Techmeme
November 18, 2025, 12:25 PM

Top News

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google unveils Gemini 3, its “most intelligent” and “factually accurate” model yet, with improvements across coding and reasoning, and offering less “flattery”  —  The flagship Gemini 3 Pro model is coming to the Gemini app and Search, with improvements across coding, reasoning, and less ‘flattery.’
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google says Gemini 3 Pro scores 1,501 on LMArena, above 2.5 Pro, and demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanity's Last Exam and GPQA Diamond  —  Google today announced Gemini 3 with the goal of bringing “any idea to life.”  The first model available in this family …
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
Google launches Antigravity, an “agent-first” coding tool that leverages Gemini 3 Pro and third-party models, available in free public preview  —  Available in free preview now, it supports browser control and provides proof of its work.
New York Times:
Google says Gemini 3 Pro is integrated into the Gemini app, which now has 650M MAUs, and powers Google Search's AI Mode conversational search feature  —  After several years of criticism that it was lagging behind in artificial intelligence, Google is turning up its competition with smaller start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Google Research:
Andrew Griffin / The Independent:
Cloudflare says “a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved”, after a major outage impacted X, ChatGPT, and others from 11:48am UTC  —  Outage comes around a month after Amazon Web Services outage also took much of the internet offline
Dane Knecht / @dok2001:
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht says “we failed our customers and the broader Internet” when a Cloudflare issue “impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us”  —  I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I
BBC:
Microsoft:
Anthropic commits to buy $30B in Azure capacity in a new deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, which commit to invest up to $5B and $10B, respectively, in Anthropic  —  Anthropic to scale Claude on Azure Anthropic to adopt NVIDIA architecture NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic
Lance Whitney / ZDNET:
Microsoft integrates more AI features into Windows, including new Copilot skills, AI agents in the taskbar, writing assistance, and troubleshooting agents  —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — Microsoft is adding more Copilot and AI agents to Windows.  — Certain new AI features require a Copilot+ PC.
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Ted Litchfield / PC Gamer:
Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer, Interplay co-founder, programmer, and the first formally recognized US Space Invaders champion, died at 62 in October  —  Heineman's cancer fundraiser is now collecting for her funeral.  —  Game developer Rebecca Heineman has died after being diagnosed with cancer last month.
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Researchers demonstrated a major WhatsApp flaw that exposed 3.5B users' phone numbers, with 57% also showing a profile photo; Meta fixed the enumeration problem  —  By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp's contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure …
More: The Hacker News, 9to5Mac, and WebProNews
Bluesky: @mrfresh, @agreenberg, and @coutsForums: Slashdot
Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News:
Larry Summers steps back from public commitments after his Jeffrey Epstein emails were released; OpenAI still lists Summers as a board member and didn't comment  —  Sen. Elizabeth Warren had called for institutions affiliated with Summers, who was treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, to sever ties with him.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko steps down from the decentralized social network as part of its transition to a nonprofit structure governed by a board  —  Mastodon's creator, Eugen Rochko, is stepping down as CEO of the open source, decentralized social network and X rival …
Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI and Intuit sign a multiyear deal, set to generate $100M+ in OpenAI revenue, in which Intuit will deepen its use of OpenAI models and launch ChatGPT apps  —  Intuit sees the opportunity to expose its products, such as TurboxTax and QuickBooks, to a broader range of potential users on ChatGPT
Financial Times:
CoinGecko: the total market value of 18K+ crypto coins is down 25% since October 6, wiping out ~$1.2T; bitcoin fell 28% to $89.5K, its lowest level since April  —  Bitcoin drops 28% in six weeks as worries over AI stocks spill into digital assets and high-octane bets backfire
xAI:
xAI unveils Grok 4.1, saying its hallucination rate is 3x less compared to its previous models and Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top spot on LMArena's Text Arena  —  Grok 4.1 is now available to all users on grok.com, 𝕏, and the iOS and Android apps.  It is rolling out immediately …
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
The EU Commission opens an investigation into AWS and Azure to determine whether they should fall under the DMA and says they “occupy very strong positions”  —  Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure are under investigation by the European Union to determine whether …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Roblox plans to require all users to undergo an age estimation process to access chat features, starting January 2026, in an effort to enhance child safety  —  After scrutiny over its ability to protect children on the platform, Roblox is making a big change.
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Sphere, which raised a $4.3M seed as an edtech marketplace, pivots and raised a $21M Series A led by a16z to develop an AI tax compliance software service  —  As Nicholas Rudder built his last startup, an educational marketplace called ScholarSite, he kept running into the same problem: tax.
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman is leaving, after 17 years at Meta; Clara Shih, who joined in November 2024 to lead its Business AI unit, is exiting  —  Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman is leaving the social networking leader, one of several leadership changes …

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