Techmeme
November 18, 2025, 11:25 AM

Top News

Emma Roth / The Verge:
Google unveils Gemini 3, its “most intelligent” and “factually accurate” model yet, with improvements across coding and reasoning, and offering less “flattery”  —  The flagship Gemini 3 Pro model is coming to the Gemini app and Search, with improvements across coding, reasoning, and less ‘flattery.’
Andrew Griffin / The Independent:
Cloudflare says “a fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved”, after a major outage impacted X, ChatGPT, and others from 11:48am UTC  —  Outage comes around a month after Amazon Web Services outage also took much of the internet offline
Dane Knecht / @dok2001:
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht says “we failed our customers and the broader Internet” when a Cloudflare issue “impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us”  —  I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I
BBC:
Microsoft:
Anthropic commits to buy $30B in Azure capacity in a new deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, which commit to invest up to $5B and $10B, respectively, in Anthropic  —  Anthropic to scale Claude on Azure Anthropic to adopt NVIDIA architecture NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Researchers demonstrated a major WhatsApp flaw that exposed 3.5B users' phone numbers, with 57% also showing a profile photo; Meta fixed the enumeration problem  —  By plugging tens of billions of phone numbers into WhatsApp's contact discovery tool, researchers found “the most extensive exposure …
More: 9to5Mac and The Hacker News
Bluesky: @mrfresh, @couts, and @agreenbergMastodon: @agreenberg@infosec.exchangeForums: Slashdot
Ted Litchfield / PC Gamer:
Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer, Interplay co-founder, programmer, and the first formally recognized US Space Invaders champion, died at 62 in October  —  Heineman's cancer fundraiser is now collecting for her funeral.  —  Game developer Rebecca Heineman has died after being diagnosed with cancer last month.
Raquel Coronell Uribe / NBC News:
Larry Summers steps back from public commitments after his Jeffrey Epstein emails were released; OpenAI still lists Summers as a board member and didn't comment  —  Sen. Elizabeth Warren had called for institutions affiliated with Summers, who was treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, to sever ties with him.
Financial Times:
CoinGecko: the total market value of 18K+ crypto coins is down 25% since October 6, wiping out ~$1.2T; bitcoin fell 28% to $89.5K, its lowest level since April  —  Bitcoin drops 28% in six weeks as worries over AI stocks spill into digital assets and high-octane bets backfire
xAI:
xAI unveils Grok 4.1, saying its hallucination rate is 3x less compared to its previous models and Grok 4.1 Thinking holds the top spot on LMArena's Text Arena  —  Grok 4.1 is now available to all users on grok.com, 𝕏, and the iOS and Android apps.  It is rolling out immediately …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko steps down from the decentralized social network as part of its transition to a nonprofit structure governed by a board  —  Mastodon's creator, Eugen Rochko, is stepping down as CEO of the open source, decentralized social network and X rival …
Reuters:
Xiaomi reports Q3 revenue up 22.3% YoY to ~$15.9B, below ~$16.4B est., and net profit up 80.9% YoY to ~$1.59B, above ~$1.5B est., driven by AI and EV revenue  —  China's Xiaomi (1810.HK) reported a 80.9% jump in third-quarter profit on Tuesday as the world's third-largest smartphone maker doubled …
Jay Peters / The Verge:
Roblox plans to require all users to undergo an age estimation process to access chat features, starting January 2026, in an effort to enhance child safety  —  After scrutiny over its ability to protect children on the platform, Roblox is making a big change.
Steven Rosenbush / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI and Intuit sign a multiyear deal, set to generate $100M+ in OpenAI revenue, in which Intuit will deepen its use of OpenAI models and launch ChatGPT apps  —  Intuit sees the opportunity to expose its products, such as TurboxTax and QuickBooks, to a broader range of potential users on ChatGPT
Samuel Stolton / Bloomberg:
The EU Commission opens an investigation into AWS and Azure to determine whether they should fall under the DMA and says they “occupy very strong positions”  —  Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.'s Azure are under investigation by the European Union to determine whether …
@artificialanlys:
Artificial Analysis announces AA-Omniscience, a benchmark for knowledge and hallucination across 40+ topics; Claude 4.1 Opus takes first place in its key metric  —  Announcing AA-Omniscience, our new benchmark for knowledge and hallucination across >40 topics, where all but three models are more likely to hallucinate than give a correct answer Embedded knowledge in language models is important for many real world use cases. Without [image]
Josh Sisco / Bloomberg:
Filing: the US FTC ends its review of SoftBank's $6.5B acquisition of chip designer Ampere, granting an early termination; SoftBank announced the deal in March  —  The US Federal Trade Commission has ended its review of SoftBank Group Corp.'s acquisition of semiconductor designer Ampere Computing LLC …

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More News

Martin Arnold / Financial Times:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Pierluigi Paganini / Security Affairs:
Cloudflare:
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: