~techmeme | Bookmarks (1045)

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: Amazon sues Washington state to limit the release of public records to The Washington Post about Jeff Bezos' Amazon Project Kuiper satellite facility in Seattle  —  In-depth Amazon coverage from the tech giant's hometown, including e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more.

Dylan Butts / CNBC: Samsung reports Q4 revenue up 12% YoY to ~$52.2B, vs. ~$51.9B est., operating profit up 132% YoY to ~$4.5B, vs. ~$4.7B est., and FY 2024 revenue of ~$207B  —  Samsung Electronics on Friday reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, though its operating profit dropped sharply …

Alkesh Sharma / The National: Apple Q1: revenue up 4% YoY to $52.6B in the Americas, up 11% to $33.9B in Europe, up 16% to $9B in Japan, and up 1% to $10.3B in the rest of Asia-Pacific  —  Apple's shares fell in after-market trading on Thursday after the company reported a decline in iPhone sales and a double-digit drop …

CNBC: Apple Services revenue reached an all-time high of $26.34B in Q1, up 14% YoY, beating estimates and helping lift the company's gross margin to a record 46.9%  —  Apple is struggling to squeeze growth out of its flagship iPhone unit, but its profit margin keeps going up thanks to a flourishing services business.

The Verge: Leaked all-hands: Mark Zuckerberg said Meta sold more than 1M Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2024, revealing sales figures for the first time  —  Mark Zuckerberg said the company needs to take the opportunity to ‘introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses.’

Ryan Knappenberger / Courthouse News Service: A US federal judge denied a motion by Apple to intervene as a defendant in the remedy trial of the DOJ vs. Google case, saying Apple's motion was untimely  —  U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Apple had waited too long to file their motion and granting the company's request …

Muyao Shen / Bloomberg: Crypto risk modeling firm Gauntlet estimates the $TRUMP memecoin has generated at least $11.4M in fees for entities linked to President Trump since its launch  —  - Official Trump cryptocurrency was launched before inauguration  — Token surged to more than $14 billion in value after its debut

Financial Times: OpenAI says it had seen some evidence that DeepSeek used “distillation” to train its open-source competitor by using outputs from OpenAI's proprietary models  —  White House AI tsar David Sacks raises possibility of alleged intellectual property theft

@newsfromgoogle: Google says “Sensitive is simply used in our internal systems for countries that see different official names in Maps”, after adding the US to that list  —  @CNBC This report is misleading. “Sensitive” is simply used in our internal systems for countries that see different official names in Maps (like a different name for a body of water) — that's all there is...

promptfoo: DeepSeek-R1 refuses to answer ~85% of 1,360 prompts on sensitive topics in China, but the restrictions can be bypassed via simple jailbreaking  —  DeepSeek-R1 is a blockbuster open-source model that is now at the top of the U.S. App Store.  —  As a Chinese company, DeepSeek is beholden to CCP policy.

Bloomberg: Sources: Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI's API was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to DeepSeek  —  Microsoft's security researchers in the fall observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount …

Jyoti Mann / Business Insider: In an internal memo, Andrew Bosworth says Meta's Reality Labs beat nearly all its sales and user targets for 2024, growing sales “>40% YoY overall”  —  - Meta's Reality Labs exceeded nearly all its 2024 sales and user targets, an internal memo said.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has been working with SpaceX and T-Mobile to add Starlink support in iOS 18.3; T-Mobile is testing with some users, only for texting initially  —  - T-Mobile begins pushing offering in limited beta test to users  —  Apple Inc. has been secretly working with SpaceX …

Cynthia Littleton / Variety: Sony names CFO Hiroki Totoki as CEO, succeeding Kenichiro Yoshida, and PlayStation co-CEO Hideaki Nishino as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, from April 1  —  The corporate shuffle, effective April 1, was approved late Tuesday by the electronics and entertainment giant's board of directors in Tokyo.

Jonathan Greig / The Record: MGM Resorts agrees to pay $45M to settle 14 class action lawsuits related to a data breach in 2019 and a ransomware attack the company experienced in 2023  —  MGM Resorts International agreed to pay $45 million to settle multiple class action lawsuits related to a data breach in 2019 …

Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg: David Sacks says there's “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models and I don't think OpenAI is very happy about this”  —  White House artificial intelligence czar David Sacks said there's “substantial evidence” …

Radhika Rajkumar / ZDNET: Block introduces an on-device, open-source AI agent called Goose, which allows developers to choose their preferred LLM to automate engineering tasks  —  Whether for developer needs or mundane tasks, the artificial intelligence (AI) tide appears to be turning in favor of open-source solutions.

Bloomberg: Sources: Arm China picks Chen Feng, an ex-executive at China-based chipmaker Rockchip Electronics, as its CEO; Liu Renchen and Eric Chen will resign as co-CEOs  —  - SoftBank-backed unit taps former Rockchip executive Chen Feng  — Chip designer's China arm navigating global tech protectionism

Vittoria Elliott / Wired: Sources: the highest ranks of the US Office of Personnel Management now include former employees of Elon Musk's companies, including xAI and the Boring Company  —  Sources tell WIRED that the OPM's top layers of management now include individuals linked to xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and Palantir.

Jennifer Elias / CNBC: Doc: Google's maps unit reclassified the US as a “sensitive country”, reserved for states with strict governments or border disputes, after Trump's map changes  —  Google's maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a “sensitive country,” a designation it reserves for states …

Reuters: Court filing: Indian digital news firms, including NDTV, Network18, and Hindustan Times, join a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, first filed by ANI in 2024  —  Digital news units of Indian billionaires Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, and other outlets like the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times …

Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi: DeepSeek's use of commodity, disconnected hardware and open-source design is enough of a shot at AI hyper scaling that it could be “the way things will go”  —  DeepSeek was certain to happen.  The only unknown was who was going to do it.  The choices were a startup or someone outside …

Bloomberg: Some Japanese stocks drop amid DeepSeek anxiety; Advantest, an Nvidia supplier of testing equipment, drops 7%+; datacenter cable company Fujikura drops 9%+  —  Japan's chip-related shares including Advantest Corp. tumbled as Chinese AI startup DeepSeek gained traction, raising concern the app …

Hayden Field / CNBC: Source: Perplexity AI revises its TikTok US merger proposal, which now allows for the US government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future IPO  —  Perplexity AI on Sunday revised the merger proposal it had submitted to TikTok parent ByteDance.  The proposal, which would create …