Techmeme
November 18, 2025, 11:50 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.’
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google Research:
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: The Hacker News and 9to5Mac
Bluesky: @mrfresh, @couts, and @agreenbergMastodon: @agreenberg@infosec.exchangeForums: Slashdot
Lance Whitney / ZDNET:
Microsoft integrates more AI features into Windows, including new Copilot skills, AI agents in the taskbar, writing assistance, and troubleshooting agents  —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — Microsoft is adding more Copilot and AI agents to Windows.  — Certain new AI features require a Copilot+ PC.
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
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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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.
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal:
Lambda, which rents access to AI chips, raised a $1.5B Series E led by TWG Global, after raising $500M in April 2024, taking its total funding to $2.3B  —  The fundraise will help the startup build its own data centers as the AI infrastructure boom shows no signs of letting up

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Earlier Picks

@artificialanlys:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Pierluigi Paganini / Security Affairs:
Cloudflare: