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Google rolls out enhanced scam detection to Google Messages beta users and previews other safety features, like an option to blur images that may contain nudity (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Google rolls out enhanced scam detection to Google Messages beta users and previews other safety features, like an option to blur images that may contain nudity (Abner Li/9to5Google)

OpenAI and Microsoft announce a $10M AI local news project operated by the Lenfest Institute, starting with five US metro news organizations (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Qualcomm partners with Google to help automakers develop AI voice assistants and unveils two new chips to power dashboards and self-driving features (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Canva releases new generative AI features, including Dream Lab, an image generator powered by Leonardo.ai's Phoenix model; Canva acquired Leonardo.ai in July (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Sources: Apple is working on a new App Store-like app dedicated to games that will integrate with the user's Game Center profile (Filipe Espsito/9to5Mac)

OpenAI hires Scott Schools, most recently the chief ethics and compliance officer at Uber, as its chief compliance officer (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

Asana launches AI Studio in early access, a no-code tool for designing AI agents that can be integrated into teams' existing workflows (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

TollBit, which recently launched a content monetization marketplace for publishers and AI companies, raised a $24M Series A led by Lightspeed Ventures (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Unisys, Check Point, Avaya, and Mimecast to pay a combined $7M to the SEC, which says they negligently downplayed the impact of the SolarWinds supply chain hack (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Penguin Random House, UMG, and SAG-AFTRA join 11.5K+ signatories of an open letter saying the "unlicensed use of creative works" to train AI must not be allowed (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

Source: Polymarket is rechecking user info, especially of big spenders, to make sure users are not US based; user Fredi9999 has bet $18M+ on GOP outcomes so far (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

Sources: TechInsights took apart at least one of Huawei's latest AI chips and found an Ascend 910B made by TSMC, which says it stopped Huawei shipments in 2020 (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

GM reports Cruise lost $435M in Q3 2024, down from a $791M loss in Q3 2023, and had $26M in net sales and revenue and $442M in total costs and expenses (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large, an 8B-parameter model that makes 1MP images, and 3.5 Large Turbo, and plans to launch 3.5 Medium on October 29 (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Anthropic claims that its new Sonnet 3.5 model scores 49% on SWE-bench Verified, up from 33.4% and "higher than all" public models, and debuts Claude 3.5 Haiku (Anthropic)

Anthropic releases a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model that can interact with desktop apps by imitating mouse and keyboard input via a "computer use" API, now in beta (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

A UK court says prominent Saudi dissident Yahya Assiri can sue Saudi Arabia in London court over claims of targeting him with NSO Group's Pegasus (Sam Tobin/Reuters)

TSMC says it alerted the US to a potential attempt to have it manufacture AI chips for Huawei, circumventing export controls; sources: the chips resembled 910Bs (Kathrin Hille/Financial Times)

WhatsApp plans to let users save contacts in the app soon, after previously relying on the local contact book, and developed a new IPLS encrypted storage system (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

iPad mini (2024) review: fast A17 Pro chip, delightful size, and Pencil Pro support, but less powerful than other iPads, outdated Touch ID and camera placement (David Pierce/The Verge)

Epic launches its Fab marketplace, a unified place to get digital assets like environments and animations, offering an 88% revenue share to creators (Jay Peters/The Verge)

X data: Elon Musk-backed America PAC spent $166K between July 8 and October 1 to run 59 ads on X targeting swing voters in six states, yielding 32M+ impressions (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)

Netflix shut down AAA game studio "Team Blue", which hired industry veterans and seemed set to pursue a big-budget multi-device strategy, amid a gaming shake-up (Stephen Totilo/Game File)

Accel: Klarna alumni have founded 62 new startups, more than any $1B+ European fintech startup; Revolut alumni founded 49, and Wise and N26 alumni had 33 each (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

Document: Chinese startup Horizon Robotics, which makes autonomous driving software and hardware, raised $696M in a Hong Kong IPO, before its October 24 listing (Bloomberg)

