News Today

Techmeme Latest Headlines

Apple releases iOS 17.5 with cross-platform detection of unwanted tracking devices, EU app downloads from websites, Apple News+ features like offline mode, more (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

OpenAI opens its GPT Store to all users for free, including the ability to create custom GPTs (Wes Davis/The Verge)

Microsoft unveils Places, an AI-powered app to help employees on Outlook and Teams better coordinate in-office time, with Copilot integration coming this year (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Meta announces Travel Mode, in beta, for the Quest 2 and Quest 3 under "Experimental features", as a way to optimize the headset for use on moving vehicles (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

OpenAI unveils GPT-4o, a new flagship generative AI model that is faster and natively multimodal, rolling out for free to all ChatGPT users in the coming weeks (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Live stream of OpenAI's Spring Update event, where the company says it will demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates (OpenAI on YouTube)

As crypto flows into Tornado Cash despite sanctions, a look at the trial against its co-founder, who says he cannot prevent abuse of a system beyond his control (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Google says Project Starline, its 3D video conferencing platform first unveiled at 2021's Google I/O, will ship in 2025 with HP as a launch partner (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Sources: after shelling out billions to acquire US users, Temu is now focusing more on acquiring users in Europe and elsewhere, following TikTok's US issues (Wall Street Journal)

Q&A with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on running Adobe since 2007, new AI features, AI investments, Firefly, monetizing AI, copyright, AI misuse, PDFs, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Google Pixel 8a review: 120Hz OLED display, strong battery life, excellent cameras, and great value at $499+, but slow wireless charging and thick bezels (Sam Rutherford/Engadget)

Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute releases Falcon 2 11B, an open-source LLM to compete with Llama and Gemini that supports five European languages (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Sources: in recent months, China asked ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and others to cut back on Nvidia purchases in favor of chips made by local companies (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Sources: Intel is in advanced, exclusive talks for a deal in which Apollo Global Management would supply $11B+ to help the chip giant build a plant in Ireland (Wall Street Journal)

Isambard-AI, the UK's fastest supercomputer that cost 225M and ranks 129 on the Top500 list, comes online; the system will contain 5,448 Nvidia GH200 chips (Charlotte Trueman/DatacenterDynamics)

Top500: the Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer, not yet fully operational, came second behind the AMD-powered Frontier, but did come top in an AI benchmark (Paul Alcorn/Tom's Hardware)

Sources: Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi is finalizing plans to float on the London stock market this month in a deal that could value the company at up to 500M (The Sunday Times)

Squarespace says private equity firm Permira plans to take the company private in a $6.9B all-cash deal, or $44 per share, a 15.2% premium on Friday's close (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

The US NHTSA opens an investigation into Amazon's Zoox after two automated SUVs braked unexpectedly, both causing collisions with motorcyclists (Keith Laing/Bloomberg)

The US and China are set to hold their first high-level AI talks on May 14 in Geneva, as the governments seek to prevent disastrous accidents and unintended war (Eva Dou/Washington Post)

Christie's confirms eight auctions will proceed this week after a "technology security issue" on May 9 knocked its website offline, the second breach in a year (Zachary Small/New York Times)

An Australian judge refuses the eSafety commissioner's request to extend an order for X to hide a video of a religious leader's stabbing, without giving reasons (Stuart Condie/Wall Street Journal)

The EU designates Booking as a DMA gatekeeper, saying "holidaymakers will start benefiting from more choice and hotels will have more business opportunities" (Bloomberg)

SoftBank reports a $4.6B gain on its Vision Fund in the fiscal year to March 2024, the first gain since 2021, after ByteDance and DoorDash rose in value (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

The US, the EU, and other superpowers have funneled nearly $81B towards supporting chip companies, the first wave of ~$380B earmarked by global governments (Bloomberg)

How GPS warfare is affecting civilian populations; an analysis finds ~40M people lived in areas with unreliable GPS for at least half of the past six months (Financial Times)

US farmers had to halt their planting operations after the solar storm broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and other equipment (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

A look at the growing number of startups offering AI deepfake detection services, with some claiming startling levels of accuracy despite untested capabilities (Washington Post)

Sources: the EU is set to issue new antitrust charges against Microsoft over concerns over undermining Teams competitors, despite Microsoft offering concessions (Javier Espinoza/Financial Times)

As VC firms pivot to investing in startups developing defense tech for the US and its allies, some of their business ties with China still linger (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Brad Smith says Microsoft will invest 4B in France, much of the investment would focus on AI, and Microsoft would set up a data center in Mulhouse, France (Sudip Kar-Gupta/Reuters)

Sources: Shein steps up preparations for a London listing amid regulatory hurdles for a New York IPO; source: Shein plans to file in London as soon as May (Reuters)

A look at 01.AI, which is launching Wanzhi, a free generative AI assistant focused on the Chinese market; CEO Kai-Fu Lee says 01.AI is nearing profitability (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

A look at how Elon Musk uses X to support right-wing world leaders like Narendra Modi who could help secure advantages for his businesses (New York Times)

A look at the rise and fall of 2U, which provides online degree programs for top US universities, and is valued at ~$30M today, down from $5B+ in 2018 (Melissa Korn/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple has met with Hollywood talent representatives to propose a new performance-based compensation regime, as Amazon and Netflix work on similar plans (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Researcher Sonia Livingstone says constraining tech companies and empowering young people and parents are better alternatives to banning kids from social media (Henry Mance/Financial Times)

Following attempts to malign Signal as insecure by Telegram's CEO and Elon Musk, a look at why Signal is widely regarded by experts as more secure than Telegram (Matthew Green/@matthew_d_green)

A look at professor-led crypto projects EigenLayer and Babylon, which seek to generate yield from cryptocurrencies, as "professor coins" spur investor interest (Bloomberg)

A look at the potential successors to Apple's top executives across all of the company's major divisions (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Q&A with Oracle CEO Safra Catz on generative AI's risks and impact, providing cloud infrastructure to TikTok, the importance of workplace diversity, and more (Keiichi Murayama/Nikkei Asia)

Alibaba leverages computing resources to become a leading AI investor in China; sources: cloud credits made up ~50% of Alibaba's $800M investment in Moonshot AI (Financial Times)

South Korea's Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok says the government is preparing a $7.3B+ support package for chip investments to win the "war" in the chip sector (Ju-min Park/Reuters)

Maryland Apple Store union workers vote to authorize strike over Apple's alleged refusal to fairly bargain; Short Hills NJ store workers vote against unionizing (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

Rad AI, which offers generative AI tools for radiology reporting, raised a $50M Series B led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to over $80M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

The demand for AI tech to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones is especially strong in China, where thousands have already paid to use such tech (Zeyi Yang/MIT Technology Review)

The UK government's new AI safety body releases Inspect, an evaluation tool for AI model capabilities, including models' core knowledge and ability to reason (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

How Trump is courting crypto traders, as GOP becomes increasingly friendly toward crypto while key Democrats remain at odds and SEC cracks down on the industry (Jasper Goodman/Politico)

Sources: Arm plans to set up an AI chip division, aiming to build a prototype by spring 2025, with mass production expected to start later in the year (Nikkei Asia)

What to expect at Google I/O 2024: Android 15 updates, more generative AI features for Google's apps, a new Gemini-powered "Pixie" digital assistant, and more (Wes Davis/The Verge)

Q&A with Linda Moore, the CEO of TechNet, which represents OpenAI, Apple, and others, about the 400+ AI bills proposed across the US, tech backlash, and more (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Ofcom's draft Children's Safety Code of Practice's emphasis on kids choosing protective tools rather than safety by design and default is not ambitious enough (Beeban Kidron/Financial Times)

The demand for AI chips is driving fierce competition among HBM chipmakers, as Samsung and Micron race to catch up to SK Hynix, which has over 52% market share (Nikkei Asia)

Filing: Indian e-commerce startup Meesho, which has ~150M transacting users, raised $275M, sources say at a $3.9B valuation as part of an ongoing $500M+ round (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

How United, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, and others use AI to reduce costs and streamline operations, including holding flights for delayed passengers (Julie Weed/New York Times)

Meituan, Alibaba, Tencent, and other Chinese tech companies are working to expand in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where they would face less political scrutiny (Financial Times)

Southeast Asia is drawing more investment from Big Tech than ever, as the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia commit billions of dollars in the region (Bloomberg)

At the Bloomberg Technology Summit, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd said the future of dating could have digital, AI-powered personas setting each other up (Daysia Tolentino/NBC News)

Appfigures: Anthropic's Claude now ranks #51 in the top free iPhone Productivity apps in the US, down from rank #5 in this category, which it achieved on May 4 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Waymo says its Waymo One robotaxis now complete over 50K paid trips every week across San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, up from 10K rides in May 2023 (Abubakar Idris/The Information)

Email: criminals target WPP CEO Mark Read in a deepfake scam by using a voice clone and public YouTube footage to set up a video meeting with his executives (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

About 48 government websites associated with different Indian states have allowed scammers to plant ads that can redirect visitors to online betting websites (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Christie's experienced a "technology security issue" that took its website down and affected some systems, ahead of auctions that are expected to generate $840M (Zachary Small/New York Times)

Jim Simons, a mathematician and founder of hedge fund firm Renaissance Technologies who pioneered computer-based approaches to quantitative trading, dies at 86 (Gregory Zuckerman/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple is finalizing a deal with OpenAI to use ChatGPT features in iOS 18; talks with Google to license Gemini are still ongoing (Bloomberg)

Epic v. Apple: Apple says it received just 38 applications to use its outside payments option for the App Store, out of ~65K app devs that offer in-app payments (Bloomberg)

Filings and sources: autonomous vehicle company Motional cut ~550 employees in a restructuring that included delaying a robotaxi service from 2024 to 2026 (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

A US jury says Microsoft must pay IPA Technologies $242M after finding that Cortana infringed a patent that expired in Jan. 2019; Microsoft plans to appeal (Christopher Yasiejko/Bloomberg Law)

Sources: OpenAI is preparing to demonstrate an AI voice assistant that recognizes objects and images and has better logical reasoning than its current products (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Some Indian journalists who turned to YouTube to dodge censorship say the company is banning or demonetizing their news channels citing government notices (Raksha Kumar/Reuters Institute)

Cloud GPU provider CoreWeave opens its European HQ in London and plans two UK data centers this year as part of a 1B investment, after raising $1.1B last week (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

A federal judge dismisses X's lawsuit against Bright Data over data scraping; Meta previously filed a suit against Bright Data and was similarly unsuccessful (CNBC)

Sources: Apple made generative AI a tent-pole project after Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing ChatGPT and found Siri to be antiquated (New York Times)

OpenAI announces a live stream at 10AM PT on May 13 to demo "some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates", which Sam Altman says are "not gpt-5, not a search engine" (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

An interview with Claude Zellweger, Google's director of industrial design, on hardware becoming a critical element for Google, Pixel's camera bar design, more (Raymond Wong/Inverse)

Bluesky rolls out an app update that lets users customize their algorithmic feeds through "Show more like this" and "Show less like this" post menu options (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

A look at the efforts in Japan, South Korea, and Australia to create stronger regulations for big tech platforms like Apple and Google (Financial Times)

Memo: Spotify's head of podcast studios Julie McNamara is leaving the company after nearly three years, emphasizing Spotify's reduced ambitions in podcasts (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Binance and KuCoin become the first offshore crypto entities to get India's approval, after being banned for "operating illegally"; KuCoin paid a $41K fine (Amitoj Singh/CoinDesk)

Google releases a Chrome security update to fix the fifth zero-day vulnerability exploited in the wild in 2024; the vulnerability is in the Visuals component (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Entertainment Headlines Today
[Mon-13-May-2024]

"Its $100,000 or nothing," she said. - Pulse

16 persons lost their lives during the incidents while men of the service saved 43 others. - Pulse

2024 AMVCA: Pay Your Designers to Avoid Embarrassment Whitemoney to Colleagues - Tori

2024 AMVCA: Pay your designers to avoid embarrassment ' Whitemoney to colleagues - DailyPost

300Lvl Students Laments About Being The Only One Studying Her Course In The Entire University (Video) - Tori

56 Young Nigerians Selected for 2024 Mandela Washington Fellowship by the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Nigeria - Bellanaija

A month after its release, Kayode Kasum's comedy-drama, Ajosepo, remains the top-grossing film at the Nigerian box office. - Pulse

A pro-Fubara group, New Rivers Agenda, slammed the ex-governor and blamed him for the political turmoil in Rivers State. - Pulse

A real man does not let his woman have a male bestie OAP Nedu Wazobia - Kemi Filani

A skit' Nigerian man and his family excited after taking delivery if a dog they ordered from Russia (video) - Linda Ikeji

According to reports, both offices were under lock and key and the staff on duty were asked to leave unconditionally. - Pulse

Actor Soji Taiwo Omobanke Buys His Daughter A Car As She Turns 21 (Video) - Tori

Actor Steve Buscemi taken to hospital after being attacked in New York - Linda Ikeji

Actor Yul Edochie Asked His Haters Why Their Hate Is Turning To Love - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Actor, Soji Taiwo Omobanke raises the bar, gifts daughter car on 21st birthday - Gistlover

Actress Blessing Obasi Celebrates Birthday - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Actress Destiny Etiko slammed over her outfits at AMVCA 2024 Award - Gistlover

