Tech Meme

Richard MacManus / The New Stack: A look at Meta’s plan to adopt ActivityPub for Threads, what makes ActivityPub attractive, and the technical challenges and social pressure Meta will face  —  Threads will soon connect its 100 million users to the fediverse via ActivityPub.  But Meta faces a number of technical and social challenges. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Reuters: Recursion, which uses AI models for drug discovery, raised $50M from Nvidia and plans to train its models on Nvidia’s platform using its own 23,000TB+ datasets  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) invested $50 million to speed up training of biotech firm Recursion’s (RXRX.O) artificial intelligence models for drug discovery … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Chainalysis: A mid-2023 crypto crime update: inflows to illicit entities drop 65% YoY, scammers net ~$3.3B less than H1 2022, and ransomware took $175.8M more than H1 2022  —  2023 so far has been a year of recovery for cryptocurrency after a chaotic 2022, with prices of digital assets like Bitcoin up over 80% on the year as of June 30. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Ercan Ersoy / Bloomberg: Banking and insurance startup Papara became Turkey’s first fintech unicorn after its Beka Finance deal; startups.watch: Turkish startups raised $111M in H1 2023  —  Turkey’s Papara became the country’s first fintech firm to reach unicorn status following a recent deal with Spain’s Beka Finance SV SA. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Cam Thompson / CoinDesk: Sound, which helps artists mint their songs as NFTs, raised a $20M Series A led by a16z with Snoop Dogg and others participating and launches out of beta  —  The company aims to help artists make a living for their music by minting their songs on-chain and selling them directly to fans. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Shira Ovide / Washington Post: Travelers can say no to a TSA facial recognition scan, but some TSA agents tell travelers the scan is required or that refusing will cause a significant delay  —  Let’s ask two questions about airports’ use of facial recognition: Is it truly voluntary?  And is it worth it? Lees verder op Tech Meme

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch: Adobe says Firefly has now generated over 1B assets on the web and in Photoshop and rolls out the web app globally with support for prompts in 100 languages  —  Adobe today announced that its Firefly web service is now available globally with support for text prompts in 100 languages … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: Google establishes an independent advisory board to manage its open-source Travel Impact Model, used to predict the per-passenger emissions produced by a flight  —  Google is setting up an independent advisory board to manage its Travel Impact Model (TIM), an open-source tool for predicting … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: London-based Prolific, which stress tests AI models through its network of 120K human participants, raised £25M co-led by Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises  —  AI, when it works well, can feel like magic, but all too often AI-based systems don’t work as they should … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Reuters: The UK CMA says it will not accept new remedies from Microsoft over Activision but would consider a restructured deal, which may require a fresh investigation  —  Britain’s competition regulator said on Wednesday that a new restructured Microsoft-Activision deal could require a fresh merger investigation. Lees verder op Tech Meme