Profile: 5bc1c11a...
Reddit says content licensing deals with Google and OpenAI account for ~10% of its revenue, but its primary focus is on ad revenue, which grew 60% YoY in Q4 (Kendra Barnett/Adweek)
Nvidia reveals the RTX 50-series Blackwell GPUs: a $1,999 RTX 5090, a $999 RTX 5080, a $749 RTX 5070 Ti, and a $549 RTX 5070, available starting in January (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337396/nvidia-rtx-5080-5090-5070-ti-5070-price-release-date
A test of ~1,300 top games on Microsoft's new Copilot+ PCs finds only about half ran smoothly; Microsoft says some titles with demanding graphics may not play (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal)
Apple is gearing up for a battle with app makers and legislators over whether regulation of teen's social media use should happen in apps or at the device level (Wall Street Journal)
As Nvidia passes Microsoft's market cap, John Chambers, who was the CEO when Cisco passed Microsoft during the dot-com boom, says the situation now is different (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Huawei, which is considering taking a cut of in-app purchases on HarmonyOS, nears a deal with Tencent to exclude WeChat from revenue sharing (Pei Li/Bloomberg)
A Google DeepMind study involving 20 professional comedians who already use AI in their work finds LLMs struggled to produce material that was original or funny (Rhiannon Williams/MIT Technology Review)
Fengate Asset Management acquires over two-thirds stake in eStruxture, which operates data centers in 15 locations in four Canadian cities, in a $1.3B deal (Paul Vieira/Wall Street Journal)
Japan is looking to lure AI investment away from Europe and elsewhere by adopting a light-touch, industry-led approach to regulating AI (Nikkei Asia)
Sources: Google and OpenAI have stepped up staff vetting over Chinese espionage threat; Sequoia has encouraged some portfolio companies to tighten staff vetting (Financial Times)
A look at Mozilla's acquisition of Anonym, which offers "privacy-preserving" ad tools, and how Anonym might interact with a user base that tends to block ads (Thomas Claburn/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/
FOI documents: eight UK train stations scanned passenger faces for two years as part of AI trials; Amazon software was used to predict age, gender, and emotions (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-ai-cameras-emotions-uk-train-passengers/
Consensys says the US SEC is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0 and "will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions" (Ryan Ozawa/Decrypt)
https://decrypt.co/236039/sec-dropping-ethereum-investigation-consensys
The California Labor Commissioner's Office fines Amazon $5.9M for violating a 2022 state law by failing to properly inform workers of quotas at two warehouses (Caroline O'Donovan/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/18/amazon-fine-labor-law-california/
Internal memo: Meta merges its Reality Labs teams into the "Metaverse" product group that now includes Quest, and the AR product group, now called "Wearables" (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/18/24181420/meta-wearables-reality-labs-layoffs
Qilin, a cohort of Russian-speaking hackers, claims responsibility for the ransomware attack impacting London hospitals for weeks and demands $50M to end it (Ryan Gallagher/Bloomberg)
Qualcomm agrees to pay $75M to resolve a suit from shareholders accusing Qualcomm of defrauding them by hiding its anticompetitive sales and licensing practices (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)
AMD says it is looking into claims that company information was stolen in a hack, after a user on BreachForums said they breached AMD's systems (Ian King/Bloomberg)
Appfigures: iOS 18 could "Sherlock" trail apps, grammar helpers, math solvers, password managers, and emoji apps that have an estimated $393M in annual revenue (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/18/ios-18-could-sherlock-400m-in-app-revenue/
The US FTC says it has referred a complaint to the DOJ against TikTok and ByteDance over potential violations of the Children's Online Privacy Act (Reuters)