Sources: Meta is considering deep budget cuts to its metaverse efforts in 2026, potentially as high as 30% and most likely including layoffs as early as January  —  Meta Platforms Inc.'s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse …

Apple says general counsel Kate Adams and policy chief Lisa Jackson will retire, and Jennifer Newstead, Meta's former chief legal officer, will replace Adams  —  Apple's general counsel, Kate Adams, and its vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson …

Two studies suggest AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, especially by presenting many claims, regardless of accuracy  —  New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people's political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV.

US and Canadian authorities warn that Chinese hackers are using the Brickstorm malware to install backdoor access within unnamed government and IT entities  —  Chinese-linked hackers used sophisticated malware to penetrate and maintain long-term access to unnamed government …

Google rolls out Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, after saying in November it needed “extra time for safety evaluations”  —  After previewing last month with the launch of Gemini 3 Pro, the new Deep Think mode is now available for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

HPE reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $9.68B, vs. $9.94B est., Server revenue down 5% to $4.5B, and forecasts Q1 revenue below est.; HPE drops 8%+ after hours  —  Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.N) forecast first-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Thursday, signaling cautious enterprise spending.

A Polymarket trader netted $1M+ in 24 hours, mostly by placing suspiciously accurate bets on Google's 2025 Year in Search rankings  —  Boaz Sobrado is a fintech leader and entrepreneur.  —  A Polymarket trader known as AlphaRaccoon has ignited controversy after allegedly netting over $1 million …

Google Cloud partners with Replit to expand the use of Google's cloud offerings and AI models and to jointly support AI use cases for enterprise customers  —  - Google Cloud is locking in a multi-year partnership with AI coding startup Replit  — Google is betting on Replit as a breakout platform …

Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan's trade deal  —  SoftBank billionaire seeks to build ‘Trump Industrial Parks’ on federal land, using hundreds of billions of capital from the Japan trade deal

Russia's Roskomnadzor says it has blocked FaceTime in Russia, claiming the service is being used to organize and “carry out terrorist attacks in the country”  —  Russia has blocked Apple's (AAPL.O) video-calling app FaceTime, the state communications watchdog said on Thursday …

Micro1, which helps AI labs find experts for data annotation, says it has crossed $100M in annualized revenue and fielded investment offers at a $2.5B valuation  —  Ali Ansari's decision to turn micro1's AI recruitment assistant into a data labeling business spiked the company's valuation …

Physicist Steve Hsu says he has published a peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper whose main idea came from GPT-5  —  I think I've published the first research article in theoretical physics in which the main idea came from an AI - GPT5 in this case. The physics research paper itself (on QFT and state-dependent quantum mechanics) has been published in Physics Letters B. I've written an [image]

Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads raised ~$1.13B in the year's second-largest onshore IPO, valuing it at ~$7.6B, with the retail portion oversubscribed 2,750x  —  Moore Threads Technology Co., a leading Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker, surged in its Shanghai trading debut …

Pine, which offers an AI agent to automate digital chores, like making calls, handling emails, and operating software to complete tasks, raised a $25M Series A  —  Pine, a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of an AI agent for consumers' digital chores, closed a $25m Series A funding round.

Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks  —  New data from Similarweb reveals massive spikes in traffic and app downloads, while the user base expands to include older generations.

Google debuts Titans, an architecture combining RNN speed with transformer performance for real-time learning, able to scale effectively to a 2M+ context window  —  Ali Behrouz, Student Researcher, Meisam Razaviyayn, Staff Researcher, and Vahab Mirrokni, VP and Google Fellow, Google Research

CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI  —  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company's efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results.

The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October  —  A U.S. agency said on Thursday it has asked Waymo to answer more questions after Texas officials said the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) …

TBPN signs a partnership with the NYSE, giving the video podcast the same on-floor access enjoyed by major financial networks such as CNBC  —  The stock exchange's latest media partnership extends its push into new formats while giving TBPN a high-profile East Coast home base.  —  ADD ON GOOGLE

Amazon plans to release its $630 Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and $500 Kindle Scribe on December 10, after announcing them in September, but won't offer preorders  —  The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and upgraded Kindle Scribe will be available to order soon.

Apple announces its 2025 App Store Award winners and names visual planner Tiimo as the iPhone App of the Year; many of the winning apps have AI integrations  —  Apple on Thursday shared its annual list of App Store Award winners, continuing its tradition of celebrating the best apps and games of the past year.

Microsoft will increase prices for commercial Office subscriptions on July 1, 2026, including a 33% jump for front-line worker plans like Microsoft 365 F1  —  Microsoft said Thursday that it will increase the prices of Office productivity software subscriptions for commercial and government clients on July 1.

Docusign reports Q3 revenue up 8% YoY to $818.4M, vs. $807.1M est., and forecasts Q4 revenue below estimates; DOCU drops 6%+ after hours  —  DocuSign Inc.'s AI-powered IAM platform helped the electronic-signature platform provider's third-quarter results beat estimates …

Lumia, which uses AI to analyze interactions between autonomous agents and humans, raised an $18M seed led by Team8  —  Lumia, which lets companies see AI usage, raised an $18 million seed round led by Team8, co-founders Omri Iluz and Bobi Gilburd tell Axios Pro.

Phia, founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe to develop an AI search engine accessed via an extension for Chrome and Safari, raised $30M at a $180M valuation  —  Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft Corp.'s billionaire founder Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, is raising $30 million …

A look at “TSMC Village” in North Phoenix, as TSMC brings skilled workers from Taiwan who struggle with adapting to a sprawling suburbia and summer temperatures  —  Skilled workers from Taiwan engaged in the chip industry have found ways to ease the transition to America while making an imprint on Greater Phoenix.