Tech Meme

Semafor: Sources: Microsoft is in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI at a $29B valuation, taking 75% of OpenAI’s profits until the investment is recouped and then owning 49%  —  Microsoft has been in talks to invest $10 billion into the owner of ChatGPT, the wildly popular app that has thrilled casual users … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Microsoft unveils VALL-E, a text-to-speech AI model trained on 60K hours of English speech that can simulate a person’s voice from three seconds of sample audio  —  Text-to-speech model can preserve speaker’s emotional tone and acoustic environment.  —  On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Microsoft acquires Fungible, which makes data processing units for data centers and has raised over $300M; reports from December say the deal is worth ~$190M  —  In December, reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Damir Yalalov / Metaverse Post: VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model can duplicate everyone’s voice in three seconds  —  Since the release of the first text-to-speech (TTS) model, researchers have been looking for ways to improve the way these systems generate speech.  The latest model from Microsoft … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Juro Osawa / The Information: Sources: Douyin e-commerce spending in China grew 76% YoY to ~$208B in 2022; TikTok users in Southeast Asia more than quadrupled their spending to $4.4B in 2022  —  TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is making inroads in e-commerce.  Consumers in China last year spent 1.41 trillion yuan … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: Southwest Airlines’ recent meltdown exposed an over-reliance on aging crew-assignment software SkySolver, forcing the company to return to manual scheduling  —  The airline industry is long overdue for a tech overhaul that takes full advantage of the cloud and data integration, analysts say Lees verder op Tech Meme

Clive Thompson / MIT Technology Review: A profile of blockchain auditing service CertiK, which inspects smart contracts to help clients like Yuga Labs avoid critical bugs that can lead to lost crypto  —  Programming errors on the blockchain can mean $100 million lost in the blink of an eye.  Ronghui Gu and his company CertiK are trying to help. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Daniel Gilbert / Washington Post: A look at the wave of US doctors and telehealth startups prescribing ketamine online, aided by looser pandemic-inspired federal rules for controlled substances  —  People can take the drug at home, thanks to federal action during the pandemic.  Some experts worry it’s now too easy to get. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times: Berlin-based Flink, one of the last independent grocery delivery startups, hit €400M in 2022 sales and expects to be profitable in 2023; Flink has raised $700M+  —  Berlin-based start-up aims for profits next year as rivals struggle for cash  —  Flink, one of Europe’s … Lees verder op Tech Meme

Debby Wu / Bloomberg: Chinese media: Foxconn says its Zhengzhou plant is operating with ~200,000 workers, or ~90% capacity, back to around reported normal levels, after disruptions  —  Foxconn Technology Group has brought the world’s largest iPhone plant to about 90% of anticipated peak capacity … Lees verder op Tech Meme