~techmeme | Bookmarks (1030)

Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal: ByteDance says it has no plans to sell TikTok, responding to a report suggesting that it is considering scenarios for selling a majority stake in US TikTok  —  The company was responding to a report by The Information that it is considering scenarios for selling a majority stake in TikTok's U.S. business

Vlad Savov / Bloomberg: TechInsights teardown: Huawei's Pura 70 uses a 7nm chip, similar to the Mate 60, and a Kirin 9010 processor, a newer version of the Mate 60 Pro's Kirin 9000s  —  - The Pura 70 relies on a 7nm chip similar to the Mate 60's  — Washington has stepped up efforts to curb Chinese chipmaking

Financial Times: Sources: the US is urging Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands to tighten export controls to China, including stopping engineers from servicing Chinese fabs  —  Washington urges Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands to tighten supply of tools and technology

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk: New rules that allow UK law enforcement agencies to seize, destroy, or transfer crypto holdings used for crime before making an arrest take effect  —  Law enforcement agencies will no longer need to wait for an arrest to seize crypto.  — New powers that will make it easier …

Katie Robertson / New York Times: Former Twilio CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson buys The Onion from G/O Media, via his new company Global Tetrahedron; Lawson had long wanted to buy the site  —  The satirical news website was bought by a new firm in Chicago that took inspiration for its name, Global Tetrahedron, from a book written by The Onion's staff.

CoinDesk: Consensys sues the US SEC over what it calls the “unlawful seizure of authority” over ethereum, after receiving a Wells notice for its MetaMask wallet product  —  By offering their MetaMask wallet software, the SEC says Consensys is acting as an unregistered securities broker.

Chris Miller / Financial Times: The CHIPS Act has been surprisingly successful so far, giving the US greater scope to meet critical infrastructure needs in the event of a crisis in East Asia  —  More than halfway through its incentives spending, the US will have far greater scope to manage shocks

Bloomberg: In a subpoena, Elon Musk asked Helen Toner to hand over documents about her departure from OpenAI's board and how OpenAI decides when a technology achieves AGI  —  Elon Musk has stepped up his court fight with OpenAI by demanding documents from ex-board member Helen Toner …

Jennifer Maas / Variety: Roku reports Q1 revenue up 19% YoY to $882M, vs. $848.62M est., a net loss of $50.9M, compared to $193.6M YoY, and 81.6M active accounts, up 1.6M from Q4 2023  —  Roku reported its first-quarter 2024 earnings Thursday, revealing the company reached 81.6 million active accounts …

Scott Farquhar / Work Life: Atlassian's co-CEO Scott Farquhar plans to step down on August 31, 2024, after 23 years at the company; he will remain a board member and a special advisor  —  Sharing a note I sent to our Atlassian employees earlier today  —  It's with a full but heavy heart that I share with you all today …

Ashley Capoot / CNBC: Snap reports Q1 revenue up 21% YoY to $1.19B, vs. $1.12B est., DAUs up 10% YoY to 422M, a net loss of $305M, compared to $329M YoY; SNAP jumps 24%+ after hours  —  WATCH NOW  —  Snap stock soars following beat on revenue, earnings and daily active users  —  Snap reported first-quarter results …

Akash Sriram / Reuters: Alphabet announces its first-ever dividend and authorizes the repurchase of up to an additional $70B of its Class A and Class C shares  —  Alphabet (GOOGL.O) announced its first-ever dividend of 20 cents per share on Thursday, returning capital when the Google parent is spending billions …

Todd Spangler / Variety: YouTube's Q1 ad revenue climbs 21% YoY to $8.1B, vs. $7.72B estimated, its highest Q1 total to date  —  YouTube keeps eating up more share of the advertising pie: The Google-owned video giant posted $8.1 billion in ad sales for the first quarter of 2024, its highest Q1 total to date.

Jordan Novet / CNBC: Microsoft reports Q3 Intelligent Cloud revenue up 21% YoY to $26.71B, vs. $26.26B est., with Azure and other cloud services revenue up 31% YoY  —  WATCH NOW  —  Microsoft beats on top and bottom line, Azure continues to accelerate  —  Microsoft shares rose 5% in extended trading on Thursday …

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Intel reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to $12.72B, vs. $12.78B est., Data Center and AI up 5% to $3B, and Q2 revenue guidance below est.; INTC drops 7%+ after hours  —  Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, holding an Intel chip, speaks during the 54th Annual Meeting of The Semafor 2024 World Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on April 17, 2024.

New York Times: A look at Saudi Arabia's spending blitz to become an AI superpower, which has put the kingdom in the middle of an escalating global competition over AI  —  More than 200,000 people converged on the Leap tech conference in the desert outside Riyadh in March.Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Filing: Swiggy, which has a ~45.8% share of the Indian food delivery market, secures shareholder approval for a potential $1.25B IPO, slated for later this year  —  Swiggy plans to raise $1.25 billion in an initial public offering and has secured approval from its shareholders …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: ByteDance execs have previously considered TikTok's global operations to be worth ~50% of the company's overall value, which would put it above $100B  —  The answer depends partly on whether TikTok bundles the U.S. and international businesses, and if it includes its coveted algorithm

Financial Times: K Krithivasan, the CEO of Indian IT giant TCS, says there'll be “minimal” need for call centers in as soon as a year, as AI chatbots take over much of the work  —  Chatbots will soon take over much of the work of human agents, forecasts chief of Indian IT group

Karissa Bell / Engadget: On Meta's Q1 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads now has more than 150M MAUs, up from 130M in February 2024  —  Mark Zuckerberg has speculated it could be Meta's next billion-user app.  —  Meta's Threads app now has more than 150 million monthly users, an increase of about 20 million new users since February.

Shubham Sharma / VentureBeat: Snowflake announces Arctic, an LLM optimized for enterprise tasks such as SQL generation, coding, and instruction following, with an Apache 2.0 license  —  Today, Snowflake announced the launch of Arctic, a large language model (LLM) optimized for complex enterprise workloads such as SQL generation …

Alex Heath / The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg says Meta AI assistant has been “tried” by “tens of millions of people” and it will take Meta several years to make money from generative AI  —  The generative AI gold rush is underway — just don't expect it to create profits anytime soon.

Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia: TSMC unveils a new chip manufacturing technology called A16 and says it plans to start producing its ultra-advanced 1.6nm chips by 2026  —  Taiwan chip titan aims to secure leading position and capture AI demand  —  TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. says it will start production …

Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: Reddit announces that its Dynamic Product Ads, which use “shopping signals” to automatically show relevant ads to users, are entering public beta globally  —  Reddit says its “communities are naturally commercial.”  —  Reddit has made it clear that it's an ad-first business.