Techmeme
December 20, 2025, 5:20 PM

Top News

Mariella Moon / Engadget:
Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices; Google previously planned to complete the transition by the end of 2025  —  The transition from Assistant to Gemini will continue into 2026.  —  Google wanted to remove Assistant from most Android phones …
Business Insider:
Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules  —  - Google and Apple are advising some employees with visas not to travel outside the US, per memos viewed by Business Insider.
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.
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Security company Koi finds browser extensions with 8M+ total installs that collected users' conversations with AI chatbots and sold them for marketing use  —  Browser extensions with more than 8 million installs are harvesting users' complete and extended AI conversations and selling …
April Roach / CNBC:
S&P Global: data center deals hit $61B globally in 2025; debt issuance nearly doubled YoY to $182B, with Meta raising $62B debt since 2022, ~50% of that in 2025  —  Global data centers dealmaking surged to hit another record high this year, driven by a rush to build out the infrastructure required for energy-intensive AI workloads.
Jon Keegan / Sherwood News:
A look at Meta's 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, with the first phase opening in 2028; an analysis shows sales tax breaks on GPUs could total $3.3B+  —  $10 billion of investment.  Code names to disguise projects and companies.  Mixed opinions.  Skyrocketing property values.
OpenAI:
OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system  —  We introduce evaluations for chain-of-thought monitorability and study how it scales with test-time compute, reinforcement learning, and pretraining.
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.
Dan Gallagher / Wall Street Journal:
Micron projects FY Q2 sales to grow over 2x YoY to $18.7B and adjusted operating income to rise over 5x to $11.3B, signaling higher memory chip prices in 2026  —  The AI gold rush is creating shortages for memory chips that could raise prices for all sorts of gadgets
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 …
More: Tech in Asia
Bloomberg:
China issues new rules letting online merchants set their own prices across platforms for goods and services they sell, effective April 10, 2026, for five years  —  China issued rules for governing pricing-related practices of internet platform operators to safeguard the interests of consumers and merchants …
More: Tech in Asia

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Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:
Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority: