Techmeme
June 17, 2025, 2:30 PM

Top News

David Pierce / The Verge:
Threads launches a fediverse feed and a way to search for fediverse users, with support for Mastodon and others, for users who turned on fediverse sharing  —  A dedicated feed, and better search, will make social web content much more visible in Threads.
More: Meta Newsroom, TechCrunch, Engadget, and WinBuzzer
Bluesky: @werd.ioThreads: @mosseri, @pcottle, and @quillmatiqForums: Hacker News
Tulsee Doshi / The Keyword:
Google makes Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro generally available and introduces 2.5 Flash-Lite, which it says is its most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet  —  Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro are now generally available, and we're introducing 2.5 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet.
John Koblin / New York Times:
Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time streaming was king of TV over a full month  —  In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said.
Nieman Lab:
Reuters 2025 Digital News Report: in a first, Americans' top news source is social media, at 54%, overtaking TV, at 50%, and news websites and apps, at 48%  —  Plus: The pivot to video is really happening, digital subscriptions may have peaked, and other findings from RISJ's 2025 Digital News Report.
Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:
The Information:
Sources: OpenAI wants Microsoft to take a ~33% stake in exchange for foregoing future profit rights, and seeks to modify its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft  —  Negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI over the startup's plan to restructure its for-profit unit, which requires Microsoft's approval …
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:
Memo: Intel's manufacturing VP says Intel plans to cut 15%-20% of factory staff from July “to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position”  —  Intel plans to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker's core businesses.
Bloomberg:
Sources: xAI is in talks to raise $4.3B via an equity investment on top of the $5B in debt it's trying to borrow; of its previously raised $14B, it has $4B left  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion through an equity investment on top …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Anysphere debuts a $200/month Ultra plan for Cursor with 20x more usage on AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI vs. its $20/month Pro plan  —  Anysphere launched a new $200-a-month subscription plan for its popular AI coding tool, Cursor, the company announced in a blog post on Monday.
More: WinBuzzer
Bloomberg:
Shanghai-based MiniMax open sources MiniMax-M1, a model for complicated productivity tasks that supports 1M input tokens and it says beats DeepSeek's R1-0528  —  Chinese AI upstart MiniMax released a new large language model, joining a slew of domestic peers inspired to surpass DeepSeek in the field of reasoning AI.
Financial Times:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
The US Defense Department awards OpenAI a one-year $200M contract to develop prototype AI tools that address challenges in “warfighting and enterprise domains”  —  OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Adobe debuts Firefly for iOS and Android, letting mobile users generate images and videos using text prompts and experiment with popular AI photo editing tools  —  The iPhone and Android Firefly app can sync AI image and video projects to desktops via Creative Cloud.
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Facebook renames its Videos tab as the Reels tab and says all videos on its platform will soon be shared as reels, regardless of their length or orientation  —  Facebook announced on Tuesday that all videos on its platform will soon be shared as reels, regardless of their length or orientation.
Katie Roof / Bloomberg:
Self-driving simulation software maker Applied Intuition raised $600M co-led by BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins at a $15B valuation, up from $6B in March 2024  —  The company raised $600 million from investors as it prepares for an eventual IPO. … The financing, which the company plans to announce Tuesday …

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Earlier Picks

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New York Times:
Todd Spangler / Variety: