~techmeme | Bookmarks (1047)

Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: Hex, which provides a tool for finding correlations between data points, building predictive models, and running experiments, raised a $70M Series C led by Avra  —  Hex cofounders Glen Takahashi, Barry McCardel, and Caitlin Colgrove.  —  Hex  —  On Memorial Day, the Oklahoma City Thunder's …

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Google unveils new Photos features, including a redesigned editor with AI features rolling out globally to Android next month and to iOS “later this year”  —  The UI has been redesigned to focus on Google's AI Magic Editor features.

New York Times: Sources detail factors that weakened Elon Musk's alliance with President Trump, including his frustrations with Trump's tariffs and his disillusionment with DC  —  The billionaire has made clear he is frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he tried to upend the federal bureaucracy.

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft opens Windows Update to any third-party app that needs to be updated, letting developers sign up for a private preview of a new orchestration platform  —  A new orchestration platform will let developers update any app through Windows Update.

Zachary Basu / Axios: Elon Musk departs the Trump administration as a “special government employee”, defending DOGE's mission to reduce wasteful government spending  —  Elon Musk pivoted to damage control in his final days as a “special government employee,” publicly recommitting to Mars …

Lindsay Whitehurst / Associated Press: The US Court of International Trade blocks Trump from imposing sweeping import tariffs under an emergency-powers law, finding Trump exceeded his authority  —  A federal trade court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.

Bloomberg: Taiwan is ramping up its defense drone push with help from startups like Coretronic, as giants like TSMC and Foxconn hold back due to a smaller local market  —  Military's stockpile of about 1,000 drones seen as inadequate in the case of conflict with China

Wall Street Journal: California's population is growing again, rising 0.6% in 2024, with the H-1B visa program being one of the drivers, helping offset the residents who are leaving  —  A job market without enough ‘homegrown’ engineers drives an influx of workers to the U.S.—and helps offset the residents who are leaving

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: Researchers detail an exploit in GitHub's official MCP server that lets hackers trick an LLM agent into leaking private information about the MCP user  —  GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP (via) GitHub's official MCP server grants LLMs a whole host of new abilities …

Alexios Mantzarlis / Indicator: The top contributor to X's Community Notes is Web3 Antivirus, a startup that uses an automated process to flag crypto scam posts and has posted 52,000 times  —  I thought someone was gaming X's crowdsourced moderation; instead, they appear to be helping clean up the platform's mess for free.

Owen Walker / Financial Times: Scam victims in Singapore lost a total of ~$858M last year, up 70% YoY; most are contacted via Meta-owned apps, and deepfakes in scams are increasingly common  —  City-state residents who spend a lot of time online and are naturally compliant with authority are especially vulnerable

Bloomberg: Sources, including 30+ current and former Meta employees and 10+ US officials, detail Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of Trump, which has yet to pay major dividends  —  Meta's CEO has done everything he can to win over Trump, and it's not clear how much he has to show for it.

Tatum Hunter / Washington Post: People are using ChatGPT for unsparing assessments of their looks, with many also asking the chatbot to create plans to “glow up” their appearance  —  Friends want to protect your feelings.  AI isn't pulling any punches.  —  Ania Rucinski was feeling down on herself.

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: A database tracking instances where lawyers got caught presenting AI hallucinations shows that, of 116 cases dating back to June 2023, 20 occurred this month  —  AI Hallucination Cases (via) Damien Charlotin maintains this database of cases around the world where a legal decision …

Edith Hancock / Wall Street Journal: The EU says Shein's practices breach rules against false discounts, deceptive product labels, and more, and warn that it could face fines if it doesn't comply  —  European Union regulators said China-founded e-commerce platform Shein's sales tactics fall foul of EU law and that the company …

Pranav Dixit / Business Insider: Meta's AI team has faced a talent drain, with just three of the 14 authors credited on the landmark 2023 Llama paper still at Meta; several joined Mistral  —  - Meta's AI team has faced a talent drain as key Llama model creators have exited.  — The departures raise concerns about Meta's ability to retain top AI talent.

Bloomberg: A look at the UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, which aims to supply talent to Emirati companies, incubate startups, and serve as the UAE's AI R&D arm  —  Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI is focused on building an engineering pipeline, incubating homegrown startups, and hypercharging the region's AI development

Financial Times: Sources: Trump Media and Technology Group aims to raise $2B in fresh equity and another $1B via a convertible bond to buy cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin  —  US president's administration and family have become staunch advocates for digital assets  —  Antoine Gara, Oliver Barnes and George Steer in New York, Arash Massoudi in London

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: CB Insights: VC investment in voice AI startups rose from $315M in 2022 to $2.1B in 2024, driven by growing business adoption of voice AI agents in call centers  —  Improvements in the technology behind voice-based AI bots are making them more prolific and humanlike in phone calls

Financial Times: JioHotstar has grown its subscriber base from 50M in March to over 280M in May, driven by IPL cricket streams, nearing Netflix's global subscriber count of 300M  —  Subscriptions soar as JioStar consolidates rights for world's richest league in sport-mad nation  —  Krishn Kaushik and Chris Kay in Mumbai

Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer: Palisade Research claims that OpenAI's o3 altered a shutdown script to avoid being turned off, even when explicitly instructed to allow shutdown  —  A new report claims that OpenAI's o3 model altered a shutdown script to avoid being turned off, even when explicitly instructed to allow shutdown.

Sean Heelan / Sean Heelan's Blog: A security researcher details how he discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel's SMB implementation by analyzing the code using OpenAI's o3 API  —  In this post I'll show you how I found a zeroday vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI's o3 model.

Emma Roth / The Verge: A look at updates that weren't in the Google I/O keynote, including a Nearby Passes notification in Wallet and the Play Store's Ask Someone Else to Pay button  —  The Google Play Store will let you ask other people to pay for your purchases, and Live Updates are coming to smartwatches.

David Cendon Garcia / EU-Startups: Paris-based Veesion, which offers AI-powered video surveillance software for spotting suspicious behavior in stores, raised a €38M Series B led by White Star  —  Veesion, a French startup building AI tools to detect suspicious behaviour in physical stores, has announced …