~techmeme | Bookmarks (997)

Wall Street Journal: Blackstone invests $300M in DDN, which helps organizations store and analyze large amounts of data more efficiently for AI and HPC, at a $5B valuation  —  The private-equity firm's deal values California-based DDN at $5 billion  —  Blackstone is investing in a company that helps organizations …

Vince Dioquino / Decrypt: Court filing: the US government got final approval in the Northern District of California to liquidate 69,370 BTC, worth $6.5B, seized in its Silk Road probe  —  The ruling does not ensure immediate liquidation of the seized Bitcoin, as federal asset forfeiture requires several administrative processes.

Julian Chokkattu / Wired: A look at AI-enabled wearables like Bee AI and Omi, with embedded always-on microphones to record conversations around users and provide actionable insights  —  The latest crop of AI-enabled wearables like Bee AI and Omi listen to your conversations to help organize your life.

Taylor Nicole Rogers / Financial Times: Analysts say that contract negotiations between US dockworkers and the shipping industry over automation could help provide a template for agreements nationwide  —  As automation becomes a reality everywhere from retail warehouses to restaurant kitchens, the use of robots is increasingly controversial

Peter Eavis / New York Times: US dockworkers and shipping industry officials reach a tentative labor agreement, overcoming differences over the introduction of automated machinery at ports  —  Dockworkers and employers on the East and Gulf Coasts had until Jan. 15 to reach a new agreement that settled differences over automation.

Bloomberg: Sources: SoftBank and its majority-owned Arm are weighing acquiring Oracle-backed Ampere, which designs ARM-based server CPUs; Ampere is exploring its options  —  Talks could still fall apart, the people cautioned.  It's also possible Ampere could end up being bought by another suitor.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Microsoft is reverting to an older DALL-E 3 model version for Bing Image Creator, after the latest version, codenamed PR16, got many complaints on X and Reddit  —  Ahead of the holidays, Microsoft said it was upgrading the AI model behind Bing Image Creator, the AI-powered image editing tool built into the company's Bing search engine.

Mari Yamaguchi / Associated Press: Japan says Chinese hacking group MirrorFace is linked to 200+ cyberattacks from 2019 to 2024 targeting the country's national security and advanced tech data  —  Japan on Wednesday linked more than 200 cyberattacks over the past five years targeting the country's national security …

Ben Lang / Road to VR: Infinite Reality, which is building an engine for creating immersive web content, says it has raised $3B from an unnamed private investor at a $12.25B valuation  —  Infinite Reality, a company building an engine for creating immersive web content underpinned with WebXR support …

Abner Li / 9to5Google: Google rolls out Daily Listen, which uses AI to generate a five-minute personalized audio overview of stories and topics that a user follows, to its mobile app  —  Google is kicking off a new experiment in Search Labs today called “Daily Listen.”  It's a bit like NotebookLM's Audio Overviews, while there are also podcast parallels.

Richard Lawler / The Verge: Adam Mosseri says Meta is adding political content recommendations to Instagram and Threads; Threads' political content control setting will have three options  —  It's been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted to blocking recommendations of “political” content from accounts …

Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk: Do Kwon's criminal fraud trial in the US is scheduled for January 2026; prosecutors expect challenges accessing encrypted devices and translating communications  —  NEW YORK, NY — Terraform Labs co-founder and former CEO Do Kwon's criminal fraud trial in the U.S. has been tentatively scheduled …

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says Meta's moderation changes are “deeply troubling”, and Mastodon will take action on Threads accounts violating Mastodon's policies  —  Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has spoken out about the significant moderation changes announced by Meta on Tuesday …

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: Meta revamping its content moderation systems with Community Notes is good, but Zuckerberg pretending it's about free speech is bad, and the timing is stupid  —  from the misinformation-about-disinformation dept  —  When the NY Times declared in September that “Mark Zuckerberg is Done With Politics …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Microsoft open sources its 14B-parameter AI model Phi-4 and its weights, available on Hugging Face under an MIT License, after releasing it in December 2024  —  Even as its big investment partner OpenAI continues to announce more powerful reasoning models such as the latest o3 series, Microsoft is not sitting idly by.

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times: Sources: Apple plans to expand Apple News in more countries and considered building locally focused news coverage in the UK; Apple News has 125M monthly users  —  Tech group now a force in driving revenues for publishers in US, UK, Canada and Australia  —  Unlock the Editor's Digest for free

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia announces early access to Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX, enabling smarter autonomous machines with generative AI, via APIs for select devs like Accenture  —  Nvidia announced early access for Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX software to enable smarter autonomous machines with generative AI.

Jay Peters / The Verge: Nvidia updates its Autonomous Game Characters, says the NPCs can “perceive, plan, and act like human players” in games like PUBG, with “small language models”  —  Nvidia has spent the last two years showing off its digital “ACE” characters that can have in-game conversations with you using generative AI.

Will Knight / Wired: Jensen Huang says Nvidia's Cosmos models for humanoids were trained on 20M hours of real footage of “humans walking, hands moving, manipulating things”  —  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the new family of foundational AI models was trained on 20 million hours of “humans walking; hands moving, manipulating things.”

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia unveils Mega, an “Omniverse Blueprint” for developing, testing, and optimizing physical AI and robot fleets at scale in a digital twin before deployment  —  Nvidia unveils Mega Omniverse blueprint for building industrial robot fleet digital twins, as part of a CES 2025 keynote speech by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: Toyota says its next-gen vehicles will have automated driving powered by Nvidia's Drive AGX Orin supercomputer and safety-focused operating system, DriveOS  —  Toyota announced at CES 2025 that its next-generation vehicles will have automated driving capabilities powered …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Nvidia shares Cosmos World Foundation Models, a family of world models that can generate “physics-aware” videos, available from Hugging Face and Nvidia's API  —  Nvidia is getting into world models — AI models that take inspiration from the mental models of the world that humans develop naturally.

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: Nvidia announces the Llama Nemotron and Cosmos Nemotron family of AI models to advance agentic AI, available in Nano, Super, and Ultra sizes on Hugging Face  —  Nvidia announced Nemotron Model Families to advance agentic AI as part of its bevy of AI announcements at CES 2025 today.

Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Nvidia says the RTX 5090 has 92B transistors, 4,000 AI TOPS, and GDDR7 memory, with support for next-gen DLSS 4, which can now generate multiple frames at once  —  As anticipated, Nvidia Monday kicked off its CES 2025 keynote by unveiling the new RTX Blackwell family of GPUs.