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December 19, 2025, 5:35 PM
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Financial Times:
Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing  —  Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to invest in new data security joint venture as part of Trump-brokered deal
Karl Bode / Techdirt:
The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China  —  There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it's somehow the worst …
Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more  —  2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs.  The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising …
Jacob Adelman / Barron's Online:
Source: Tencent has secured access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips through a cloud service operated by Tokyo-based Datasection  —  encent Holdings 700 +1.49% has secured access to high-end Nvidia NVDA +3.93% artificial-intelligence chips that remain restricted to Chinese buyers …
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times:
Sources: China is retrofitting older models of ASML's DUV machines to produce advanced smartphone and AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls
Chris McGuire / Council on Foreign Relations:
US approving Nvidia H200 exports to China is based on the idea that Huawei is a viable competitor, but data shows the gap between Nvidia and Huawei is widening
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M  —  After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it's acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia.
Financial Times:
Sources: UK officials believe China was behind the October cyber attack on the UK's Foreign Office, which aimed to access tens of thousands of sensitive files  —  The UK's Foreign Office was the victim of a major cyber attack in October, which officials believe was carried out by Chinese hackers.
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
Cursor-developer Anysphere acquires code review startup Graphite and says Graphite will continue operating as an independent product  —  The AI coding market is booming amid enterprise adoption.GRAPHITE  —  Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal …
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Coinbase sues Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan over attempts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that the markets fall under CFTC's jurisdiction  —  Coinbase Global Inc. said it is suing the US states of Michigan, Illinois and Connecticut over their attempts to regulate prediction markets.
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
The Delaware Supreme Court rules that Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla CEO pay package, worth around $56B when it vested, must be restored, ending a years-long fight  —  Elon Musk's 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority:
Samsung unveils the Exynos 2600, the world's first smartphone SoC built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, expected to power some Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models  —  Galaxy S26 could get Samsung's boldest chip yet: Meet the 2nm Exynos 2600.  —  •  —  TL;DR
Physical Intelligence:
AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence says it saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process  —  HUMAN DATA  —  NEW ROBOT CAPABILITIES  —  One of the most exciting (and perhaps controversial) phenomena in large language models is emergence.
Bloomberg:
Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025  —  ByteDance Ltd. is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader …
Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
Meta board member Dina Powell McCormick, an ex-top adviser to Trump, steps down after joining in April; source: she is considering retaining an advisory role  —  Dina Powell McCormick, a former top adviser to President Donald Trump, is stepping down from the board of Meta Platforms Inc. just eight months after she joined.
Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg:
The US Senate confirms Trump pick Michael Selig as chairman of the CFTC, as lawmakers consider legislation to give the agency more control over digital assets  —  The US Senate on Thursday night confirmed Michael Selig as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Travis Hill …

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:35 PM ET, December 19, 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

Todd Spangler / Variety:
Filing: Amazon's spending on content, including music, sports rights, and licensed and produced TV and film, rose 10% YoY to $22.4B

Natalie Korach / @nataliekorach:
Sources: Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray spiked a story prepared by the newspaper's media desk covering the historic layoffs

Financial Times:
Sources: WaPo is losing about $100M per year but aiming to break even by the end of 2026, which could unlock fresh funding from Jeff Bezos

More News

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire speculated in an X post that an innocent Palestinian student was behind the Brown University shooting; the post was later deleted

Earlier Picks

Miranda Bryant / The Guardian:
Denmark says Russia was behind “destructive and disruptive” cyberattacks on a water utility in 2024 and DDoS attacks in the lead-up to local November elections
Bloomberg:
Sources: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut ties with FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, eliminating its main funding source
Alex Heath / Sources:
Meta's head of Threads Connor Hayes says that fediverse compatibility isn't a top priority, but it is something that “we're maintaining”
Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal:
The administrator winding down Do Kwon's Terraform Labs sues Jump Trading for $4B, alleging it unlawfully profited from and contributed to Terraform's collapse
Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:
Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt says subtle keystroke data lag, measuring 110ms instead of the expected tens of milliseconds, helped catch a North Korean IT worker
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