A look at LibGen, one of the largest online pirate libraries, with 7.5M+ books and 81M+ research papers, allegedly used by Meta and OpenAI to train AI models
Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here. — When employees at meta started developing …
Google says it uncovered and eliminated 10K+ illegitimate Google Maps listings, including for fake businesses, and sues the alleged scammers behind the fraud
Google says it uncovered thousands of illegitimate listings, including for fake businesses, on Google Maps and has announced …
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walks back his January 2025 comments casting doubt on useful quantum computing within 15 years, which triggered a quantum stock sell-off
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday walked back comments he made in January, when he cast doubt on whether useful quantum computers …
Source: US Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham plan to introduce a bipartisan bill with wide support that would make Section 230 expire on January 1, 2027
In June 1995, two young congressmen reached across the aisle to introduce legislation that would become the defining legal protection …
The US SEC says proof-of-work crypto mining doesn't trigger federal securities laws and mining operators do not need to register their transactions with the SEC
In a staff statement published Thursday, the SEC said that both solo mining and mining pool operations would fail the first prong of the Howey Test.
The US Treasury's sanctions watchdog removes Tornado Cash from its global blacklist, after a federal appeals court ruled against the sanctions in November 2024
The U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions watchdog removed Tornado Cash from its global blacklist Friday.
Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives
Today, we're excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down …
Anthropic adds web search to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, available now in preview for paid US Claude users, with support for free users and more countries coming soon
Anthropic's AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it.
European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane says Europe needs a digital euro to avoid rising stablecoin risks and reduce reliance on US payment firms
Europe needs a digital currency to safeguard against threats from new forms of money like stablecoins, and reduce reliance …
Yahoo strikes a deal to sell TechCrunch to media investment firm Regent, which acquired PCWorld publisher Foundry earlier this week
Yahoo on Friday said it has struck a deal to sell TechCrunch, the 20-year-old tech journalism site, to Regent, a media investment firm. Bluesky: @amanda.omg.lol , @karlbode.com , and @niedermeyer.onli...
Micron Q2: revenue up 38% YoY to $8.05B, vs. $7.89B est., net income up 100% to $1.58B, data center revenue up 200%, and offers better-than-expected Q3 guidance
Micron shares popped 6% in extended trading Thursday after the company reported second-quarter results that beat analysts' estimates …
Google adds “smarter search” to Gmail for Android, iOS, and the web, using AI to show the most relevant results instead of showing emails in chronological order
Abner Li / 9to5Google :
BuildOps, which develops software for commercial services contractors, raised a $127M Series C led by Meritech Capital at a $1B post-money valuation
Commercial services tech hasn't historically been considered “sexy,” but the need for innovation in the space is enormous.
Report: North Korea is launching Research Center 227, a cybersecurity research unit focused on AI-based hacking for stealing information and digital assets
The North Korean government is reportedly establishing a new hacking group within the intelligence agency Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). Bluesky: @myromanempire and @mnadeau X: @thegrugq and @lo...
Shipments of India-manufactured smartphones grew 6% YoY in 2024, with Samsung and Apple accounting for ~94% of exports; Samsung's India exports grew 13% YoY
Counterpoint Research :
A profile of Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, who served in Israel's cyber intelligence unit 8200; sources: Wiz was set to hit $1B annualized recurring revenue in 2025
Wiz chief executive Assaf Rappaport agrees higher sale price after turning down $23bn offer last summer
Interviews with 50+ current and ex-staffers reveal Google's two-year race to catch up with OpenAI, including through layoffs and lowering some guardrails
The search giant should've been first to the chatbot revolution. It wasn't. So it punched back with late nights, layoffs—and lowering some guardrails.
Researchers unveil Aardvark, an AI weather prediction system that they say uses thousands of times less compute and is tens of times faster than current methods
A new AI weather prediction system, Aardvark Weather, can deliver accurate forecasts tens … Markus Kasanmascheff / WinBuzzer : New Weather AI Promises Faster, Low-Cost Forecasting Without Supercompute...