Actress Ireti Doyle And Daughter At The AMVCA10 Red Carpet - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Actress Omobewaji Explains Why Women Outnumber Men In Older Age - Information Nigeria

Akpabio stated that the running of government institutions among other substantial components contributed to weighing down the economy. - Pulse

All The Women In Monogamous Relationships And Marriages Are There For Economic Benefit Only - Nigerian Man Says - Tori

All the women in monogamous relationships and marriages are there for economic benefit only - Nigerian polygamy advocate says - Linda Ikeji

Alleged Assault: Setting The Record Straight, Jesam Michael Is Victim, Not Maxwell Opara - New Telegraph

Alleged Assault: Setting The Record Straight, Jesam Michael Is Victim, Not Maxwell Opara - New Telegraph

Alleged Assault: Setting The Record Straight, Jesam Michael Is Victim, Not Maxwell Opara - New Telegraph

Alleged Assault: Setting The Record Straight, Jesam Michael Is Victim, Not Maxwell Opara - New Telegraph

Alleged notorious Boko Haram member surrenders to army - Linda Ikeji

Alleged Notorious Boko Haram Member Surrenders To Army - Tori

American musician and songwriter Stevie Wonder has officially been granted Ghanaian citizenship status by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on Monday, May 13, 2024. - Pulse

Among her demands are a public apology published in two national newspapers and compensation totalling 500 million for general damages. - Pulse

AMVCA 2024: Pay Your Designers to Avoid Embarrassment Whitemoney Advises Colleagues - Gistlover

AMVCA 2024: Toyin Abraham Commends Organizers - Tori

AMVCA 2024:Ruth Kadiri Didnt Get Any Nomination or Award At AMVCA - Gistlover

AMVCA10 Winners.- Actors Wale Ojo And Kehinde Bankole Win Best Actors Awards - Stella Dimoko Korkus

AMVCA10: Layi Wasabi Excited After Winning Best Digital Content Creator Award - Tori

AMVCA: His Attire Is Not Fitting For An Urhobo Man - Okowa's Media Aide Berates RMD Over Attire - Tori

Anita Okoye reacts as Paul Okoye sweetly celebrates her on Mothers Day - Kemi Filani

Appeal Court Slashes Atheist, Mubarak Balas 24-year Blasphemy Sentence - Tori

Arsenal's win over Manchester United helped them set a new Premier League record - Pulse

As you are dancing, ensure you are working - Obasanjo tells Governor Adeleke - Linda Ikeji

Asa Asika Discusses Business & Creativity on Episode 6 of Business and Booze - Bellanaija

Aston Villa vs Liverpool: Starting XIs for 2023/2024 EPL clash - Kemi Filani

Basic Rhymes With Zero Punchline - Daniel Regha Blasts Dremo For Dissing Sarkodie - Tori

Basking In My Bloom Season - Actress Blessing Obasi Writes As She Shares Stunning Photos To Celebrate Birthday - Tori

BBNaija Vee fires back at Isilomo for calling her AMVCA outfit cheap - DailyPost

BBNaijas Vee replies colleague Isilomo for rating her outfit to the AMVCA low - Linda Ikeji

Beef threatens Nigerian Afrobeats as artistes deepen rivalry - DailyPost

BellaNaija Style Best Dressed List: These 12 Looks Commanded Attention at the 10th AMVCA - Bellanaija

Benson Upah, NLC's spokersperson, announced that members would gather at Labour House, Abuja, by 7 am on Sunday for further action. - Pulse

Best Actress in Africa Toyin Abraham hails Kehinde Bankole as she serenades her following her AMVCA win (Video) - Kemi Filani

Best, realest AMVCA ever' ' Toyin Abraham hails organisers as her rival, Funke Akindele misses out - DailyPost

Big Brother Naija winner, Phyna, is making her debut as a producer with the film. - Pulse

Bill Maher drops 2018 interview where pornstar Stormy Daniels laughed off suggestions Trump coerced her into having sex during their alleged hook-up - Linda Ikeji

Blessing Obasi mares bkrthday with beautiful photos - Gistlover

Bob Marley and his wife Rita Marley both had children out of wedlock but officially recognise all of them as Marleys - Pulse

Bolanle Austen-Peters Film Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti Premieres in Style See All The Looks - Bellanaija

Boredom Eliminating Post - Stella Dimoko Korkus

Borno: Notorious Boko Haram Terrorist Surrenders To Army - Information Nigeria

Bovi Expresses Disappointment For Never Winning AMVCA Despite 7 Career Nominations - Tori