Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- The Palantir-sponsored AI Expo for National Competitiveness featured VR headsets for soldiers, a map tool that can "nominate targets of interest", and more (Caroline Haskins/The Guardian)
- Honda plans to invest ~$12.8B in software over the decade up to the FY ending March 2031, as it prepares to join the rapid shift to EVs in markets like China (Yuichi Shiga/Nikkei Asia)
- Access Now: 2023 was the worst year for internet shutdowns since monitoring began in 2016, with 283 shutdowns across 39 countries, led by India at 116 (Astha Rajvanshi/TIME)
- A US judge approves Genesis Global Capital's Chapter 11 repayment plan to return Bitcoin and other tokens to creditors, defeating a challenge by its parent DCG (Jonathan Randles/Bloomberg)
- A look at an ISIS-affiliated media program called News Harvest, which is using AI-generated news anchors to disseminate extremist propaganda quickly and cheaply (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)
- Expedia fires its CTO Rathi Murthy and SVP Sreenivas Rachamadugu due to a "violation of company policy", days after its annual product and partner conference (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
- The US DOJ charges two arrested Chinese nationals for allegedly orchestrating a crypto pig butchering scam that laundered at least $73M from defrauded victims (Brendan O'Boyle/Reuters)
- Critics warn the French government's first-of-its-kind move within the EU to suspend TikTok in New Caledonia amid widespread protests sets a dangerous precedent (Politico)
- Epic v. Apple: Phil Schiller told a US judge that Apple's new 27% fee on purchases made outside its App Store are a good-faith attempt to comply with the law (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg)
- Some researchers say GPT-4o's Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites, likely due to inadequate data cleaning (Zeyi Yang/MIT Technology Review)
- Photo editing and sharing app VSCO says it is now profitable, has a user base of 200M worldwide, and has 160K subscribers for its $59.99/year Pro product (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)
- The US SEC will require some financial institutions to notify customers whose personal information was compromised within 30 days of learning about breaches (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
- Google DeepMind releases its Frontier Safety Framework, a set of protocols for analyzing and mitigating future risks posed by advanced AI models (Reed Albergotti/Semafor)
- Meta is working on an Instagram feature called Peek that lets users post unedited, authentic pictures that can only be viewed once (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
- OpenAI has an unusual, extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement with a lifelong nondisparagement commitment; those who don't sign it lose all vested equity (Kelsey Piper/Vox)
- Reddit reintroduces the awards system it shut down in 2023, ends the replacement Golden Upvotes system, and expands its Contributor Program to 35 countries (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
- [Thread] Superalignment team co-lead explains why he has left, says OpenAI's safety culture and processes took a backseat to shiny products over the past years (Jan Leike/@janleike)
- Source: the Superalignment team was promised 20% of OpenAI's compute resources but requests for a fraction of that were often denied (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
- Sources: Apple is working on a significantly slimmer iPhone that could be released concurrently with the iPhone 17, a major redesign, similar to the iPhone X (The Information)
- Apple limits the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU, forcing browser makers to have staff in the EU (Thomas Claburn/The Register)