Mon. 08/03 – The TikTok, Microsoft, Trump Ban...

Bots passed human web traffic for the first time, per Cloudflare's CEO. The S&P 500 rejected fast-entry for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX. Anthropic embedded engineers at the NSA, Meta hid face-recognition code in its app, and Cambridge trialed the first AI-designed vaccine. Cloudfla ...  Show more

Google released Gemma 4 12B, a multimodal model that runs locally on 16GB devices. TSMC's CEO warned chip supply won't meet demand for years. Ramp raised $750M at $44B, and Anthropic says 80%+ of its merged code is now Claude-authored. Google releases Gemma 4 12B, an 11.95B-param ...  Show more

Calls to ban TikTok or force its sell-off from its parent company ByteDance are gaining momentum, especially after reports of ByteDance’s surveillance of several U.S. journalists. And could Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI mark the end of Google’s search monopoly?

Plus: ...

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Vision Pro review rating, changes to the TikTok app, streaming news, and more. Further reading: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens Apple’ ...  Show more

After months of anticipation, President Biden finally signed the TikTok divestment into law this week. It will force ByteDance to either sell TikTok to another company within a year, or see the app banned from US app stores. Is this a wise move to rid control of the social app fr ...  Show more

Stories discussed this week; Election tech was supposed to clean up the Iowa caucus … Iowa's caucus fracas shows we're still too ignorant about how … America is bad at voting (it isn’t just Iowa) US attorney general says tech and telecom industries should invest in Huawei competi ...  Show more