Jack Sweeney says Meta suspended Instagram and Threads accounts tracking celebrities' private jets, including Zuckerberg's; Meta cites a "risk of physical harm" (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Paytm reports Q2 net profit of ~$111M, its first-ever profit, helped by the sale of its ticketing business in August 2024, and revenue down 34% YoY to ~$197.4M (Dimpal Gulwani/Reuters)

A look at some use cases of Anthropic's Claude Artifacts, which lets users create interactive single-page apps via prompts (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Austin-based SchooLinks, whose SaaS offers college and career readiness resources for K-12 students, raised a $80M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity (Zoya Hasan/Forbes)

Mumbai-based Neysa, a provider of AI infrastructure to enterprise customers, raised a $30M Series A co-led by NTTVC, Z47, and Nexus Venture Partners (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

The US DOD plans an initiative to recruit CTOs and other senior tech professionals as uniformed, paid reservists to help in security, data analytics, and more (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Disney no longer lets new and returning customers sign up for and buy subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple's App Store, avoiding Apple's cut (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Lawsuit: a civil rights organization says a Virginia town installing Flock cameras violated the Fourth Amendment, making citizens moving untracked "impossible" (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

Meta is testing facial recognition to combat celebrity scam ads and to help enable faster recovery of compromised Facebook and Instagram accounts (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)

Ireland adopts an Online Safety Code for video-sharing platforms headquartered in the country, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, effective next month (Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch)

The Biden admin unveils proposed rules for restricting the transfer of US citizens' sensitive data, including biometric and genomic info, to adversarial nations (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

EssilorLuxottica CFO says Ray-Ban Meta glasses are a "success" in the US and the bestseller "in 60%" of Ray-Ban stores in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (David Heaney/UploadVR)

Qualcomm unveils the 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile SoC, with two prime and six performance CPU cores, claiming 45% faster CPU and NPU over the 8 Gen 3, and more (Robert Triggs/Android Authority)

Blade Runner 2049's producer sues Musk, Tesla, and WBD for allegedly using AI to create imagery close to the film to promote Cybercab, despite a denied request (Brooks Barnes/New York Times)

Stripe announces a finalized deal to buy stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge; Michael Arrington says the deal is worth $1.1B; Bridge has raised $54M (Jamie Crawley/CoinDesk)

Dow Jones and New York Post sue AI startup Perplexity for alleged copyright infringement and say it hasn't replied to a July 2024 letter about copyright issues (Todd Spangler/Variety)

xAI launches an API for "grok-beta" priced at $5 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens; it is unclear which AI model "grok-beta" might be (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

UK-based Sophos plans to acquire Atlanta-based cybersecurity company Secureworks for ~$859M, expected to close in early 2025; Dell owns ~79% of Secureworks (Joe Warminsky/The Record)

Sources: Tim Cook helped Nike secure Elliott Hill as CEO in September, and has carved out a role as one of Nike's closest outside advisers during a turnaround (Bloomberg)

AMD unveils Zen 5-based X3D desktop CPUs, arriving November 7, but offers few details and no price, ahead of Intel's Core Ultra 200-series launch on October 24 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Zip, which uses AI to help businesses manage buying goods and services, raised $190M led by BOND at a $2.2B valuation, up from $1.5B in May 2023 (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

Q with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi on AI, tax, and more; in a follow-up, an exec said "at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted" (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Seattle-based Carbon Robotics, which offers an AI-powered deweeding robot for farmers, raised a $70M Series D led by BOND, taking its total funding to $157M (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Q with Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on his Nobel Prize being "a watershed moment for AI", biology, AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic Labs, drug programs, and more (Financial Times)

A profile of and interview with Tim Cook on being "perfectly fine with not being first", running Apple, Vision Pro, AI, the Design Studio, group chats, and more (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Hands-on with Apple's hearing health features for AirPods Pro 2, set for iOS 18.1: hearing aids work well, hearing protection in all modes, and a hearing test (Chris Welch/The Verge)

ByteDance says it fired an intern in its ad tech team for "maliciously interfering" with AI training, and says operations were unaffected by their actions (Joo da Silva/BBC)

Investigation: a Russian espionage and hacking campaign targeted Georgia for years and breached its Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, central bank, and more (Bloomberg)

