Bloomberg:
BMW partners with Alibaba to use Qwen-powered AI cockpit tech from Alibaba-backed Banma in its upcoming car models for the Chinese market, rolling out next year — BMW will adopt AI cockpit technology from Alibaba-backed Banma for its upcoming models tailored for the Chinese market, the companies said Wednesday in a joint statement.
Financial Times:
Docs: China’s new energy rules could block the use of Nvidia’s H20 chips in new data centers if implemented strictly, risking Nvidia’s $17B/year China business — US chipmaker could suffer $17bn-a-year hit to business if energy efficiency rules are enforced more strictly
Reuters:
The US adds six subsidiaries of Inspur Group, China’s top cloud provider, and dozens of other Chinese entities to its export blacklist; Inspur was added in 2023 — The U.S. added six subsidiaries of Inspur Group, China’s leading cloud computing and big data service provider …
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Anthropic convinced a California federal judge to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by UMG and other music publishers to train Claude — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block …
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Character.AI adds a Parental Insights feature that lets teens send reports of their chatbot usage to their parents, including which bots they are talking to — They won’t see the contents of the chats. … Chatbot service Character.AI is adding a new ‘Parental Insights’ feature …
TechCrunch:
Leaked email: Block lays off 931 employees, ~8% of staff, and moves 193 managers to individual contributor roles, in a second reorganization in just over a year — Fintech Block laid off 931 people, roughly 8% of the company’s staff, on Tuesday, according to a leaked message from the company seen by TechCrunch.
Erin Brodwin / Axios:
NY-based Silna, which provides healthcare revenue cycle management software, emerges from stealth with a $22M Series A co-led by Accel and Bain and a $5M seed — Revenue automation company Silna Health raised $27 million in seed and Series A funding, CEO Jeffrey Morelli tells Axios exclusively.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Qualcomm has complained to antitrust regulators in the EU, US, and South Korea that Arm is hurting competition by restricting access to its technology — In private meetings and confidential filings to regulators on three continents, Qualcomm is arguing that Arm — its biggest supplier …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison’s Weblog:
In an addendum to the GPT-4o system card, OpenAI says it is not blocking the image generation of adult public figures and that public figures can opt out — Introducing 4o Image Generation. When OpenAI first announced GPT-4o back in May 2024 one of the most exciting features was true multi-modality …
Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:
Nielsen: YouTube was the #1 TV distributor in February, making up 11.6% of all US TV; viewers over age 50 accounted for 36% of time spent watching YouTube on TV — The service supplants Disney atop the Nielsen list for the second time. — YouTube commanded more TV time than any other media provider …
