~techmeme | Bookmarks (1000)

Brady Dale / Axios: SEC chair Gary Gensler will step down on January 20; it has been traditional for SEC chairs to resign if the administration changes in the middle of their term  —  - “I thank President Biden for entrusting me with this incredible responsibility. … The agency had resisted launching exchange …

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: A look at OpenScholar, an LLM for scientific research built by the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington that outperforms GPT-4o on accuracy  —  Scientists are drowning in data.  With millions of research papers published every year, even the most dedicated experts struggle …

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: Filing: the US DOJ's proposal requires Google to allow websites more ability to opt-out of its AI products and provide more ad placement controls to advertisers  —  - Antitrust officials propose options in historic lawsuit  — Google says government pushing ‘radical agenda’ beyond case

Brian Fung / CNN: As part of its proposed remedies, the US DOJ says Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines for the next decade  —  The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale …

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press: Filing: DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome, restrict Android from favoring Google's search engine, ban default search deals on iOS and other devices  —  U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI releases a free online course for K-12 teachers to integrate ChatGPT into their classrooms, but some educators remain skeptical about the technology  —  OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students.

Rod McGuirk / Associated Press: Australia introduces a bill in Parliament to ban children younger than 16 from social media; companies would face fines of up to AU$50M for violations  —  Australia's communications minister introduced a world-first law into Parliament on Thursday that would ban children younger than 16 from social media …

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: Neuralink receives approval from Canada to launch clinical trials of its brain implants and plans to run its first non-US trial with Toronto Western Hospital  —  The billionaire's brain device company is currently recruiting patients in the US, UK and Canada.

Matt Swayne / The Quantum Insider: Google researchers introduce AlphaQubit, a machine-learning decoder that surpasses existing methods in identifying and correcting quantum computing errors  —  - Google researchers introduced AlphaQubit, an AI-powered decoder that improves quantum error correction, reducing errors by 6% compared …

Sara Fischer / Axios: Adtech company The Trade Desk announces Ventura, a smart TV operating system, and plans to partner with TV manufacturers for its rollout, expected in H2 2025  —  - “We're looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity,” Green said.

Claudia Assis / MarketWatch: Palo Alto Networks reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $2.14B, vs. $2.12B est., and projects FY 2025 sales in line with estimates; PANW drops ~5% after hours  —  Merely in-line outlook for fiscal 2025 weighs on the stock, down 5% after hours  —  Referenced Symbols

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: Snowflake reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $942.09M, vs. $898.46M est., unveils a deal with Anthropic to bring Claude to Cortex AI; SNOW jumps 18%+ after hours  —  Snowflake said it has inked a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic's Claude models to Snowflake Cortex AI.

Daniel Howley / Yahoo Finance: Nvidia reports Q3 revenue up 94% YoY to $35.1B, vs. $33.2B est., Data Center revenue up 112% to $30.8B, vs. $29B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  Nvidia (NVDA) reported its Q3 earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: xAI has told investors it raised $5B in a funding round valuing it at $50B and that its revenue has reached $100M on an annualized basis  —  The artificial intelligence startup has more than doubled its valuation from the spring  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup …

Hayden Field / CNBC: Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $13.8B in 2024, up from $2.3B in 2023; OpenAI's marketshare in enterprise AI declined from 50% to 34%  —  Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, a “reasoning” AI model that it claims is competitive with OpenAI's o1, and plans to open source it  —  A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI's o1.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Los Angeles-based Moonvalley, which is developing “transparent” generative AI video tools, raised a $70M seed co-led by General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures  —  The wide availability of tools to build generative AI has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups in the space.

Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine: Bluesky is booming partly because it isn't hindered by bad adtech, AI slop, throttled links, and largely hostile user experiences, unlike some of its big rivals  —  No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links.  Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not  —  Greetings all —

Jason Del Rey / Fortune: Memo: Amazon employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking a question to the new AI-based Alexa and getting a response or completing a task  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.  —  Amazon's race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags …

Faris Mokhtar / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has raised its offer to invest in Indonesia from about $10M to almost $100M, in a bid to persuade the government to lift its iPhone 16 sales ban  —  - Company increases investment proposal tenfold, sources say  — Indonesia banned sales of iPhone 16 over local content rules

NBC News: The US Library of Congress says hackers accessed some email communications between congressional offices and library staff between January and September 2024  —  The Library of Congress didn't specify who was behind the hack.  —  The Library of Congress said hackers broke into its communications systems …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Internal document: Amazon has held talks with several partners for handling specific tasks on the AI-powered Alexa, including Uber, Ticketmaster, and Instacart  —  - Amazon discussed partnerships with other companies for an AI-powered Alexa upgrade.  — Partners under consideration included Uber …

Daniel Wiessner / Reuters: Amazon and SpaceX argued the NLRB, which recently found issues at the companies, is unconstitutional; 5th Circuit judges questioned the timeline of the charges  —  A panel of U.S. judges on Monday seemed likely to rule that Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Elon Musk's SpaceX were too quick to bring …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Perplexity debuts a shopping feature offering product recommendations, one-click checkout, and more for Pro users in the US, alongside a merchant program  —  AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce.  On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature …