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Techmeme Latest Headlines

Updated: 3 hours ago

Satya Nadella says Microsoft's AI business has surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $13B, up 175% YoY, as the company faces new scrutiny over AI spending (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

NewsGuard: with news-related prompts, DeepSeek's chatbot repeated false claims 30% of the time and provided non-answers 53% of the time, giving an 83% fail rate (NewsGuard's Reality Check)

Sources: SoftBank is in talks to invest $15B-$25B in OpenAI on top of its $15B+ commitment to Stargate; the deal would make it OpenAI's biggest financial backer (Financial Times)

Microsoft says Q2 capital expenditures hit $22.6B, vs. $20.95B estimated, and forecasts Q3 Azure growth between 31% and 32%, vs. 33% expected (Reuters)

Microsoft reports Q2 LinkedIn revenue up 9% YoY, and Satya Nadella says that LinkedIn passed a record $2B in Premium subscriptions revenue in the last 12 months (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Wiz: DeepSeek left one of its critical databases exposed, leaking more than 1M records including system logs, user prompt submissions, and users' API keys (Wired)

Mark Zuckerberg says spending heavily on AI infrastructure is a "strategic advantage" and vows Meta will invest "hundreds of billions" in AI over the long term (Charles Rollet/TechCrunch)

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads has 320M MAUs, up from 275M in November 2024, and is adding more than 1M daily signups (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

Microsoft Q2: Windows OEM and Devices revenue up 4% YoY, gaming revenue down 7%, Xbox hardware revenue down 29%, and Xbox content and services revenue up 2% (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Employer.com founder Jesse Tinsley says his US investor group vying to buy TikTok has secured $20B+ and recruited the CEOs of Roblox and Anchorage as investors (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)

Meta's Reality Labs posts Q4 revenue up 1% YoY to $1.1B, vs. $1.1B est., and a $4.97B operating loss, vs. $5.4B est.; Reality Labs has lost $60B+ since 2020 (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

Microsoft adds DeepSeek's R1 to Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, and plans to make a distilled, smaller version of R1 available to run locally on Copilot+ PCs soon (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Meta reports Q4 revenue up 21% YoY to $48.4B, net income up 49% YoY to $20.8B, and family daily active people up 5% YoY to 3.35B on average for December 2024 (Meta)

Meta agrees to pay ~$25M to settle a 2021 lawsuit that Trump brought against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6 riot (Wall Street Journal)

IBM reports Q4 revenue up 1% YoY to $17.6B, vs. $17.5B est., bookings for AI consulting and software crossed $5B, up from $3B in Q3; IBM jumps 8%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Sources: the Trump administration is exploring additional curbs on the sale of chips to China to cover Nvidia's scaled-down H20, designed for the Chinese market (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek makes US export controls to China even more important, and DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough but an expected point on a cost reduction curve (Dario Amodei)

How employees at Meta, Google, and more have quietly protested tech's rightward shift, as Mark Zuckerberg and others embrace Trump and muffle internal dissent (New York Times)

Netflix now lets iPhone and iPad app users download an entire TV show season with one tap, a much-requested feature that launched on Android in 2021 (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

The US Copyright Office says using AI tools to assist in creative processes doesn't compromise copyright protections as long as the content has human authorship (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

Vandatrack: retail traders bought a net $562M of Nvidia's stock on January 27, a record, and $360M on January 28, after DeepSeek's AI model sent NVDA crashing (Financial Times)

Huawei adds DeepSeek's R1 to its ModelArts Studio platform, saying the free model is "Ascend-adapted", referencing its data center GPUs, but offers few details (Matthew Connatser/Tom's Hardware)

Ampere: users spent $465M on Microsoft games in December, making it the biggest publisher, ahead of EA's $366M; Call of Duty HQ had 38M MAUs in November 2024 (Christopher Dring/Video Games Chronicle)

Comcast starts rolling out its "pioneering new, ultra-low lag connectivity experience" to select US cities, using the L4S standard to significantly cut latency (Jay Peters/The Verge)

DeepSeek's app is unavailable on Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store in Italy, after its data protection regulator says it questioned DeepSeek (Stefano Bernabei/Reuters)

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 review: slim, lightweight, reasonable power draw, and DLSS 4, but mild generational performance uplift and spotty availability at launch (Ben Wilson/Windows Central)