Microsoft unveils 10 new AI agents for its enterprise-focused Dynamics 365 apps covering sales, finance, and more, ahead of Salesforce's Agentforce availability (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

IBM launches its open source Granite 3.0 models, including 2B and 8B general purpose versions and Mixture-of-Experts models, aimed at enterprise customers (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)

ABI expects there to be 8,400 global data centers by 2030, as investors capitalize on the AI boom; Statista projects the industry will be worth $624B by 2029 (Nicholas Fearn/Financial Times)

Tracxn: Indian health tech-related startups raised $3.7B since 2022, about half of the $7.4B raised in the sector across the Asia Pacific region (Bloomberg)

How OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are using different approaches to improve "model behavior", an emerging field shaping systems' responses and characteristics (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

A look at the Harris campaign's outreach to the tech sector, as it tries to convince companies that she'll chart her own course while avoiding policy specifics (Washington Post)

At a San Francisco protest, blind Uber and Lyft users say the companies aren't doing enough to stop drivers from turning away passengers with visual impairments (Wired)

Sources: Perplexity is looking to raise ~$500M to double its valuation to $8B or more; Perplexity's annualized revenue is ~$50M, up from ~$10M in March 2024 (Wall Street Journal)

After Elon Musk promises to give $1M to one swing state voter per day who signs his PAC's petition, PA's governor says "law enforcement could take a look" (Alexandra Marquez/NBC News)

Polymarket users have bet ~$2B on predicting the next US president; Polymarket has excluded US users since 2022 as part of a settlement with federal regulators (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)

Sources: some at Apple think it is over two years behind the leaders in generative AI; a closer look at changes in Apple's HR and hardware engineering groups (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

After allegations of poor working conditions on MrBeast's Amazon Studios show Beast Games, industry insiders call for more safety oversight on creator-run sets (Daysia Tolentino/NBC News)

Anthropic evaluates four "sabotage" threat vectors for its Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models and finds that "minimal mitigations are sufficient" (Anthropic)

In a letter, key US lawmakers urged Japan to strengthen restrictions on sales of chipmaking equipment to China or risk facing US curbs on Japanese companies (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

Kazakhstan-based Kaspi.kz agrees to acquire a majority share, or 65.4%, of Turkish e-commerce platform Hepsiburada for ~$1.13B, expected to close in Q1 2025 (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)

How Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming cracked an encrypted ZIP file containing the code for a system that helped ANC members communicate safely under apartheid (Steven Levy/Wired)

Students, academics, and developers say AI writing detectors are most likely to falsely flag essays written in a more generic manner as written by AI tools (Bloomberg)

Meta Quest 3S teardown: uses Quest 2's same LCD panel and cheap Fresnel optics, replaces Quest 3's depth sensor with two IR flood illuminators, and more (Shahram Mokhtari/iFixit News)

Six months after the bitcoin halving, some miners hold their bitcoin, while others spend more on developing AI data centers and see the largest stock gains (David Pan/Bloomberg)

How Waymo is converting locals and attracting tourists in San Francisco to pull ahead in the robotaxi race, with ~300 vehicles in the city and global ambitions (Wall Street Journal)

Q with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on how internet traffic surge during COVID helped it build an AI-ready "connectivity cloud", internet balkanization, more (Om Malik/Crazy Stupid Tech)

Inside the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative AI film competition sponsored by AWS and FBRC.ai giving filmmakers AI tools and three weeks to submit a short (Marah Eakin/Wired)

A historical look at Microsoft's work in AI, from research to real-world applications, recent progress, competition, challenges, and the future (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

01.ai, DeepSeek, and other Chinese companies are reducing costs to create AI models by focusing on smaller training data sets, as they deal with export controls (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

DJI sues the US DOD for adding the drone maker to a list designating it a Chinese military company, says the DOD didn't engage on the issue for over 16 months (K Oanh Ha/Bloomberg)

In a filing, WP Engine asks a court in Northern California to issue a preliminary injunction and restore its access to the WordPress.org open source repository (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Fuji Soft's board decided to keep backing KKR's ~$4B buyout offer despite Bain's $4.2B bid, in a rare battle between PE titans over a Japanese software company (Financial Times)