Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Meta brings its anti-scam facial recognition test to the UK "after engaging with regulators", letting celebrities opt-in "to receive the celeb-bait protection" (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Meta brings its anti-scam facial recognition test to the UK “after engaging with regulators”, letting celebrities opt-in “to receive the celeb-bait protection”  —  Last October, Meta dipped its toe into the world of facial recognition with an international test of two new tools …



Turing winners Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton warn over unsafe AI deployment, saying releasing models "without safeguards is not good engineering practice" (Financial Times)

Financial Times:
Turing winners Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton warn over unsafe AI deployment, saying releasing models “without safeguards is not good engineering practice”  —  Two pioneers of reinforcement learning have won the $1mn prize from the Association for Computing Machinery



Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win the 2024 Turing Award; their work played a vital role in the rise of AI, including ChatGPT (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Cade Metz / New York Times:
Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton win the 2024 Turing Award; their work played a vital role in the rise of AI, including ChatGPT  —  Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton developed reinforcement learning, a technique vital to chatbots like ChatGPT.



Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Sources: the US office responsible for the $52B CHIPS Act will lose ~40% of its staff, including ~40 who are probationary, as Trump cuts the federal workforce (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
Sources: the US office responsible for the $52B CHIPS Act will lose ~40% of its staff, including ~40 who are probationary, as Trump cuts the federal workforce  —  The US government office responsible for a marquee $52 billion chip subsidy program will lose about two-fifths of its staff …



Nothing unveils the $379 Phone 3A and $459 3A Pro, both with 6.77" displays, Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, and new AI tools to help organize files, shipping this month (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Nothing unveils the $379 Phone 3A and $459 3A Pro, both with 6.77" displays, Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, and new AI tools to help organize files, shipping this month  —  Because of course there's AI. … The Nothing 3A phones were just announced with a new take on the company's “make tech more fun again” ethos.



Bybit CEO Ben Zhou says 77%+ of the funds stolen remain traceable, including 417,348 ETH, and 20% have "gone dark"; the hackers converted 83% of the ETH to BTC (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk:
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou says 77%+ of the funds stolen remain traceable, including 417,348 ETH, and 20% have “gone dark”; the hackers converted 83% of the ETH to BTC  —  Some 417,348 ETH, valued at approximately $1 billion remain traceable on the blockchain after being moved using privacy-focused THORChain.



TSMC's US investment is a win-win; dropping one advanced node protects its interests, while an advanced packaging plant and R&D center boost US chip prowess (Ming-Chi Kuo)

Ming-Chi Kuo:
TSMC's US investment is a win-win; dropping one advanced node protects its interests, while an advanced packaging plant and R&D center boost US chip prowess  —  TSMC's newly announced US investment plan, unveiled on March 4, 2025, differs from the original by adding $100 billion …



Sunday, March 2, 2025

President Trump names XRP, Solana, and Cardano as three assets to be included in a strategic US crypto reserve, but does not mention Bitcoin or Ethereum (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk:
President Trump names XRP, Solana, and Cardano as three assets to be included in a strategic US crypto reserve, but does not mention Bitcoin or Ethereum  —  U.S. President Donald Trump named XRP, Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA) as three assets to be included in a U.S. strategic crypto reserve on Sunday …



Some parents are teaching their children how to use AI chatbots so they are prepared to deploy the tools responsibly as personal assistants when they are older (Aaron Mok/The Guardian)

Aaron Mok / The Guardian:
Some parents are teaching their children how to use AI chatbots so they are prepared to deploy the tools responsibly as personal assistants when they are older  —  As AI grows increasingly prevalent, some are showing their children tools from ChatGPT to Dall-E to learn and bond



How tech companies moving to or investing in Texas, attracted by lower taxes and fewer regulations on land use and labor, are transforming the state's economy (Harriet Torry/Wall Street Journal)

Harriet Torry / Wall Street Journal:
How tech companies moving to or investing in Texas, attracted by lower taxes and fewer regulations on land use and labor, are transforming the state's economy  —  Apple is latest to remake state's economy, but some headwinds loom  —  Texas notched another technology win this week when Apple …



Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry anti-US views are taking root worldwide (New York Times)

New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...