Sources detail Elon Musk's time in government so far, accompanied by friends and staff, as he races to cut staff; Musk's plane has not left DC since January 20 (New York Times)

Meta executives say DeepSeek's breakthrough shows that upstarts now have a chance to innovate and compete with AI giants and vindicates the open-source strategy (New York Times)

US officials and Google researchers: China, Iran, and 18+ others are using AI, including Gemini, to bolster their cyberattacks against US and global targets (Wall Street Journal)

ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet says cheaper AI "could mean more applications" and "more demand over time", and "cost and energy" are the big issues to address (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

Appfigures: ChatGPT's app has grossed $529M since its May 2023 release, around 4x the second-highest earner, as AI app spending grew ~4x YoY to $1.4B in 2024 (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

The UK National Audit Office says the government was operating at least 228 "legacy" computer systems as of March 2024, increasing the risk of a disruptive hack (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek's app tops the US Play Store; Appfigures says the DeepSeek app has 1.9M+ downloads on the App Store and 1.2M+ on the Play Store since mid-January 2025 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

A look at Huawei's HarmonyOS Next, a China-only OS decoupled from Android that is still missing many third-party apps, despite supporting some key ones in China (Bloomberg)

A look at MrDeepFakes, a site with obscure ownership that hosts non-consensual deepfake porn, has close to 650K members, and gets millions of visits per month (bellingcat)

Paris-based online corporate event booking marketplace Naboo raised a 20M Series A led by Notion Capital, and says its 2024 booking volumes grew 4x YoY to 60M (Romain Dillet/TechCrunch)

Samsung and LG unveil new OLED tech, including stretchable and transparent screens, to counter Chinese rivals, which held a 33% market share in 2024, per DSCC (Nami Matsuura/Nikkei Asia)

Carta data shows that 966 US-based startups shut down in 2024, compared to 769 in 2023, with enterprise SaaS startups accounting for 32% of the closures (Mary Ann Azevedo/TechCrunch)

The US could encourage future DeepSeeks to happen inside the US by funding the NAIRR, a pilot project providing compute power to university-level researchers (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)

Alibaba releases Qwen 2.5-Max, an AI model which the company claims "outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B" (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

ASML reports Q4 net profit of 2.69B on 9.26B net sales, net bookings up 169% QoQ to 7.09B, and expects 2025 net sales of 30B to 35B, up from 28.3B in 2024 (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

A US federal judge denied a motion by Apple to intervene as a defendant in the remedy trial of the DOJ vs. Google case, saying Apple's motion was untimely (Ryan Knappenberger/Courthouse News ...)

Crypto risk modeling firm Gauntlet estimates the $TRUMP memecoin has generated at least $11.4M in fees for entities linked to President Trump since its launch (Muyao Shen/Bloomberg)

OpenAI says it had seen some evidence that DeepSeek used "distillation" to train its open-source competitor by using outputs from OpenAI's proprietary models (Financial Times)

Google says "Sensitive is simply used in our internal systems for countries that see different official names in Maps", after adding the US to that list (@newsfromgoogle)

DeepSeek-R1 refuses to answer ~85% of 1,360 prompts on sensitive topics in China, but the restrictions can be bypassed via simple jailbreaking (promptfoo)

Sources: Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether data output from OpenAI's API was obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to DeepSeek (Bloomberg)

In an internal memo, Andrew Bosworth says Meta's Reality Labs beat nearly all its sales and user targets for 2024, growing sales ">40% YoY overall" (Jyoti Mann/Business Insider)

Sources: Apple has been working with SpaceX and T-Mobile to add Starlink support in iOS 18.3; T-Mobile is testing with some users, only for texting initially (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Sony names CFO Hiroki Totoki as CEO, succeeding Kenichiro Yoshida, and PlayStation co-CEO Hideaki Nishino as CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, from April 1 (Cynthia Littleton/Variety)

MGM Resorts agrees to pay $45M to settle 14 class action lawsuits related to a data breach in 2019 and a ransomware attack the company experienced in 2023 (Jonathan Greig/The Record)

David Sacks says there's "substantial evidence" that DeepSeek "distilled knowledge out of OpenAI models and I don't think OpenAI is very happy about this" (Jackie Davalos/Bloomberg)

