News Today

Techmeme Latest Headlines

AMD completes its $4.9B purchase of data center equipment designer ZT Systems, announced in August 2024, taking on its roughly 1,000 design engineers (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Amazon's AGI Lab unveils Nova Act, a general purpose AI agent to control a web browser and independently perform some simple actions, and a Nova Act SDK (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

How the Trump family took over World Liberty Financial, which raised $550M+ via governance tokens; the family has a claim on 75% of net revenues of token sales (Reuters)

Barclays, Monzo, Lloyds, and other major UK banks join Amazon, Google, Match, Meta, BT, and Three in committing to live data sharing in a UK fraud clampdown (Georgina Quach/Financial Times)

Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff focusing on drug discovery, raised $600M led by Thrive to research treatments, including for cancer and immune disorders (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Eric and Donald Trump Jr.'s American Data Centers plans to merge with Hut 8's American Bitcoin and take a 20% stake, aiming to create the world's largest miner (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

TSMC says its Kaohsiung plant in Taiwan is set to begin 2nm wafer volume production in H2 2025, reaffirming its commitment to Taiwan during its US expansion (Reuters)

Nokia and Amazon settle a long-running, global patent dispute over Amazon using Nokia's video tech in Prime Video and its devices, without disclosing the terms (Karin Matussek/Bloomberg)

An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protg confirmed by the Senate on March 25, on US plans to counter Beijing on AI (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

PumpSwap, a new DEX launched by Pump.fun's creators, processed $2.43B in cumulative trading volume after just 10 days, shaking up the Solana DEX ecosystem (Zack Abrams/The Block)

Nasdaq-listed Chinese self-driving company WeRide, which reported a ~$260M loss in 2023 and a ~$344M loss in 2024, warns profitability is "difficult to predict" (Financial Times)

Huawei reports FY 2024 revenue up 22.4% YoY to ~$118.2B, near its ~$123B record in 2020, net profit down 28% YoY to ~$8.63B, and R&D spend rising to ~$25B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Memecoins attempting to profit from a man's suicide highlight Pump.fun's extreme lack of boundaries; one of the memecoins soared past $2M in total value (Kevin T. Dugan/Wall Street Journal)

France's antitrust regulator fines Apple '150M after a lengthy investigation into how iOS asks to collect user data under ATT and the impact on advertisers (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

Chinese AI startup Zhipu, which secured three rounds of government-backed funding in March 2025, launches a free AI agent, intensifying the domestic AI race (Reuters)

An analysis finds 170+ violent vigilante attacks since 2023 by US "pedophile hunters", whose online content has been amplified by websites like Kick and Locals (New York Times)

Chinese startup Manus, whose AI agent service is still in the beta testing phase, announces a $39/month Manus Starter plan and an upgraded $199/month Pro tier (Bloomberg)

A look at the race between China and the US to build truly useful humanoid robots, as China lists "embodied" AI as a priority for a $138B state investment fund (Wall Street Journal)

Japan earmarks up to ~$5.4B in additional aid for chipmaker Rapidus, which aims to begin mass production of 2nm chips in 2027, a highly ambitious target (Bloomberg)

Report: 79% of 475 AI experts believe current public perceptions of AI do not match R&D realities, while 76% said scaling current approaches will not yield AGI (Isaac Schultz/Gizmodo)

South Korea-based Wrtn, a free-to-use AI platform with 5M+ users aggregating LLMs like GPT-4, Stable Diffusion 3, and Claude 3, raised a ~$56M extension round (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

After Trump signed an EO to end the government's DEI programs, tech firms like Google are rebranding DEI efforts, using terms like "learning" or "hiring" (CNBC)

Sources: Foxconn plans to assemble 25M to 30M iPhones in India in 2025, up from ~12M in 2024, and is conducting production trials at its new Bengaluru plant (Dia Rekhi/The Economic Times)

Sources detail tensions between Apple and Elon Musk's SpaceX over efforts to expand satellite cellphone services (Wall Street Journal)

Global foldable smartphone shipments increased by just 2.9% YoY in 2024, and shipments are expected to decline by about 4% YoY in 2025 (Counterpoint Research)

Many LinkedIn users put part-time job-level effort to maintain their pages; LinkedIn: 85% of FTSE 100 CEOs have a presence on the platform, up from 12% in 2023 (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

Apple's current enterprise offerings are built for single machines and have complex virtualization rules, saddling high-end users with inefficient remote setups (Ernie Smith/Tedium)

Ethereum is struggling to keep the interest of investors and developers, having fallen out of step in an industry transformed by the embrace of Donald Trump (Bloomberg)

Google announces it is rolling out Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental to all Gemini users, after initially launching it for Gemini Advanced subscribers on March 25 (Abner Li/9to5Google)

