~techmeme | Bookmarks (1025)

Bloomberg: Sources: SoftBank's Masayoshi Son has recently become singularly obsessed with how to build the next Nvidia and wants competitive AI chips ready to ship by 2026  —  The billionaire SoftBank founder promises to invest $100 billion in the US as part of a sweeping redemption plan.

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan says AI spending frenzy will continue until the decade's end, and downplays an Intel bid, saying he had his “hands very full” in AI chips  —  CEO said Big Tech groups are ‘investing full tilt’ as US chipmaker soars to more than $1tn valuation

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Donald Trump announces that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at a16z, will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House OSTP  —  Incoming president Donald Trump has confirmed reports that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz …

The Linux Foundation: A survey of 501 organizations globally estimates organizations contribute $7.7B annually to open source software and 86% of contribution value is employee labor  —  We've long understood that people are the engine that powers open source.  Prior research has found different ways to measure the value …

Financial Times: Sources: Palantir and Anduril are in talks with OpenAI, SpaceX, and more to form a consortium to bid for US defense contracts and plan to announce it in January  —  Consortium likely to include Elon Musk's SpaceX in move to grab a bigger slice of $850bn US defence budget

Bloomberg: A look at the challenges facing Crunchyroll, as current and ex-staffers say its management is out of touch, amid Disney and Netflix's expansion into anime  —  Disney and Netflix are expanding in the popular Japanese cartoon genre  —  At first glance, Sony Group Corp.'s $1.2 billion acquisition …

Kevin Roose / New York Times: A look at Amazon's revamped drone delivery program near Phoenix, Arizona, where the company's new MK-30 drones deliver dozens of packages a day to customers  —  A recent visit to the company's overhauled drone delivery program in Arizona left me impressed by the drones, but skeptical that the public will welcome them.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is working on a smart doorbell system with advanced facial recognition that can wirelessly connect and unlock third-party smart locks  —  Also: Company ramps up work on turning AirPods into a health device.

Bloomberg: Preqin data: Southeast Asia's AI startups raised just $1.7B across 122 deals so far in 2024, out of ~$20B across 1,845 deals for the whole Asia-Pacific region  —  - While global tech expands in the region, its startups languish  — Its homegrown tech industry risks falling behind in AI

Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times: How Britannica survived the Wikipedia era by changing itself into a maker of education software and AI agents, as it reportedly weighs an IPO at a $1B valuation  —  The encyclopedia maker could have become a casualty of the Wikipedia era.  But it has remade itself into a digital learning giant that is weighing going...

Esha Dey / Bloomberg: Tesla's shares are up 73% since Election Day, as several analysts see the Trump administration easing rules for self-driving tech, benefiting Tesla's ambitions  —  - Stock was down 2% before election, gains 73% since Trump's win  — ‘Hard to imagine an upside’ from here: Wisdomtree's Gannatti

Wall Street Journal: Gina Raimondo says holding back China in the chips race is a “fool's errand”, and investment, more than export controls, will keep US ahead of Beijing  —  Investment, more than export controls, will keep the U.S. ahead of Beijing, Commerce secretary says

Satviki Sanjay / Bloomberg: A look at India's quick food delivery market as Swiggy and Zomato enter the sector; report: online food delivery market in India to reach $15B by March 2029  —  - Zomato, Swiggy among those who now have quick food delivery  — Some social media users have voiced concerns on food quality

Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media: Researchers at Anthropic, Oxford, Stanford, and MATS create Best-of-N Jailbreaking, a black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities  —  Anthropic created an AI jailbreaking algorithm that keeps tweaking prompts until it gets a harmful response.

Reuters: Dealogic data: the global M&A activity in the tech sector in 2024 jumped 20%+ YoY to $534B, accounting for the largest share of the total $3.45T in M&A activity  —  Bankers expect global deal volumes to surpass $4 trillion next year, the highest in four years, buoyed …

Wency Chen / South China Morning Post: Report: Alibaba splits the team developing apps for its AI chatbot Qianwen from the team that builds its LLM, following similar moves by ByteDance and Baidu  —  It follows similar moves by ByteDance and Baidu, which have divided their AI research and application teams to tackle a competitive market

Bloomberg: Sources: Intel shortlists buyout firms for the next round of bidding for its Altera unit, including Francisco Partners, Silver Lake, and Lattice Semiconductor  —  - Company asks suitors to submit formalized bids by late January  — Intel is without a permanent CEO after Pat Gelsinger ousted

Bloomberg: Google calls DOJ's proposed Chrome sale “extreme” and at odds with the law, urging the judge to take caution to avoid stifling innovation and future investment  —  - Justice Department seeking forced sale in antitrust case  — DC federal court to hold hearing on remedy proposals in April

Jody Godoy / Reuters: As part of its remedies proposal, Google would make its Android agreements with OEMs non-exclusive and allow them to unbundle Play Store from Chrome and Search  —  Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google proposed on Friday a loosening of its agreements with Apple (AAPL.O) and others to set Google …

Lee-Anne Mulholland / The Keyword: Google files its proposed remedies in the DOJ's search antitrust lawsuit, including letting browser companies have multiple default agreements across platforms  —  We will appeal the Court's decision but the process requires that we first file proposed remedies.  This is a case about contracts.

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal: Sources: OpenAI's GPT-5, codenamed Orion, is behind schedule and faces technical hurdles, including high computing costs and limited high-quality training data  —  OpenAI has run into problem after problem on its new artificial-intelligence project, code-named Orion

TrendForce: Global shipments of VR and MR headsets are expected to reach ~9.6M units in 2024, up 8.8% YoY; Meta remains the global leader with a 73% market share  —  TrendForce's latest report estimates that global shipments of VR and MR headsets are expected to reach approximately 9.6 million units in 2024, representing a YoY increase of 8.8%.

Joseph Menn / Washington Post: A US judge finds NSO Group liable for exploiting a bug in WhatsApp to spy on 1,400 users and that WhatsApp is entitled to sanctions against NSO  —  Israel-based maker of Pegasus program loses five-year-old landmark case.  —  Messaging giant WhatsApp won a landmark ruling Friday …

David Scheer / Bloomberg: Tai Mo Shan, part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agrees to pay $123M to settle SEC's claims it misled investors about the stability of TerraUSD  —  Tai Mo Shan Ltd., part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agreed to pay $123 million to settle a US regulator's claims it misled investors …