Block introduces an on-device, open-source AI agent called Goose, which allows developers to choose their preferred LLM to automate engineering tasks (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

Sources: Arm China picks Chen Feng, an ex-executive at China-based chipmaker Rockchip Electronics, as its CEO; Liu Renchen and Eric Chen will resign as co-CEOs (Bloomberg)

Sources: the highest ranks of the US Office of Personnel Management now include former employees of Elon Musk's companies, including xAI and the Boring Company (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

Doc: Google's maps unit reclassified the US as a "sensitive country", reserved for states with strict governments or border disputes, after Trump's map changes (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

OpenAI told some shareholders revenue from its $200/month ChatGPT Pro plan surpassed that of ChatGPT Enterprise, which was generating $25M/month as of September (The Information)

Researchers detail two Apple silicon side-channel attacks that could leak secrets: SLAP, affecting M2, A15, and newer chips, and FLOP, affecting M3, M4, and A17 (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

The US Navy has instructed its members to avoid using DeepSeek "in any capacity" due to "potential security and ethical concerns" (Hayden Field/CNBC)

An ex-OpenAI safety researcher says he's "terrified" by AI development's pace and that labs racing to AGI can cut corners on alignment, pushing all to speed up (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

Hugging Face researchers unveil Open-R1, a project to "systematically reconstruct DeepSeek-R1's data and training pipeline" for the open-source community (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Chinese state media and social media viewed DeepSeek's success as a shot in the arm for a discouraged tech industry and a public suffering a stagnating economy (Li Yuan/New York Times)

Nearly two months after GM said it would stop funding Cruise robotaxi development, GM says it expects to save up to $1B annually thanks to the move (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Garmin smartwatch users report their devices are bricking after starting any activity that uses GPS; Garmin says it is looking into the issue (Victoria Song/The Verge)

Valencia-based Quibim, which is developing foundational AI models for medical imaging, raised a $50M Series A co-led by Asabys and Buenavista (Paul Sawers/TechCrunch)

The EU says upcoming sanctions on Russia aim to crack down on traders who send gaming consoles to Russia that are then often used by the army to control drones (Financial Times)

Fusion reactor startup Helion, which has a deal to supply Microsoft with electricity by 2028, raised a $425M Series F, valuing the company at $5.245B (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

X announces X Money Account, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments service with Visa as its launch partner, debuting "later this year" (Hugh Son/CNBC)

Hugging Face launches Inference Providers, which makes it easier for developers to run AI models on 3rd-party clouds; launch partners include SambaNova and Fal (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Spotify says it paid out a record $10B to the music industry in 2024, up from a then-record $9B in 2023, taking its total to nearly $60B since its 2006 founding (Jem Aswad/Variety)

The "DeepSeek moment" is like in 2004 when Google detailed using distributed algorithms to build a supercomputer, and unlike Sputnik, when Russia shared little (@yishan)

Paris-based Alice&Bob, a cat qubit quantum architecture pioneer, raised a 100M Series B for a "fault tolerant" quantum computer, after a 27M Series A in 2022 (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov, built for US government use, and says 90K+ government employees have generated 18M+ prompts within ChatGPT since the start of 2024 (Hayden Field/CNBC)

A profile of DeepSeek creator Liang Wenfeng, a math geek who founded hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015 and had to apologize to investors about returns in 2021 (Wall Street Journal)

The UK CMA provisionally finds that competition in the cloud services market isn't working for consumers; AWS and Azure each control 40% of the UK market (Bloomberg)

AI enterprise service management startup Atomicwork raised a $25M Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Z47, a source says at a $150M valuation (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

TechInsights: ChangXin Memory Technologies' DDR5 RAM required advanced manufacturing techniques that haven't previously been seen on the Chinese market (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

SemiAnalysis: DeepSeek has spent "well over $500M on GPUs over the history of the company"; TechInsights says it doesn't see DeepSeek as "a big hit to Nvidia" (Financial Times)

DeepSeek highlights some of China's key advantages: a deep pool of skilled software engineers, a vast domestic market, and government support via subsidies (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek challenges the "bigger is better" narrative underpinning the AI arms race in recent years and suggests we may see more investment into smaller startups (Kevin Roose/New York Times)

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