An author finds multiple “garbage books” uploaded to Amazon under her name, most likely AI-generated, and on Goodreads, which removed them after her complaint
Update: Hours after this post was published, my Goodreads profile was cleaned of the offending titles.
After the countless times Elon Musk has walked back announcements, the business media must rethink its coverage of X, Musk, and the fight with Mark Zuckerberg
After a weekend of whoppers about X and fighting Mark Zuckerberg, the press should take a more skeptical approach
OpenAI details GPTBot, which the company uses to crawl the web for data to improve its AI models, and how site admins can opt out using robots.txt
GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler and can be identified by the following user agent and string. Emilia David / The Verge : Now you can block OpenAI's web crawler Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land : GPT...
The UK Electoral Commission reports a hack by “hostile actors” starting in August 2021 and identified in October 2022; the full scope isn't “conclusively” known
Watchdog apologises for security breach in which names and addresses were accessible as far back as 2021
Prosecraft, a site that compiled 27K+ books to compare and rank the “vividness” of their language, shuts down after writers' backlash over its possible AI uses
Today, I'm taking down the prosecraft.io website … Sam Barsanti / The A.V. Club : Explaining the Prosecraft drama: This is why every author is mad at a website that counted words Robert Andrew / CityL...
TSMC agrees to build a €10B plant in Germany's Dresden, owning 70% of the facility with Infineon, NXP, and Bosch each holding 10% stake, set to open in 2027
- Taiwanese giant will own 70% of fab in eastern city of Dresden — Facility to supply auto, industrial sectors starting in 2027
Developer logs: Apple is testing M3 Max with a 16-core CPU, a 40-core GPU, and 48GB of RAM, in a new MacBook Pro that Apple is expected to launch in 2024
- The chip has 16 central processing cores and 40 for graphics — Company is testing flurry of new Macs as it seeks sales boost
Researchers tested 14 LLMs for political bias and found OpenAI's GPT-4 was the most left-wing libertarian and Meta's LLaMA was the most right-wing authoritarian
New research explains you'll get more right- or left-wing answers, depending on which AI model you ask. — Should companies have social responsibilities?
SoftBank reports ~$426M profit for Vision Fund in Q1, up from a ~$16.4B loss in Q1 2022 and ~$30B in FY2022; Vision Fund invested $1.6B in Q1; Arm lost ~$66.4M
Bloomberg :
A US judge denies Google a summary judgment in a $5B lawsuit over the company tracking users' activities in Incognito mode, pushing the case closer to a trial
/ Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers denied Google's push for a summary judgment in a lawsuit over the way it tracked internet activity …
Source: Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, and Intel plan to invest in Arm's US IPO as soon as shares are listed in September; SoftBank owns 75% of Arm and Vision Fund 25%
SoftBank chip design unit to debut on Nasdaq, market cap seen topping $60bn — SoftBank Group plans to list shares in its chip deign unit …
Q&A with Grimes on her “c” persona, letting people use her voice in their music, AI, social media, Elon Musk, NFTs, a stronger sense of ethics in tech, and more
Claire Boucher is open sourcing her musical persona to let people create their own version of Grimes with AI.
TikTok unveils Gimme the Mic, a music competition hosted on livestreams where the US winner receives 50K Diamonds, the USD conversion rate for which is unclear
TikTok will host a music contest similar to popular talent shows like The Voice, the company announced today.
Sources: Apple has a deal where TSMC effectively eats the cost of chip defects, saving billions for Apple, which will get 3nm chips about a year before rivals
WhatsApp introduces screen sharing during video calls, rolling out gradually on Android, iOS, and Windows, and support for Landscape mode on video calls
WhatsApp today introduced screen sharing as its latest feature to enhance the video calling experience on its platform …
Matter's biggest problem is that companies can't agree on how to support Thread, a protocol Matter picked, especially for border routers joining mesh networks
The Thread protocol offers a robust mesh network designed to solve many of the smart home's biggest problems.
PayPal debuts PYUSD, a Paxos-issued stablecoin and fully backed by USD deposits, short-term Treasuries, and cash equivalents, rolling out to US users gradually
Press Releases — McHenry Statement on PayPal Announcing Launch of Payment Stablecoin Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk : PayPal to Issue Dollar-Pegged Crypto Stablecoin Based on Ethereum Tim Copeland / The B...
Spotify expands its AI-powered DJ globally to ~50 markets, six months after its North American launch, available via the Music tab; the feature is English-only
Spotify is expanding its AI-powered “DJ” to dozens of markets globally, six months after debuting the feature in North America.
Zoom updates its terms to let the company train its AI models using some customer data, but doesn't plan to use audio, video, or chat content without consent
Whether they're hoovering up all the data for training AI or not, it's bad optics and I've seen tech companies sink for less. … @GoTakeAKnapp@anti-social.online : It appears that Zoom has seen everyon...
The SEC fines 11 Wall Street firms $289M total for poor recordkeeping by using apps including Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage; CFTC fines four banks $260M total
- U.S. regulators on Tuesday announced a combined $549 million in penalties against Wall Street firms that failed to maintain electronic records of employee communications.
