The US adds new restrictions on transferring HBM chips to China, the fourth US attempt in three years to curb China, and adds 140 companies to its blacklist — Export of memory chips used in AI applications is restricted, but delayed announcement gives Chinese companies chance to stock up
Meta will require advertisers to be verified before they can run ads targeting Australian users with financial services, starting in early February 2025 — Exclusive: Businesses to require financial services license number to post Facebook ads, while individuals will need government-issued ID
Q&A with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark on Nokia's failure in mobile phones, moving from mobile and fixed networks into data centers and defense, 5G, and more — Pekka Lundmark sees opportunities for the Finnish communications company to grow in defense and data centers.
How Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve Native American languages, building speech recognition models for over 200 endangered Indigenous languages — Indigenous languages are rapidly disappearing, and AI could help preserve them, according to Indigenous technologists.
A profile of SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, who made a highly risky bet to acquire debt-ridden Hynix in 2012 to form SK Hynix, which is now valued at ~$80B — The race to win the AI chip market is akin to Squid Game, quipped an industry insider during a lunch meeting recently. It's intense.
Salesforce says online Black Friday sales hit $74.4B globally, up 5% YoY, and $17.5B in the US, up 7% YoY; Adobe says US online sales hit $10.8B, up 10.2% YoY — The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang.
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus says there was no legal or regulatory angle for the government to kill its Libra project and “it was 100% a political kill” — How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan's pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a
Google, which joined the Open Cloud Coalition, denies its offer of €100M+ in incentives to CISPE was linked to CISPE's antitrust complaint against Microsoft — El Reg has seen the presentation to CISPE members which sources say was intended to keep the lawsuit over licensing alive
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia says generative AI tools have helped it lower frauds by 30% and reduce call center customer wait times by 40% in 2024 — - Customer scam losses at Commonwealth Bank cut in half — CEO Matt Comyn says many more AI use cases in development
Japan allocates another $9.9B to boost its chip, quantum computing, and AI endeavors, with an undisclosed amount going to chip startup Rapidus — - Ishiba promised more than ¥10 trillion in outlays on chips, AI — Some of the funds are seen going to foundry startup Rapidus
Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reports Q3 revenue up 22.4% YoY to $12.9B, net profit up 3x YoY to $1.78B, and core delivery business up 20.2% YoY to $9.57B — China's largest food delivery firm Meituan (3690.HK) posted a bigger-than-expected 22.4% rise in third-quarter revenue on Friday, defying sluggish Chinese consumption.
Australia's Senate votes to pass a social media ban for children under 16, brushing aside lawmaker concerns on both sides; tech companies could be fined A$50M — - Australia's social media laws to be among strictest in world — Children under age of 16 will be banned from opening accounts
Cloud backup startup Eon raised $70M led by BOND at a $1.4B valuation, taking its total funding to $200M since its January 2024 founding by AWS alumni — - BOND led a $70 million funding round, Eon's third this year — Cloud backup startup was founded by Amazon Web Services alumni
Reddit COO Jen Wong says ~50% of current users are located outside the US, and the company is developing new search tools to simplify navigation on Reddit — Reddit is ramping up efforts to attract more users outside of the U.S., putting countries like India and Brazil in focus as it looks …
Alibaba releases QwQ-32B-Preview under an Apache 2.0 license and claims the “reasoning” AI model beats OpenAI's o1 models on the AIME and MATH tests — A new so-called “reasoning” AI model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has arrived on the scene. It's one of the few to rival OpenAI's o1 …
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg : Samsung says it sent the first commercial HBM4 shipments to customers, as it seeks to supply Nvidia and compete ...