A look at the RainbowEx crypto Ponzi scheme, which ensnared 16,000 people in San Pedro, Argentina; different versions of the scam have emerged around the world (New York Times)

Straiker, which develops tech for securing enterprise AI applications, emerges from stealth with a $21M Series A from Lightspeed and Bain Capital (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

Sources: Apple is working on a major Health app revamp and an AI doctor service, planned for H1 2026, and M5 updates for the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro this year (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Cambridge, UK-based Camgraphic, which is developing graphene-based photonics chips for AI, HPC, autonomous cars, and other applications, raised a '25M Series A (Maya Dharampal-Hornby/Sifted)

As ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli-style images going viral sparks a debate, AI may not devalue human-created art and may even elevate it by fueling a creation economy (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

A look at inZOI, a new life simulation game by South Korean studio Krafton that aims to appeal to players in Asia, where The Sims never gained popularity (Bloomberg)

Dyna Robotics, which is building AI-powered robots to help businesses automate repetitive tasks like chopping food, emerged from stealth with a $23.5M seed (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)

Bernstein: AI could erode India's $350B services export sector as AI replaces entry-level engineers at "higher precision and speed" at a fraction of the cost (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

How Klarna's Walmart deal ahead of its IPO put long-simmering tensions between Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Affirm CEO Max Levchin on public display (Bloomberg)

Waterloo, Ontario-based logistics software company Descartes Systems Group acquires 3Gtms, an Ohio-based transportation software vendor, for $115M in cash (Alex Riehl/BetaKit)

NYC-based Navina, which has developed an AI copilot for clinicians, raised a $55M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, taking its total funding to $100M (Emma Beavins/Fierce Healthcare)

PE firm Clearlake agrees to acquire and take private Dun & Bradstreet, one of Wall Street's oldest data and analytics providers, for $7.7B including debt (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)

Marketing executives say big brands are allocating small amounts of their ad budget to X, seeking to avoid being perceived as boycotting Elon Musk's platform (Financial Times)

Prolific fintech VC and QED Investors co-founder Frank Rotman says he will become partner emeritus by the end of 2025 and focus on launching his own startups (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

Chinese chip equipment manufacturer SiCarrier debuted ~30 "domestically controllable" products at the Semicon China show, as China pushes for chip self-reliance (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)

Fleetio, which develops vehicle fleet management software, raised a $450M+ Series D and acquired Auto Integrate in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.5B+ (PYMNTS.com)

Berlin-based Amboss, which makes study guide apps for medical students and online databases for clinicians, raised '240M, sources say at an '800M+ valuation (Bloomberg)

A look at the new, open-source Model Context Protocol for connecting LLMs to data sources and why its success depends on overcoming middleware challenges (Steven Sinofsky/Hardcore Software)

How AI tools are causing problems and sowing distrust in both job hunting and hiring; a Polish cybersecurity startup says it almost hired a deepfake candidate (Taylor Telford/Washington Post)

Uber and DoorDash are pressing GOP lawmakers to include independent contractors who drive rideshare vehicles and deliver food in Trump's no-tax-on-tips proposal (Richard Rubin/Wall Street Journal)

A look at drone delivery startup Zipline, which has raised $500M+, made 1.4M+ deliveries in seven countries, and delivers packages for Walmart in two US cities (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

Kalshi sues Nevada's gaming regulators to keep offering event contracts to bet on sports and politics, citing federal regulation by the US CFTC (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

A look at AI-generated fake movie trailers on YouTube; WBD, Paramount, and Sony have earned ad revenue from some videos instead of defending their copyright (Jake Kanter/Deadline)

Hamish McKenzie says Substack is partnering with FIRE to support "writers residing lawfully" in the US targeted by the government for their writing (Hamish McKenzie/@hamishmckenzie)

A book excerpt details how the OpenAI board ousted Sam Altman with help from Mira Murati, who provided examples of his alleged lies and other toxic behavior (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

Replit CEO Amjad Masad says learning to code is a waste of time, citing Dario Amodei's prediction that AI may generate essentially all code by next year (Arfa Javaid/Financial Express)

Sources: TSMC, Intel, and other chipmakers have slowed their expansions in Japan and Malaysia due to lackluster demand for older chips and tariff uncertainties (Nikkei Asia)

US tech companies are racing to establish more and bigger offshore campuses in India, fully staffed with highly skilled professionals in cities like Bengaluru (New York Times)

World History Encyclopedia, the second most visited history site, says its traffic fell 25% in Nov. 2024 after AI search tools began presenting its information (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)

India's e-commerce market grew 10%-12% YoY to ~$60B in GMV in 2024, versus historical rates of over 20%, with 270M+ people shopping online, second only to China (Bain)

