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 …



Saturday, March 1, 2025

Sources: China is instructing its top AI leaders to avoid visiting the US over fears they could be detained as bargaining chips or divulge confidential info (Yoko Kubota/Wall Street Journal)

Yoko Kubota / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: China is instructing its top AI leaders to avoid visiting the US over fears they could be detained as bargaining chips or divulge confidential info  —  Beijing increasingly views cutting-edge technology through national-security lens, putting executives on tighter leash



DeepSeek says its V3 and R1 models' cost of inferencing relative to sales during a 24-hour-period on February 28 put "theoretical" profit margins at 545% (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

Saritha Rai / Bloomberg:
DeepSeek says its V3 and R1 models' cost of inferencing relative to sales during a 24-hour-period on February 28 put “theoretical” profit margins at 545%  —  Chinese artificial intelligence phenomenon DeepSeek revealed some financial numbers on Saturday, saying its “theoretical” …



Despite breakthroughs from Amazon and Microsoft, quantum computing is far from its silicon moment, with no consensus on the best way to build practical qubits (Richard Waters/Financial Times)

Richard Waters / Financial Times:
Despite breakthroughs from Amazon and Microsoft, quantum computing is far from its silicon moment, with no consensus on the best way to build practical qubits  —  Despite breakthroughs from Amazon and Microsoft, the industry is still a long way from building practical machines



Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; it was last valued at $1.2B in 2024 (Meir Orbach/CTech)

Meir Orbach / CTech : Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; ...