Journals

Sean Michael Kerner / VentureBeat: Stability AI releases Stable LM 2 1.6B, which the company says outperforms other small AI language models on most benchmarks, including Microsoft’s Phi-2  —  Size certainly matters when it comes to large language models (LLMs)… Read More »Stability AI releases Stable LM 2 1.6B, which the company says outperforms other small AI language models on most benchmarks, including Microsoft’s Phi-2 (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)

Canalys: Indian smartphone shipments in Q4 2023 grew 20% YoY to 38.9M units, after five quarters of declines; total shipments for 2023 declined 2% YoY to 148.6M units  —  The latest Canalys research shows Indian smartphone vendors capitalized on robust… Read More »Indian smartphone shipments in Q4 2023 grew 20% YoY to 38.9M units, after five quarters of declines; total shipments for 2023 declined 2% YoY to 148.6M units (Canalys)

Joy Lo Dico / Financial Times: How urban planners in Barcelona and others are using supercomputers and AI to create digital twins of their cities to address issues like traffic congestion  —  Digital city-building has become a legitimate part of… Read More »How urban planners in Barcelona and others are using supercomputers and AI to create digital twins of their cities to address issues like traffic congestion (Joy Lo Dico/Financial Times)

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Dave Mills, who created the Network Time Protocol in 1985 to synchronize time across different computer systems and networks, died at age 85 on January 17  —  Dave Mills created NTP, the protocol that holds… Read More »Dave Mills, who created the Network Time Protocol in 1985 to synchronize time across different computer systems and networks, died at age 85 on January 17 (Benj Edwards/Ars Technica)

Bloomberg: Sources: Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $500M in commitments from investors toward a $1B goal and is aiming for a valuation of $15B to $20B  —  – Grok maker aims for valuation of at least $15 billion  — Investors… Read More »Sources: Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $500M in commitments from investors toward a $1B goal and is aiming for a valuation of $15B to $20B (Bloomberg)

Theo Wayt / The Information: Sources: Flexport is raising $260M from Shopify, one of its biggest shareholders; Shopify sold its logistics business to Flexport in exchange for equity in 2023  —  Flexport is raising $260 million from e-commerce software giant… Read More »Sources: Flexport is raising $260M from Shopify, one of its biggest shareholders; Shopify sold its logistics business to Flexport in exchange for equity in 2023 (Theo Wayt/The Information)

Bloomberg: Microsoft says Russia-linked hacking group Midnight Blizzard hacked some employee emails, including those of senior leadership in cybersecurity and legal  —  – Nation-state spies previously conducted cyber-espionage on US  — Targeted breaches hit Microsoft executives, cyber team

Paul Alcorn / Tom’s Hardware: AMD says it removed the country of diffusion labels from all new CPUs and APUs, after criticism that it removed the “Diffused in Taiwan” labels to appease China  —  The ‘Made in Malaysia’ markings will… Read More »AMD says it removed the country of diffusion labels from all new CPUs and APUs, after criticism that it removed the “Diffused in Taiwan” labels to appease China (Paul Alcorn/Tom’s Hardware)

Josh Sisco / Politico: Sources: the DOJ and FTC are in discussions over which agency can probe the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership and who can probe AI companies for scraping web content  —  One of the most high-profile tech partnerships in years… Read More »Sources: the DOJ and FTC are in discussions over which agency can probe the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership and who can probe AI companies for scraping web content (Josh Sisco/Politico)

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat: YouTube’s head of gaming Leo Olebe was among the 100 staff laid off from the company this week  —  When Google’s YouTube video division confirmed 100 layoffs on Wednesday, Leo Olebe, who was head of YouTube… Read More »YouTube’s head of gaming Leo Olebe was among the 100 staff laid off from the company this week (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)