Bain and Flipkart report: quick commerce made up over two-thirds of India's e-grocery orders in 2024, with GMV rising nearly five times to $6B-$7B from 2022 (Ashwin Manikandan/Reuters)

NYC-based Rain, which issues credit cards that let customers settle payments in stablecoins, raised $24.5M led by Norwest, taking its total funding to $30.5M (Catherine McGrath/Fortune)

Brooklyn-based Underdog, a fantasy sports and sports betting app, raised $70M in a first Series C tranche at a $1.23B valuation from Spark Capital (Dan Primack/Axios)

Gensol's troubles cast doubt on the future of Indian EV ride-hailing firm BluSmart, founded by Gensol's promoters; BluSmart has raised $180M in debt and equity (Debarghya Sil/Inc42 Media)

FTX tells a US bankruptcy judge it will make the first payment to its main creditors on May 30 using the $11.4B cash hoard it has collected since shutting down (Steven Church/Bloomberg)

Adalytics: DoubleVerify, IAS, and Human Security, paid by advertisers to detect bots, regularly miss such traffic; DoubleVerify missed 21% of bot visits (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

In the latest Windows 11 preview build, Microsoft removed the "bypassnro" command, which let users skip signing into a Microsoft Account when installing Windows (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

A US judge rejects Musk's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming he defrauded ex-Twitter shareholders by delaying the disclosure of his initial Twitter investment (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Source: the new combined entity housing xAI and X is called XAI Holdings and is valued at more than $100B, not including debt (Bloomberg)

Filing: Intel says three board members will not stand for reelection at its 2025 annual meeting, shrinking the size of the board to 11 members (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

Source: hackers broke into Oracle's Cerner servers sometime after January 22 and stole patient data to extort US medical providers; the FBI is investigating (Bloomberg)

Sources: Blackstone is evaluating a small minority investment in TikTok's US operations, joining the front-running bid by ByteDance's non-Chinese shareholders (Reuters)

Elon Musk says xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal valuing xAI at $80B and X at $33B; xAI was reportedly in talks to raise funds in February at a $75B valuation (CNBC)

@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt). Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models

Sources: ScaleAI is seeking a valuation as high as $25B in a potential tender offer; it was last valued at $13.8B in a $1B Series F round led by Accel in 2024 (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Sources: OpenAI is finalizing a $40B round led by SoftBank, receiving $10B initially and another $30B by 2025's end if it restructures into a for-profit company (Wall Street Journal)

Reddit shares are down 50% from a February high, after its Q4 earnings report showed its traffic took a hit from a change in Google's search algorithm (Carmen Reinicke/Bloomberg)

Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, who was OpenAI's interim CEO in 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, launches Softmax, a startup focused on AI alignment (Ashlee Vance/Core Memory)

A jury finds Frank founder Charlie Javice guilty of defrauding JPMorgan Chase by falsifying Frank user numbers; the charges carry a maximum sentence of 30 years (Luisa Beltran/Fortune)

Google will pay $100M in cash to settle a 2011 lawsuit accusing the company of charging for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas the advertisers targeted (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

The US FDIC says banks can engage in cryptocurrency and other legally permitted activities without prior regulatory approval if they manage risks appropriately (Pete Schroeder/Reuters)

Infotech Headlines Today
[Mon-31-Mar-2025]

Weekly Recap: Chrome 0-Day, IngressNightmare, Solar Bugs, DNS Tactics, and More - Hackers News

10 Gift cards to buy at Walgreens - Techpoint

3 easy ways to check your Sephora gift card balance - Techpoint

4 reasons I'm drifting away from Google One - Pocket Lint

5 Impactful AWS Vulnerabilities You're Responsible For - Hackers News

6 best AI for Python coding - Techpoint

7 Best Electric Toothbrushes, Tested and Reviewed (2025) - Wired

A look at the race between China and the US to build truly useful humanoid robots, as China lists "embodied" AI as a priority for a $138B state investment fund (Wall Street Journal) - Techmeme

Actis-Led Consortium Acquires Swiftnet to Strengthen South Africa's Digital Infrastructure - Itnewsafrica

After Trump signed an EO to end the government's DEI programs, tech firms like Google are rebranding DEI efforts, using terms like "learning" or "hiring" (CNBC) - Techmeme

Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser - Techcrunch

Amazon's AGI Lab Reveals Its First Work: Advanced AI Agents - Wired

An AI Image Generator's Exposed Database Reveals What People Really Used It For - Wired

An analysis finds 170+ violent vigilante attacks since 2023 by US "pedophile hunters", whose online content has been amplified by websites like Kick and Locals (New York Times) - Techmeme

An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protg confirmed by the Senate on March 25, on US plans to counter Beijing on AI (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) - Techmeme

Apple is reportedly on track to launch the M5 iPad Pro and MacBook Pro later this year - Engadget

