New York Times:
An investigation details how predatory men engage in the grooming of child influencers on Instagram under the guise of working as social media professionals — Photographers and other men offer to build online followings for young girls, but some are pedophiles who work with parents to sexualize them.
As Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in the $80B+ per year car chip business, sources say the use of homemade chips in Chinese cars has risen to around 15% (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal:
As Beijing pushes for self-sufficiency in the $80B+ per year car chip business, sources say the use of homemade chips in Chinese cars has risen to around 15% — U.S. objects to rival’s push for self-sufficiency in $80 billion business and opens trade probe
KoBold Metals, which uses AI to sift through historical and scientific data to identify untapped mineral deposits, raised a $537M Series C at a $2.96B valuation (Camilla Hodgson/Financial Times)
Camilla Hodgson / Financial Times:
KoBold Metals, which uses AI to sift through historical and scientific data to identify untapped mineral deposits, raised a $537M Series C at a $2.96B valuation — KoBold Metals aims to lead race for critical minerals needed for energy transition — A mining and artificial intelligence start …
Report: users on Douyin, WeChat, and other short video apps in China dropped for the first time, reaching 1.05B in June 2024, ~300M fewer than in December 2023 (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Report: users on Douyin, WeChat, and other short video apps in China dropped for the first time, reaching 1.05B in June 2024, ~300M fewer than in December 2023 — The number of short video app users in China reached 1.05 billion at the end of June, about 300 million fewer than in December last year
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes (Raquel Coronell Uribe/NBC News)
Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News:
The US Treasury sanctions Iranian and Russian entities over attempted election interference, including a Moscow entity that directed the creation of deepfakes — The Treasury Department said Iran and Russia sought to divide Americans through targeted disinformation campaigns in the 2024 elections.
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing the latter at ~CA$1.8B (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
St. Louis-based tech services company World Wide Technology agrees to acquire Canadian IT provider Softchoice in an all-cash deal valuing the latter at ~CA$1.8B — One last mega-deal closed out an eventful 2024. — On Tuesday, World Wide Technology (WWT), a tech services company based in St. Louis …
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, slop arrived, more (Simon Willison/Simon Willison’s Weblog)
Simon Willison / Simon Willison’s Weblog:
Some 2024 LLM takeaways: multimodal vision became common, LLM prices crashed, overall environmental impact worsened despite efficiency gains, slop arrived, more — A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured …
Researchers find 4.5M “stars” on GitHub repos they suspect are fake; in July, Check Point found a network of inauthentic users starring repos containing malware (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)
Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer:
Researchers find 4.5M “stars” on GitHub repos they suspect are fake; in July, Check Point found a network of inauthentic users starring repos containing malware — GitHub has a problem with inauthentic “stars” used to artificially inflate the popularity of scam …
In 2024, Intel had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of value; Broadcom stock soared 111%, its best performance ever, driven by AI revenue (CNBC)
CNBC:
In 2024, Intel had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of value; Broadcom stock soared 111%, its best performance ever, driven by AI revenue — It was a big year for silicon in Silicon Valley — but a brutal one for the company most responsible for the area’s moniker.
Ant Group’s payment app Alipay adds an AI-powered image search feature as it tries to become a super app like rival Tencent’s WeChat (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post:
Ant Group’s payment app Alipay adds an AI-powered image search feature as it tries to become a super app like rival Tencent’s WeChat — Alipay’s move shows how mobile payment platforms are striving to grow their customer base and engender user loyalty in the AI era