Zoom, known for helping millions of people work from home, asks its employees living within 50 miles of an office to work in person at least two days per week
an engraved invitation to disruption [embedded post] Casey Newton / @caseynewton.bsky.social : It's too much to say that this marks the end of remote work in Silicon Valley but .... Only by a little b...
China releases draft rules for limiting the use of facial recognition to “specific purposes and full necessity”, requiring individual approval, and more
The pervasive use of facial recognition technology across all facets of life in China has elicited both praise for its convenience and backlash around privacy concerns.
Sources: in the fall of 2020, the NSA discovered that Chinese hackers had access to Japanese defense networks; the problem persisted until at least fall 2021
Not 2021. They're still in there, as of June 2023: https://www.nisc.go.jp/... X: Ellen Nakashima / @nakashimae : The penetration was so disturbing that NSA chief Gen. Paul Nakasone and then-Deputy Na...
A profile of Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, who sold Adallom to Microsoft for $320M in 2015 before building the $10B Israeli cloud security startup
$200 million in sales. A $10 billion valuation. New billionaire Assaf Rappaport has built Wiz into one of software's fastest-growing startups ever. X: @alexrkonrad , @alexrkonrad , and @alexrkonrad ...
Nvidia announces the Grace Hopper Superchip, a combination GPU and CPU relying on high-bandwidth memory 3, or HBM3e, expected to enter production in Q2 2024
- Company is upgrading lineup that fueled $1 trillion valuation — New chip could make it harder for rivals like AMD to catch up
Stability AI launches StableCode, a code generation LLM based on data from the open-source BigCode project, supporting Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, C, and C++
Stability AI is well known for its Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation model, but that's not all the generative AI startup is interested in developing.
Microsoft says Bing Chat, which is only available in products like its Edge browser and Bing app, is coming “soon” to third-party browsers, including on mobile
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch :
Data management company Rubrik acquires Laminar, which helps companies manage public cloud data security, sources say for around $200M to $250M
Cybersecurity startups, in particular those hatched in Israel, have been getting scooped up a rapid pace by larger tech companies looking to bolt …
A look at archive.today, an opaque service to access paywalled content that hosts 1,000TB and uses a Russian analytics engine and Europe-based data centers
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can't afford to pay … Mastodon: @dietrich@mastodon.social Mastodon: Dietrich / @dietrich@mast...
The European Commission opens a full-scale investigation into Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition, after a preliminary review found the deal may reduce competition
> concerns that it may reduce competition — This kind of statement always takes me aback. I mean, it couldn't be more obvious that whenever a big dominant company buys an up-and-coming competitor o...
Sources including current and former Stability AI employees describe a chaotic startup led by an inexperienced CEO often unable to deliver on his lofty promises
Bloomberg :
Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $533.3M, vs. $532.4M est., adjusted operating income of $135M, vs. $121.5M est., and authorizes a $1B share buyback
Sources: Meta disbanded the team behind its protein-folding AI project ESMFold this spring, prioritizing commercial AI products over blue-sky research
Financial Times :
NYC-based Simon Data, which uses ML to help with analytics and marketing automation, raised a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Capital
Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE :
The White House unveils cyber initiatives to bolster K-12 schools' defenses, including up to $200M over three years from the FCC, amid rising ransomware attacks
The Philippines races to defend its share of the nearly $300B global business process outsourcing market, battling a talent shortage, rising competition, and AI
Bloomberg : X: @mannyserapio X: Manny Serapio Jr / @mannyserapio : As AI-powered bots take away an increasing number of outsourcing jobs since the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of English-speaking work...
Sources: some global investors, including Warburg Pincus and GIC, opt out of Ant Group's proposed share buyback after the company's valuation was cut by 70%+
Bloomberg :
Unlike in Gonzalez v. Google, SCOTUS in the next year can't just punt the NetChoice cases challenging social media content moderation laws in Texas and Florida
Jeff Kosseff / Wired : Mastodon: @jkosseff@mastodon.social Mastodon: Jeff Kosseff / @jkosseff@mastodon.social : In Wired, I wrote about the potential Supreme Court cases that really could shape the f...
Israel- and Delaware-based Chargeflow, which uses ML to help businesses deal with chargeback disputes, raised an $11M seed led by OpenView and a $3M pre-seed
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch :
Neuralink, the brain-computer interface startup Elon Musk co-founded, raised a $280M Series D led by Founders Fund, after a reported ~$5B valuation in June 2023
Niket Nishant / Reuters :
Austin-based One Model, which uses AI to help employers make recruiting, hiring, promotion, layoff, and other HR decisions, raised $41M led by Riverwood Capital
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch :
Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI, edge computing, and sensors to identify potential mechanical failures, raised a $45M Series B led by General Catalyst
Bryson Masse / VentureBeat :
Shopify: Revolutionizing Commerce with Winter Edition '26
Over 150+ new features transform how merchants build, design, and grow—with technology that amplifies creative vision.
Email fatigue is real: Here's how smart email tools help you regain control
Picture this: It's Monday morning. You walk into the office feeling energized and ready to take on the week.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data
Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.