~techmeme | Bookmarks (1013)

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: After backlash, YC deletes a demo video from X and LinkedIn of a startup it backs that says it's building AI-powered performance monitoring for factory workers  —  A demo from Optifye.AI, a member of Y Combinator's current cohort, sparked a social media backlash that ended up with YC deleting it off its socials.

Pew Research Center: A survey of US workers in October 2024: 52% are worried about AI's workplace impact, 32% think it will mean fewer job opportunities, 36% feel hopeful, and more  —  About a third of workers say AI use will lead to fewer job opportunities for them in the long run; chatbots seen as more helpful …

Financial Times: Researchers estimate that air pollution related to data centers from Google, Microsoft, and Meta resulted in $5.4B in US public health costs from 2019 to 2023  —  Research suggests the price of treating illnesses related to building of computing infrastructure in the US is on the rise

Stu Woo / Wall Street Journal: The iPhone 16e gives Apple a chance to get more competitive in China, where rivals like Huawei are becoming more sophisticated with the government's help  —  The less-expensive 16e model arrives in the world's biggest smartphone market, where local tech companies benefit from Beijing's help

Sean Hollister / The Verge: Nvidia confirms a “rare” manufacturing issue affecting less than 0.5% of RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti GPUs which are missing render units, the latest hitch since launch  —  Where did the ROPs go? … In the grand scheme of things, that doesn't sound like a lot of affected GPUs …

Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab: Some journalists are taking freelance jobs with AI training data companies like Scale AI, which recruit them for tasks such as fact-checking and prompt drafting  —  The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs).

Enock Nyariki / Poynter: A Maldita study of nearly 1.2M Community Notes on X published globally in 2024 shows that professional fact-checkers are among the three most cited sources  —  Notes that cite fact-checkers earn more trust from X users and combat misinformation faster  —  When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Filing: Amazon estimated the fair value of its stake in Anthropic at $14B at the end of December 2024, after agreeing to invest $8B in Anthropic so far  —  - The value of Amazon's investments in Anthropic have soared.  — Amazon has agreed to invest $8 billion in Anthropic so far.

Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk: DefiLlama: Bybit experienced a “bank run” of over $4B after the ~$1.5B hack, leading to a ~$5.5B total outflow; CEO says “about 50%” of funds were withdrawn  —  Major cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has seen total outflows of over $5.5 billion after it suffered …

Kendra Barnett / Adweek: X is rolling out Grok-powered AI tools for advertisers to generate ready-to-use ad copy and imagery and provide campaign performance analysis  —  The company is betting on AI to help recover some of the millions it has shed in ad revenue over the last two years

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: An investigation details how Chinese cybercrime groups are turning phished payment card data into new Apple or Google wallets for online and in-store use  —  Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers.

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times: Even as Trump embraces crypto, attracting millions of new investors, the Bybit hack and memecoins show how crypto remains the wild West of the financial world  —  Hours after Coinbase said the S.E.C. was dropping a lawsuit against it, another major cryptocurrency exchange reported a potentially record-setting theft.

Sigal Samuel / Vox: A look at the debate about whether AI models can truly reason, as some researchers describe the current pattern of reasoning as “jagged intelligence”  —  The AI world is moving so fast that it's easy to get lost amid the flurry of shiny new products.

Erin Griffith / New York Times: Many SV startups are using AI to boost productivity in research, coding, and more, reducing reliance on VC money for hiring, fueling “tiny team” success stories  —  Tech start-ups typically raised huge sums to hire armies of workers and grow fast.

Davide Castelvecchi / Scientific American: Some physicists are skeptical about Microsoft's claims of achieving a quantum computing breakthrough with Majorana 1, citing the lack of detailed evidence  —  With its ‘topological’ quantum computers, Microsoft aims to reach useful scales faster than competing technologies

Daniel Cancel / Bloomberg: Latin American e-commerce giant MercadoLibre's stock reached a record high on February 21 after it reported a record $639M net income on $6.1B in revenue in Q4  —  - Latin America e-commerce, fintech giant blows away estimates  — MercadoLibre extends lead as most valuable Latin American firm

Lucinda Shen / Axios: Renaissance Capital: 12 of 40 fintech firms that went public in the US since 2020 have given positive investor returns; only Shift4 and AppLovin are profitable  —  All topics  —  Situational awareness: OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising over $1 billion for his startup Safe Superintelligence …

Harry Dempsey / Financial Times: Japanese officials and executives warn that China's export curbs on gallium, germanium, and other chip raw materials threaten global electronics supply chains  —  Officials and executives say gallium rules will upset supply chains for chips and vehicle batteries

Bloomberg: Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu calls the pursuit of AGI the company's “primary objective”, saying “our first and foremost goal is to pursue AGI”  —  “Our first and foremost goal is to pursue AGI,” Eddie Wu told investors on a call after the company reported results that surpassed analyst estimates.

Hannah Murphy / Financial Times: Sources: Meta's oversight board got little notice of Zuckerberg's “free speech” overhaul, fueling tensions as it rushes to hold Meta accountable for the changes  —  Independent body searches for ways to hold social media group to account over content moderation and hate speech changes

Brenda Goh / Reuters: Chinese state media: Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Xi Jinping at a meeting that concerns about China lacking homegrown chips or operating systems had eased  —  Huawei's founder told Xi Jinping at a meeting the Chinese president held with private sector entrepreneurs that concerns China …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Microsoft researchers introduce Magma, an AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems  —  On Wednesday, Microsoft Research introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing …

Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer: A look at the potential reasons why software developer job listings on Indeed hit a five-year low in January, down 35% from 2020, including the impact of AI  —  Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.  In every issue, I cover topics related to Big Tech …

Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Filing: Meta approves raising executives' annual bonuses to 200% of base salary, up from 75%, as most employees' annual stock options are reportedly cut by ~10%  —  Executives at Meta stand to get bigger bonuses this year.  —  The company said in a corporate filing Thursday that it had approved …