Apple reportedly revamping Health app to add an AI coach - Techcrunch

Apple's current enterprise offerings are built for single machines and have complex virtualization rules, saddling high-end users with inefficient remote setups (Ernie Smith/Tedium) - Techmeme

As Microsoft Turns 50, Four Employees Remember Its Early Days - Slashdot

Barclays, Monzo, Lloyds, and other major UK banks join Amazon, Google, Match, Meta, BT, and Three in committing to live data sharing in a UK fraud clampdown (Georgina Quach/Financial Times) - Techmeme

Benin and Senegal Experience Highest Growth in African Internet Resilience - Itnewsafrica

Best AI for College students in 2025 - Techpoint

Best AI for Lawyers in 2025 - Techpoint

Best AI tools for content creation - Techpoint

Best computers for AI tasks in 2025 - Techpoint

Bloomberg's AI-Generated News Summaries Had At Least 36 Errors Since January - Slashdot

California Has 48% More EV Chargers Than Gas Nozzles - Slashdot

Carluex Pro+ review: wireless convenience - Pocket Lint

ChatGPT's Projects Feature Brings Order to Your AI Chaos - Wired

China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories - Slashdot

Chinese AI startup Zhipu, which secured three rounds of government-backed funding in March 2025, launches a free AI agent, intensifying the domestic AI race (Reuters) - Techmeme

Chinese startup Manus, whose AI agent service is still in the beta testing phase, announces a $39/month Manus Starter plan and an upgraded $199/month Pro tier (Bloomberg) - Techmeme

Copilot Can't Beat a 2013 'TouchDevelop' Code Generation Demo for Windows Phone - Slashdot

Despite crypto dominance, Nigeria businesses missed out on crypto payment adoption in 2024 - Technext

Elon Musk's Neuralink to implant brain chip that treats blindness for the first time in 2025 - Technext

Eric and Donald Trump Jr.'s American Data Centers plans to merge with Hut 8's American Bitcoin and take a 20% stake, aiming to create the world's largest miner (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal) - Techmeme

France's antitrust regulator fines Apple '150M after a lengthy investigation into how iOS asks to collect user data under ATT and the impact on advertisers (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) - Techmeme

Global foldable smartphone shipments increased by just 2.9% YoY in 2024, and shipments are expected to decline by about 4% YoY in 2025 (Counterpoint Research) - Techmeme

Google introduces AI-powered weather forecasts on Search across Africa - Technext

Google Sunsets Two Devices From Its Nest Smart Home Product Line - Slashdot

Has the Decline of Knowledge Worker Jobs Begun - Slashdot

Here's why you should use Stage Manager on your iPad instead of split-screen - Pocket Lint

How Rust Finally Got a Specification - Thanks to a Consultancy's Open-Source Donation - Slashdot

How the Trump family took over World Liberty Financial, which raised $550M+ via governance tokens; the family has a claim on 75% of net revenues of token sales (Reuters) - Techmeme

How to check Starbucks gift card balance - Techpoint

How to check your Sephora gift card balance quickly and easily - Techpoint

How to check your Subway gift card balance quickly and easily - Techpoint

How to record a call on iPhone - Pocket Lint

HTTPS Certificate Industry Adopts New Security Requirements - Slashdot

Huawei reports FY 2024 revenue up 22.4% YoY to ~$118.2B, near its ~$123B record in 2020, net profit down 28% YoY to ~$8.63B, and R&D spend rising to ~$25B (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) - Techmeme

IPO-bound Chime hopes to boost growth by paying higher interest rates - Techcrunch

Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinoff focusing on drug discovery, raised $600M led by Thrive to research treatments, including for cancer and immune disorders (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times) - Techmeme

Japan earmarks up to ~$5.4B in additional aid for chipmaker Rapidus, which aims to begin mass production of 2nm chips in 2027, a highly ambitious target (Bloomberg) - Techmeme

Linus Torvalds Gently Criticizes Build-Slowing Testing Code Left in Linux 6.15-rc1 - Slashdot

Many LinkedIn users put part-time job-level effort to maintain their pages; LinkedIn: 85% of FTSE 100 CEOs have a presence on the platform, up from 12% in 2023 (Bethan Staton/Financial Times) - Techmeme

Memecoins attempting to profit from a man's suicide highlight Pump.fun's extreme lack of boundaries; one of the memecoins soared past $2M in total value (Kevin T. Dugan/Wall Street Journal) - Techmeme

Mercurie wants to help African businesses pay for subscriptions in one place - Techpoint

Microsoft Announces 'Hyperlight Wasm': Speedy VM-Based Security at Scale with a WebAssembly Runtime - Slashdot

Microsoft Attempts To Close Local Account Windows 11 Setup Loophole - Slashdot