~techmeme | Bookmarks (1028)

Mohar Chatterjee / Politico: OpenAI is tripling the size of its DC policy team to 12 and beefing up its lobbying as it tries to promote a sweeping plan for cheaper energy to data centers  —  The AI industry wants Trump's Washington to embrace it as a bulwark against China.  OpenAI is trying to lead the pack.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: DeepSeek-V3 sometimes identifies itself as ChatGPT when asked which model it is; some speculate that its training datasets may contain text generated by ChatGPT  —  Earlier this week, DeepSeek, a well-funded Chinese AI lab, released an “open” AI model that beats many rivals on popular benchmarks.

Natasha Mascarenhas / The Information: Bookkeeping startup Bench, which raised $100M+ including from Shopify, closes down effective immediately; several employees say Bench also laid off staff  —  Bench, a Vancouver, Canada-based bookkeeping startup that had raised more than $100 million from well-known venture capital firms …

Todd Spangler / Variety: Eight free-speech groups, including the EFF, and three members of Congress file briefs with SCOTUS in support of TikTok's appeal against the divest-or-ban law  —  Groups alleging China's government has engaged in human-rights violations argue U.S. Constitution does not protect TikTok as “an unregistered foreign agent”

Reuters: Experts say hackers compromised several companies' Chrome browser extensions, including Cyberhaven's, in a series of intrusions dating back to mid-December  —  Hackers have compromised several different companies' Chrome browser extensions in a series of intrusions dating back to mid-December …

Greg Otto / CyberScoop: The US says it has identified a ninth telecom company impacted by the Salt Typhoon hacks, and the number of individuals directly impacted is “less than 100”  —  In an update Friday, the White House says nine telecom companies were impacted by the Chinese espionage effort.  —  Learn more.

Shivaune Field / Forbes Australia: Sydney-based Sitemate, which offers no-code software tools for industries like infrastructure and utilities, raised a AU$27.5M Series A at a ~AU$150M valuation  —  Sydney-founded Sitemate is making an impact on solar renewable sites in New Zealand, nuclear projects in Switzerland, and electric vehicle production in Detroit.

Financial Times: Meta expects AI-generated characters to “generate and share content” and “over time, exist on our platforms”, similarly to regular accounts  —  US tech group is rolling out a range of artificial intelligence tools to drive engagement

New York Times: Japan Airlines halts ticket sales after a cyberattack hit its network equipment, causing delays to more than 40 flights and says flight safety was not impacted  —  The airline also temporarily stopped selling tickets for flights departing Thursday, but said that there was no impact on flight safety.

Richard Deitsch / New York Times: Netflix's first livestream of NFL games avoided major buffering and freezing issues that plagued the Tyson-Paul fight for the most part, after early glitches  —  If you believe in omens, Netflix appeared to be in for a very long day on Wednesday.  As the streaming giant began …

J. Clara Chan / Wired: A look at Toontown Rewritten, an unofficial recreation of Disney's Toontown Online game that shut down in 2013; Toontown Rewritten now has 10K DAUs and 50K MAUs  —  Thanks to a bunch of game-makers who were still teens when Toontown Online disappeared, the beloved online world lives on as Toontown Rewritten.

Politico: Examining Biden's tech legacy and the CHIPS Act, as the White House says $446B has been announced for chips and electronics manufacturing since he took office  —  President Joe Biden had just a single term to try to transform the nation's approach to energy, climate change, technology and jobs.

Qwen: Alibaba's Qwen unveils QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on “enhancing visual reasoning capabilities”, built upon Qwen2-VL-72B  —  Language and vision intertwine in the human mind, shaping how we perceive and understand the world around us.

Ashley Capoot / CNBC: Analysis: roughly two-thirds of 39 public digital health companies have lost value in 2024, while the Nasdaq is up 32%  —  If the Covid era marked a boom time for digital health companies, 2024 was the reckoning.  —  In a year that saw the Nasdaq jump 32%, surpassing 20,000 for the first time this month …

The Block: Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week; it averaged just $2.5B per day in November 2024  —  - The weekly total is 124% higher than the previous week's total.  — The following is an excerpt from The Block's Data and Insights newsletter.

Gleb Bryanski / Reuters: Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions  —  Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments following legislative changes …

Tharin Pillay / Time: A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench  —  Despite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable of—at least, not at first.

Bloomberg: Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+  —  - Fair Trade Commission concerned deal would limit competition  — Uber had sought Delivery Hero's Foodpanda unit in Taiwan

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis: Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and total cost of ownership, but software bugs hold it back  —  Intro  —  SemiAnalysis has been on a five-month long quest to settle the reality of MI300X.  In theory, the MI300X …

Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg: Kaiko: the share of BTC-USD trades in US market hours has now climbed to ~53% from 40% in 2021, with crypto liquidity back at levels seen before FTX's collapse  —  - Bitcoin trading versus dollar is more concentrated in US hours  — Open interest in CME futures for Bitcoin, Ether scaled records

Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu / Financial Times: Opensignal ranks Japan #1 in G7 mobile reliability experience between July 1 and September 28, followed by France, Germany, the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK  —  Research highlights impact of poor network performance on consumers  —  Mobile users in the UK had the least reliable experience …

Suvashree Ghosh / Bloomberg: Singapore issued 13 crypto licenses in 2024, pulling ahead of Hong Kong, where authorities have been more cautious, in the race to become a regional crypto hub  —  - Both cities have tried to attract crypto firms to their shores  — Hong Kong authorities have been cautious handing out permits

Ann Cao / South China Morning Post: Ant splits Alipay into the Digital Payment Business Group focused on new payment products, and the Alipay Business Group focused on user growth and monetization  —  The company will adopt a ‘rotating presidential system’ for the two new businesses, with each unit president serving a six-month term

Niket Nishant / Reuters: Fiserv to acquire Toronto-based Payfare, which lets gig workers on platforms like Uber access their wages early, for $140M, expected to close in H1 2025  —  U.S. fintech firm Fiserv (FI.N) will buy Canada's Payfare (PAY.TO) in a C$201.5 million ($140 million) deal as it looks …