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June 17, 2025, 3:50 PM
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Top 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.
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.io.  Threads: @mosseri, @pcottle, and @quillmatiq.  Forums: Hacker News
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%
CNBC:
Sources: Meta and EssilorLuxottica plan AI-powered smart glasses under Oakley and Prada brands; they will be aimed at athletes, and the Oakleys may cost ~$360  —  Meta and EssilorLuxottica plan to release versions of their AI-powered smart glasses under the Oakley and Prada brands, CNBC has learned.
Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:
Amazon plans to hold Prime Day 2025 from July 8 at 12:01am PT through July 11, lasting four days instead of the usual two and exclusive to Prime subscribers  —  Prime members will have even longer than usual to score some of the year's best tech deals.
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 …
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.
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 …
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.
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
Financial Times:
German defense tech startup Helsing raised €600M led by Daniel Ek's Prima Materia, sources say at a ~€12B valuation, bringing its total funding to €1.37B  —  Defence start-up valued at €12bn to become one of Europe's most valuable tech groups
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 …
Jez Corden / Windows Central:
Microsoft and AMD announce a “strategic, multi-year partnership” to design custom silicon for a number of devices, including next-generation Xbox consoles  —  Xbox President Sarah Bond shared an update on Xbox consoles today, confirming their ongoing partnership with AMD for first-party hardware …
Steve Kopack / NBC News:
In a memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AI “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” over time  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the retail and tech giant “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.”
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.
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training starting July 1, and enforces a new age limit of 16 for users globally  —  Social networks are bolstering their terms of service against scrapers and bots that crawl the website to train AI models.  Days after Elon Musk-owned X updated …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:50 PM ET, June 17, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Dade Hayes / Deadline:
AMC Networks says it is reducing its 1,800 person workforce by “less than 5%” through voluntary buyouts

Brier Dudley / Local News Initiative:
How three Northwest newspapers have remained independent and avoided closure: selling to employees, diversifying print operations, and nurturing future owners

Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:
Sony Pictures Television and CBS settle their legal battle over the distribution of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune; Sony will gradually take over distribution

More News

Rohan Paul / @rohanpaul_ai:
[Thread] A US paper shows the best frontier LLM models solve 0% of hard coding problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI, domains where expert humans still excel

Earlier Picks

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”
Katie Notopoulos / Business Insider:
The Meta AI app now shows a pop-up warning before users share to the public Discover feed, after reports showed accidentally shared chats with personal info
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
Germany, Europol, and Eurojust take down Archetyp Market, a darknet drug marketplace active since May 2020 with 612K+ users and €250M+ in Monero transactions
New York Times:
WhatsApp rolls out ads in its Updates tab, a first for the app, and Meta will collect some data to target the ads, but says it has no plans to put ads in chats
Todd Spangler / Variety:
The Trump Organization teases the $499 “T1 Phone”, a gold phone “designed and built” in the US, and Trump Mobile, an MVNO that uses AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile
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