Joseph Cox / VICE:
ElevenLabs found an uptick in “voice cloning misuse cases” during its recent beta; Motherboard finds deepfake voices of Emma Watson, Joe Rogan, others on 4chan — 4chan members used ElevenLabs to make deepfake voices of Emma Watson, Joe Rogan, and others saying racist, transphobic, and violent things.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/lzKvqSR
Bloomberg:
Sources: Twitter made its first interest payment under Elon Musk to a group of seven banks; the payment was due around January 27 and estimated to be ~$300M — Twitter Inc. made its first interest payment under Elon Musk, according to people with knowledge of the matter …
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TechCrunch:
Court records since 2011 show how police in some US states used digital data, like text messages, search history, and emails, in abortion-related prosecutions — In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/hC8uF6O
Financial Times:
Meme-stock mania companies, including GameStop and AMC Entertainment, have raised $4.7B since the hype began in January 2021, but failed to boost performance — Cash bonanza enabled by retail investors fails to boost beneficiaries' performance — Companies at the centre of the meme-stock mania …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/LRITJhF
Julia Angwin / The Markup:
Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more — Hello, friends, — If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/6uwTeyd
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Google researchers detail AI model MusicLM, which can generate high-fidelity music in any genre from text and was trained on a dataset of 280K hours of music — An impressive new AI system from Google can generate music in any genre given a text description. But the company, fearing the risks, has no immediate plans to release it.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/je6GODE
Semafor:
Sources: OpenAI hired ~1,000 contractors over the past six months, 40% of them programmers creating data for its models to learn software engineering tasks — OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors …
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Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams says Uber and Lyft will be required to have zero-emissions fleets by 2030, potentially affecting over 100K for-hire vehicles — In his State of the City speech Thursday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that Uber and Lyft will be required to be zero emission by 2030.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/XIHaur3
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Substack introduces private accounts, search and chat improvements, easy template creation, toggling between publications, inline footnotes, and LaTeX support — Newsletter platform Substack announced today that it's introducing several new features, including private Substacks.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/ingwJUI
Dan Primack / Axios:
NEA raised $3.05B for a fund focused on early-stage deals and $3.18B for a debut growth equity fund and says it filed to become a registered investment advisor — NEA said Thuesday that it's raised just over $6.2 billion for a pair of new funds; comprised of $3.05 billion for its 18th fund …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/jx9Kb5t
Ryan Smith / AnandTech:
SK Hynix announces its LPDDR5T chip for mobile devices, with a 9.6Gbps data transfer speed, 13% faster than the previous LPDDR5X — In a bit of a surprise move, SK hynix this week has announced a new variation of LPDDR5 memory technology, which they are calling LPDDR5T.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/YOWpM2R
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
London-based crypto exchange Luno, owned by DCG, lays off 35% of its global workforce, citing market “turbulence”; Luno has a headcount of ~960 per LinkedIn — - London-based crypto exchange Luno informed employees of the redundancies at 12 p.m. GMT on Wednesday in a live-streamed town hall.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/5KcOWfk
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Elon Musk's team has been exploring selling up to $3B in new Twitter shares to help repay some of the $13B in debt that backed his takeover — Billionaire has held talks with investors about selling new Twitter shares — Elon Musk's team has been exploring using as much as $3 billion …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/uhW8frk
Dade Hayes / Deadline:
Netflix, Apple and Amazon accounted for 19 Oscars nominations, down from 37 in 2022, and only one streaming title garnered more than one nomination — Despite all of the uncertainty about the future of theatrical distribution, streaming services collectively took a step back in this year's Oscar race …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/aPHpDrm
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
The DOJ sues Google, joined by California and seven other US states, calling to break up its ad tech business over alleged monopolization of the US ad market — The US Justice Department and eight states sued Alphabet Inc.'s Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business …
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PYMNTS.com:
Under a new agreement with Amazon, Stripe will expand its use of AWS and become a “strategic payments partner” for Amazon in the US, Europe, and Canada — Amazon plans to “significantly expand” its use of payments platform Stripe. — “Under the new agreement …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/9h17Ovy
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Meta expands its partnership with the NBA to offer 52 games in VR, including five immersive 180-degree monoscopic VR games, as well as some WNBA games and more — Meta is expanding its partnership with the NBA and WNBA to offer more than 50 live games in VR on Meta Quest, the company announced on Monday.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/dOwKEgc
Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
Researchers and ex-Twitter staff: physical attacks in the US have tracked with spikes in some hate speech on Twitter, notably anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric — SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this month, the FBI charged a Florida man with making detailed online threats to murder 100 gay people.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3nFMdr7
Keri Blakinger / The Marshall Project:
How some US incarcerated people use contraband mobile phones to educate themselves, make TikToks, find love, publicize prison conditions, earn money, and more — Despite the security concerns of administrators, incarcerated people use phones to hustle, make TikToks or publicize prison conditions.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/DSdKysA
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
A look at Amazon's fledgling drone delivery unit, which has struggled due to safety concerns and now faces layoffs and other cost-cutting measures — - As part of Amazon's widespread layoffs, some employees in the nascent drone delivery project are losing their jobs, according to people familiar with the matter.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/ld1qQJK
Eric Wallerstein / Wall Street Journal:
Filings: Signature Bank borrowed $10B in Q4 from Federal Home Loan Banks, the system originally designed to support mortgage lending; Silvergate borrowed $3.6B — Signature and Silvergate turn to government-chartered lenders after customer withdrawals surge
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Natasha Singer / New York Times:
How Dutch privacy negotiators, empowered by GDPR, have spurred major changes at Google, Microsoft, Zoom, and others, as the Netherlands punches above its weight — Dutch privacy negotiators have spurred major changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a landmark European data protection law as a lever.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/7AW50GM
Ronan Shields / Digiday:
Sources: Google is pushing advertisers to work with third-party resellers directly as it seeks to reduce its overheads related to advertising services — Alphabet today has confirmed that it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, reportedly the largest round of layoffs in its history …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/rPV5xhS
Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
According to six employees and an internal doc, TikTok and ByteDance staff engage in “heating”, or inflating video view counts, to court influencers and brands — TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in “heating,” a manual push that ensures specific videos …
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/rB192M3
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
PayPal says hackers accessed sensitive data of ~35K users, including addresses and social security numbers, in a credential stuffing attack in December 2022 — PayPal is sending out data breach notifications to thousands of users who had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing attacks that exposed some personal data.
from Techmeme https://ift.tt/CtoAp68