~techmeme | Bookmarks (1030)

MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: Trump signs an EO to create a crypto working group led by David Sacks to consider a national digital asset stockpile “potentially derived” from seized crypto  —  President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to promote the advancement of cryptocurrencies in the U.S …

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times: Neko Health, a startup co-founded by Daniel Ek that offers AI-based full-body scans, has raised $260M led by Lightspeed, sources say at a $1.7B valuation  —  Spotify founder's body-scanning start-up valued at $1.7bn in new funding round  —  Daniel Ek's body-scanning start-up Neko Health …

Song Jung-a / Financial Times: SK Hynix's Q4 operating profit grew over 20x YoY to ~$5.6B, beating Samsung's for first time, with HBM chips accounting for 40% of its total DRAM chip revenue  —  South Korean chipmaker expects sales of high-bandwidth memory products to more than double this year

Reuters: Saudi digital security firm Elm Company agrees to acquire business services firm Thiqah from Saudi Arabia's PIF, which is also Elm's majority owner, for $906M  —  Saudi Arabian digital security firm Elm Company (7203.SE) said on Wednesday that it had agreed to acquire business services firm Thiqah …

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: An interview with Pinterest CEO Bill Ready on why his company is backing US state laws to restrict cellphone use in classrooms  —  The photo-sharing app is backing state laws that restrict cellphone use in classrooms amid a political reckoning over youth safety online.

Reuters: ByteDance launches Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgraded AI model, claiming it outperforms OpenAI's o1 in AIME benchmarks, joining DeepSeek in China's AI reasoning push  —  TikTok owner ByteDance on Wednesday released an update to its flagship AI model aimed at challenging Microsoft-backed OpenAI's …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Sensor Tower: consumer spending in 2024 on AI apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, and ByteDance's Doubao grew more than 200% YoY to nearly $1.1B  —  Demand for generative AI help drive consumer spending on apps to $150 billion globally in 2024, up 13% from the prior year.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Microsoft and OpenAI were arguing over Microsoft's ability to fulfill OpenAI's computing needs, in the months leading up to the Stargate announcement  —  The partnership that launched the AI boom has been strained by disagreements over computing resources

Dina Bass / Bloomberg: Microsoft was mentioned only as a technology partner in Stargate but the company is poised to benefit from the venture by offloading AI computing costs  —  - OpenAI-led venture lets Microsoft offload AI computing costs  — Software giant could still decide to invest more in future

Abner Li / 9to5Google: Google signs an agreement to acquire a part of the HTC VIVE engineering team in Taiwan for $250M in cash, aiming to “accelerate” Android XR development  —  To “accelerate” Android XR development, Google announced this evening that it “signed an agreement to welcome some of the HTC VIVE engineering team to Google.”

Kat Tenbarge / NBC News: Moderators for 50+ subreddits announce bans of X links in new posts and comments, with several citing Elon Musk's recent gesture that many saw as a Nazi salute  —  The cascade of link bans came after Musk made a hand gesture at a Monday rally that many compared to a Nazi salute, which many cited in their protests, among...

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: SK Hynix reports Q4 revenue up 75% YoY to a record ~$13.7B, a ~$5.6B net profit, and a ~$5.6B operating profit, in line with estimates, as HBM chip demand soars  —  - Its shares slide in Seoul after a 30% run-up this year  — Demand for high-end memory soaring on datacenter rollouts

Patrick G. Eddington / Cato Institute: A US district judge rules that the FBI's warrantless “backdoor” searches of FISA's Section 702 databases violate the Fourth Amendment  —  Generated with ElevenLabs AI technology.  —  Sometimes when “secret law” is involved—and that is always the case with the Foreign Intelligence …

The Information: Sources: Sam Altman told some colleagues that OpenAI and SoftBank will each commit $19B to Stargate, and OpenAI would effectively hold a 40% interest in the JV  —  OpenAI and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank will each commit $19 billion to fund a joint venture to develop data centers …

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Scale AI faces a lawsuit by six people who worked on its Outlier platform, claiming they were forced to write disturbing prompts about violence and abuse  —  Scale AI is facing its third lawsuit over alleged labor practices in just over a month, this time from workers claiming …

Bloomberg: An analysis of two years of episodes by nine prominent podcasters shows how they became mainstream sources for young men and rallied support for Trump's agenda  —  Podcasters including Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Logan Paul are mobilizing America's men to lean right.  An analysis of over 2,000 videos shows how.

Kenza Bryan / Financial Times: Microsoft to buy 3.5M carbon credits, estimated to be worth about $200M, from Re.green over 25 years to restore parts of Brazil's Amazon and Atlantic forests  —  Tech giant acquires carbon credits worth around $200mn, as energy usage surges due to generative artificial intelligence

Becky Bracken / Dark Reading: The Trump administration removed all advisory committee members within the DHS, including those in CISA and CSRB, which was investigating Salt Typhoon  —  In a letter sent today, the acting DHS secretary terminated membership to all advisory boards, including the Cyber Safety Review Board …

Financial Times: Sources: Google is investing over $1B more in Anthropic, which is also nearing a further $2B funding round from Lightspeed and other VCs at a ~$60B valuation  —  Artificial intelligence group closes in on $60bn valuation  —  Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1bn into OpenAI rival Anthropic …

Tsubasa Suruga / Nikkei Asia: DealStreetAsia: Southeast Asian startups raised $4.56B in 2024, down 42% YoY and falling to a fifth of a 2021 peak, as the number of deals fell 10% YoY to 633  —  SINGAPORE — Southeast Asia's startup funding in 2024 dropped for the third consecutive year, falling to a fifth of the peak it recorded in 2021 …

Bloomberg: An internal probe into SoftBank-backed eFishery, one of Indonesia's most prominent startups, finds the agritech company allegedly faked most of its 2024 sales  —  - EFishery board investigating startup's sales, profit numbers  — Indonesian firm has raised hundreds of millions of dollars

Gerrit De Vynck / Washington Post: Documents: Google gave Israel access to its latest AI tools from the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, directly assisting the Defense Ministry and the IDF  —  The company fulfilled requests from Israel's military for more access to AI tools, as it sought to compete with Amazon, documents obtained by The Post show.

James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review: Filing: OpenAI spent $1.76M on lobbying in 2024, up from 2023's $260K, with focus on the AI Advancement and Reliability Act and the Future of AI Innovation Act  —  OpenAI spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone …

Washington Post: Sources: a deep philosophical rift over how DOGE should operate helped spur Vivek Ramaswamy's exit, with Donald Trump's Jan. 20 EO embodying Elon Musk's vision  —  A deep philosophical rift between the two billionaire leaders of the “Department of Government Efficiency” left Musk to run the group.