Techmeme
January 2, 2026, 1:50 PM

Top News

Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times:
Yann LeCun says Llama 4's “results were fudged a little bit”, and that the team used different models for different benchmarks to give better results  —  The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up
Bloomberg:
xAI's Grok says “lapses in safeguards” led it to create sexualized images of minors in response to user prompts on X; the images have been taken down  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has created sexualized images of people including minors on the social media platform X …
Dan Wang:
Tech analyst Dan Wang reflects on the Chinese Communist Party vs. Silicon Valley, AI and manufacturing, and how China and the US are building the future  —  One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Pebble unveils Pebble Round 2 smart watch with a rounded screen and basic health and activity tracking but no heart rate monitor, shipping in May for $199  —  Shortly after bringing back the Pebble smart watch and launching a low-cost AI smart ring, Pebble is readying yet another new product: the Pebble Round 2.
Rishabh Jaiswal / Reuters:
SpaceX plans to lower its Starlink satellites from orbiting at ~550km to ~480km in 2026 to improve space safety and reduce the likelihood of debris collisions  —  Starlink will begin a reconfiguration of its satellite constellation by lowering all of its satellites orbiting at around 550 km …
Rachel Clun / BBC:
UK crypto buyers are required to share their account details with tax officials starting January 1 or face penalties, as the UK seeks to collect unpaid taxes  —  People buying cryptocurrency in the UK now need to share their account details or face penalties, in changes that came into effect on 1 January.
Bill Allison / Bloomberg:
Filing: OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman donated $25M to Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc., in H2 2025; Crypto.com operator Foris DAX donated $20M  —  President Donald Trump's super political action committee raised $102 million in the second half of 2025, fueled by eight-figure donations …
More: HuffPost
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information:
Sources: OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its AI-powered personal device, which is expected to be largely audio-based  —  OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its eventual release of an AI-powered personal device, said a person with knowledge of the effort.
Kieran Smith / Financial Times:
How Nokia has reinvented itself for the AI revolution by expanding into cloud services, data centers, and optical networks, and by partnering with Nvidia  —  Finnish company that brought the world the 3310 has reinvented itself for the AI revolution  —  Few digital sounds have burrowed into the human brain like the Nokia ringtone.
Vincent Chow / South China Morning Post:
DeepSeek researchers detail mHC, a new architecture they used to train 3B, 9B, and 27B models, finding it scaled without adding significant computational burden  —  DeepSeek has published a technical paper co-authored by founder Liang Wenfeng proposing a rethink of its core deep learning architecture

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More News

Bloomberg:
Sneha Kumar / Reuters:
Philosopher Count:

Earlier Picks

Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal: