Techmeme
December 19, 2025, 10:35 PM

Top News

Ashley Gold / Axios:
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the RAISE Act into law; the AI safety bill's text was modified earlier to more closely resemble California's SB 53  —  Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed the RAISE Act into law Friday, making New York the latest state to have broad safety rules for the most advanced AI models.
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties  —  Google on Friday sued a Texas company that “scrapes” data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions …
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 …
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 …
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:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI rolls out an update to let users adjust ChatGPT's characteristics, including how warm or enthusiastic it is, and its use of headers, lists, and emojis  —  OpenAI is making it easier to edit emails with ChatGPT, too. … OpenAI will now give you the ability to dial up — or down — ChatGPT's warmth and enthusiasm.
Echo Wang / Reuters:
Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras plans to file for a US IPO as soon as next week, targeting a Q2 2026 listing, after withdrawing its prior IPO filing in October  —  AI chip maker Cerebras Systems is preparing to file for a U.S. initial public offering as soon as next week …
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.
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.
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 …
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.
Emily Mullin / Wired:
Source: Sam Altman's Merge Labs, which seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of LA-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech  —  Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit.
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.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Sources: Resolve AI, which is developing an autonomous site reliability engineering tool, raised a Series A at multiple valuation tiers, including at $1B  —  Resolve AI, a startup developing an autonomous site reliability engineer (SRE), a tool that automatically maintains software systems …
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 …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything.  Cape doesn't.  —  Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more.  Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho Expense MCP: Turn conversations into expense workflows  —  Artificial intelligence (AI) has already changed how we search for information, summarize documents, and analyze data.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
Demis Steps Down, Apple's Memory Problem, Microsoft's Clever Trick
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Hard Fork:
The White House's Secret A.I. Rules + The State of Model Alignment With METR's Chris Painter + The Final Hot Mess Express
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
Subscribe to Hard Fork.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
Oliver Darcy on Status, Bari Weiss, and Why Media Reporters Are Too Soft
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Training Data:
Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Invest Like the Best:
Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:35 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.

More News

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:

Earlier Picks

Miranda Bryant / The Guardian:
Bloomberg:
Alex Heath / Sources:
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority:
Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg: