Techmeme
December 2, 2025, 10:00 AM

Top News

The Information:
Internal memo: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares a “code red” to shift more resources to improve ChatGPT amid rising competition, delaying other plans, like ads  —  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday told employees he was declaring a “code red” to marshal more resources to improve ChatGPT …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery:
Google, with its structural advantages, is a threat to both OpenAI and Nvidia; OpenAI has a meaningful moat with 800M+ ChatGPT users, but must monetize via ads  —  OpenAI and Nvidia are both under threat from Google; I like OpenAI's chances best, but they need an advertising model to beat Google as an Aggregator.
Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Apple says AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down and will retire in spring 2026; ex-Microsoft CVP Amar Subramanya takes over, reporting to Craig Federighi  —  Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down from his position and retiring in spring 2026, Apple announced today.
Reuters:
Sources: Apple plans to not comply with India's mandate to preload a state-owned cyber safety app on all smartphones and will convey its concerns to New Delhi  —  Apple (AAPL.O) does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey …
Allison Johnson / The Verge:
Samsung unveils the Galaxy Z TriFold, with a 6.5" outer screen, a 10" inner screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC, and a 3.9mm body at its thinnest point  —  It's really called the TriFold and it's really coming to the US. … It'll launch first in Korea on December 12th, with a US launch planned for the first quarter of 2026.
Heekyong Yang / Reuters:
Nicholas Kulish / New York Times:
Michael and Susan Dell say they will deposit $250 in individual investment accounts for 25M kids, totaling $6.25B, comparing the gift to Dell's direct model  —  The tech billionaire and his wife hope other philanthropists follow their $6 billion lead in expanding the reach of soon-to-be-created “Trump accounts.”
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
A Claude user gets Claude 4.5 Opus to generate a 14,000-token document that Claude calls its “Soul overview”; an Anthropic staffer confirms its authenticity  —  This appeared to be a document that, rather than being added to the system prompt, was instead used to train the personality of the model during the training run.
Ryan Christoffel / 9to5Mac:
AWS and Google Cloud announce a jointly-built multicloud networking solution and an open interoperability spec; AWS plans a rollout with Azure “later in 2026”  —  Outages at major web hosts can have huge impacts across society, as we see often such as with the recent Cloudflare outage.
Anthropic:
Study: using the SCONE-bench benchmark of 405 blockchain smart contracts, Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 developed exploits together worth $4.6M  —  AI models are increasingly good at cyber tasks, as we've written about before.  But what is the economic impact of these capabilities?
Wall Street Journal:
The Trump administration agrees to inject up to $150M in xLight, which develops lasers for EUV machines and has Pat Gelsinger on its board, for an equity stake  —  XLight to get up to $150 million to develop ultraprecise lasers for squeezing more circuits onto semiconductors
Matthew Gault / 404 Media:
Polymarket's Ukraine war betting, based on ISW's map, generated $1M+ in volume for “Will Russia capture Myrnohrad?”; an “unauthorized” map edit resolved the bet  —  A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15.
Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal:
A profile of Cursor CEO Michael Truell, a 25-year-old who started building the AI coding tool in 2023, as some question Cursor's reliance on third-party models  —  Cursor, which launched one of the fastest-growing AI tools of all time, is at the center of the boom-or-bust debate in Silicon Valley
Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch:
Marques Brownlee plans to shut down wallpaper app Panels on December 31; Appfigures: Panels had 900K downloads and $95K in user spending since its 2024 launch  —  Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD, announced on Monday that his phone wallpaper app Panels is shutting down.
Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post:
Chinese short-video company Kuaishou launches Kling Video O1, saying it is the first multimodal AI model to unify video generation, editing, and post-production  —  Kuaishou expects the new model's abilities to drive its adoption by filmmakers, production studios, advertisers and influencers
Liana Baker / Bloomberg:
Vista Equity-backed infrastructure software company LogicMonitor acquires Catchpoint, which monitors user experiences across the internet, for $250M+ in cash  —  Vista Equity Partners-backed infrastructure software company LogicMonitor is acquiring the startup Catchpoint for more than $250 million in cash.
Emily Graffeo / Bloomberg:
Vanguard now allows ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies to be traded on its platform, reversing a longstanding position  —  Vanguard Group, the world's second-largest asset manager, has decided to allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies …

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