Techmeme
December 11, 2025, 11:10 AM

Top News

OpenAI:
Disney and OpenAI sign a three-year deal to bring 200+ Disney characters to Sora; Disney makes a $1B investment in OpenAI and will become a major OpenAI client  —  Agreement marks a significant step in setting meaningful standards for responsible AI in entertainment.
Courtney Rozen / Reuters:
US state AGs sent a letter to Meta, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and nine others, warning that their chatbots' “delusional outputs” could be violating state laws  —  Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple were among the 13 companies that received a warning from a bipartisan group …
Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:
Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup planning to launch a “Twitter.new” social network, petitions the USPTO to cancel X's trademarks over “abandonment”  —  A Virginia startup calling itself “Operation Bluebird” announced this week that it has filed a formal petition …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Oracle reports Q2 revenue up 14% YoY to $16.06B, below $16.21B est., and raises its FY capex forecast to ~$50B, up from $35B as of September; ORCL drops 15%+  —  Oracle shares sank 11% in extended trading on Wednesday after the database software maker reported lower quarterly revenue …
Tim Dettmers:
An Ai2 research scientist says AGI may never emerge because such a concept ignores the physical realities and limits of computation, such as energy constraints  —  If you are reading this, you probably have strong opinions about AGI, superintelligence, and the future of AI.
Clare Duffy / CNN:
Study: 15 TikTok accounts posting AI videos of sexualized underage girls have nearly 300K followers; TikTok says that 14 of the accounts don't violate its rules  —  TikTok AI  —  AI-generated videos showing what appear to be underage girls in sexualized clothing or positions have together racked …
Bluesky: @daniloc.xyz
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Spotify says it will test Prompted Playlist, which lets users describe what they want to hear and receive a unique set of songs based on their listening history  —  Spotify announced on Wednesday that, for the first time, it's giving users more control over the streaming service's algorithm.
Hayden Field / The Verge:
A look at the Model Context Protocol and how it went from a passion project from two Anthropic employees to an industry standard managed by the Linux Foundation  —  Over the past 18 months, the largest AI companies in the world have quietly settled on an approach to building the next generation …
Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times:
Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk:
a16z crypto expands to Asia, opens a Seoul office, hires Monad's Sungmo Park as its Asia head, and calls South Korea the world's second-largest crypto market  —  What to know: … A16z crypto, a venture capital fund of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), said it is expanding into Asia …
Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI faces a wrongful death lawsuit from the estate of an 83-year-old woman killed by her son, who had engaged in delusion-filled conversations with ChatGPT  —  The estate of victim Suzanne Eberson Adams is suing OpenAI for wrongful death, and her grandson is speaking out for the first time
Carlos Garcia / Fortune:
LI.FI, which provides businesses with price comparisons of crypto exchange rates and bridging fees, raised $29M, bringing its total funding to ~$52M  —  When businesses decide to engage with crypto, they quickly discover the landscape is fragmented across numerous blockchains.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Blue Origin has worked for over a year on tech for orbital AI data centers; SpaceX plans to use upgraded Starlink satellites for AI computing payloads  —  Space companies backed by tech billionaires hope to move AI data centers off Earth  —  Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have raced …
Francisco Rodrigues / CoinDesk:
Sei partners with Xiaomi to preinstall its crypto wallet and discovery app on all new Xiaomi phones sold outside mainland China and the US, starting in 2026  —  The app will enable peer-to-peer payments, access to decentralized apps, and Web3 exploration, as well as stablecoin payments in retail stores.
Julie Bort / TechCrunch:
Israeli startup Port, which offers a proprietary developer portal competitor to Spotify's open-source Backstage, raised a $100M Series C at an $800M valuation  —  Spotify may be synonymous with music streaming, but it's also got a wildly popular developer-tool side-hustle called “Backstage.”
More: Globes and Accel
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:
Runware, which operates a developer tool platform that generates images, video, and audio in real-time, raised a $50M Series A, taking its total funding to $66M  —  Flaviu Radulesc started Runware in 2023 when he was testing a text-to-image company and realized that, though genAI tech was powerful, it was slow in generating images.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy / Invest Like The Best on YouTube:
Q&A with investor Gavin Baker of Atreides Management on the economics of AI, data centers in space, mistakes SaaS companies are making in adopting AI, and more  —  In this episode of Invest Like The Best, Patrick O'Shaughnessy sits down with investor Gavin Baker to explore the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Agnee Ghosh / Bloomberg:
Medra, which programs robots with AI to conduct and improve biological experiments, raised $52M led by Human Capital, taking its total funding to $63M  —  Medra, which programs robots with artificial intelligence to conduct and improve biological experiments, has raised $52 million to build …
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal says the Indian edtech startup's valuation has fallen from its $3.5B peak three years ago to less than $500M, and confirms M&A talks  —  Unacademy, once one of India's best-known edtech startups, may now be worth less than $500 million, 85% less …
The Information:
Sources: in recent months, Tencent aggressively hired AI researchers from ByteDance, including by offering to double their salaries, and reorganized its AI team  —  Throughout the past couple of years, as AI fever swept China's technology sector, one giant—Tencent—seemed to mostly be sitting on the sidelines.

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Featured Podcasts

Training Data:
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
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Invest Like the Best:
Andrew Huberman - The Frontier of Neurotechnology
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Big Technology Podcast:
Who Wins The AI Assistant Wars? + Why Didn't Google Build Muse?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Sources:
Reflection's founders on building a DeepSeek of the West
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
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Grit:
How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
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Lenny's Podcast:
OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT: We're entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
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