: Recent incidents indicate the US no longer characterizes Russia as a cyber threat; source: CISA analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats  —  Recent incidents indicate US is no longer characterizing Russia as a cybersecurity threat, marking a radical departure: ‘Putin is on the inside now’

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.