Threads rolls out new features: ability to set following feed or any custom feed as the default, limit post replies to followers, a better video player, more
show people what you're into by adding topics to your profile. Tom Warren / @tomwarrenuk : Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default! 🥳 Threads will also now let you limit replies to...
Huawei unveils the Pura X foldable phone that opens to an unconventional 16:10 6.3" display, its first flagship with HarmonyOS 5, launching in China for ~$1,036
Bloomberg :
A book excerpt from AI Valley details the 2024 mass defection of staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving but faced scaling challenges, to Microsoft
An excerpt from AI Valley tells the story of why the staff at Inflection AI, which seemed to be thriving, defected en masse to Microsoft in 2024.
Stockholm-based Evroc, which plans to build hyperscale data centers in Europe and an array of cloud services, raised a $55M Series A from Blisce and others
largest tech Series A in the Nordics Laura Varley / Silicon Republic : Data centre firm Evroc raises €50m to fund European tech independence evroc : evroc raises largest tech Series A in the Nordics t...
Tencent says it has slowed the pace of its GPU rollout since implementing DeepSeek, and that most of its GPU capex goes toward its ad and gaming businesses
Chinese giant says locals are more efficient than Western hyperscalers, and has tiny capex to prove it
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reports Q4 revenue up 20% to ~$12.21B, vs. $12.1B est., net profit up 180% YoY to ~$858M, even as it faces stiff competition
Kimberley Kao / Wall Street Journal :
OpenAI adds gpt-4o-mini-tts, a text-to-speech model that it says delivers more nuanced and realistic-sounding speech, and two speech-to-text models to its API
www.implicator.ai/claude-gets- ... tip @techmeme.com @fry69.dev : Unrelated to OpenAI, here is an interesting text to speech model/generator with supports “emotion” sounds like <laugh>, <chuckle>, <s...
Source: Perplexity has discussed raising as much as $500M to $1B in a new round that would double its valuation to $18B; its current ARR is nearly $100M
Doubling In Just 4 Months PYMNTS.com : Report: Perplexity in Talks to Raise Up to $1 Billion Archanarani / Verdict : Perplexity AI in talks to secure up to $1bn funding Jon Swartz / Techstrong.ai : Pe...
Argentina-based neobank Ualá raised an additional $66M for its Series E, after an initial raise of $300M led by Allianz X at a $2.75B valuation in November 2024
Carolina Millan / Bloomberg :
Denver-based Multiply Mortgage, which provides an AI-based mortgage origination service for tech employees, raised a $23.5M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins
Today, we publicly unveiled our newest product that we believe will transform …
Germany's Munich Re agrees to acquire digital insurance company Next Insurance for $2.6B; Next Insurance has raised ~$1.2B from Capital G, Redpoint, and others
Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch :
Sources: Microsoft chose not to exercise a nearly $12B option to buy more data center capacity from CoreWeave; OpenAI snapped up the contract last week
Jeffrey Emanuel was a little-known crypto executive and blogger … Fortune : Mistral AI CEO denies IPO plans, touts renewed focus on open source to best deeper-pocketed competitors Bluesky: Ed Zitron /...
A look at Chinese AI startup Manycore, which develops spatial design software, has filed for a Hong Kong IPO, and reported a $58.3M loss from Q1 to Q3 2024
Bloomberg :
Stockholm-based Rerun, which is building a data stack for “Physical AI” like robots and drones, raised a $17M seed, bringing its total funding to $20.2M
a big step toward building the data-stack that robotics, drones, AVs and the whole Physical AI world needs. …
Source: Insight Partners is set to reap ~$2.7B from the pending sale of Wiz to Alphabet, a 15.5x return on its invested capital, based on its ~8% stake in Wiz
Gillian Tan / Bloomberg :
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.