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December 4, 2025, 5:10 PM
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Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg:
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 …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Sources: Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, and expects to shift the savings from the layoffs into investments in its AR glasses
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
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.
Reuters:
Russia's Roskomnadzor says it has blocked FaceTime in Russia, claiming the service is being used to organise 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 …
Ece Yildirim / Gizmodo:
DealBook Summit: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says “the more constitutional you want to make” the US' Caribbean boat strikes “the more you're going to need” Palantir  —  Alex Karp vows to use his “whole influence” on immigration and defense policy.  —  Read Later Read Later
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
Apple replacing Alan Dye with Stephen Lemay may revive the Jobs-era “design is how it works” ethos in Apple's UI design that faded due to Jony Ive elevating Dye  —  In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company 1), I wrote:
Jay Peters / The Verge:
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.
Humeyra Pamuk / Reuters:
The Trump administration orders enhanced vetting of H-1B applicants and their families for past work in “censorship”, including fact-checking and online safety  —  The Trump administration has ordered increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers …
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
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.
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Thoughts on AI progress and why AI labs' actions hint at a worldview in which AI models will continue to fare poorly at generalization and on-the-job learning  —  Why I'm moderately bearish in the short term, and explosively bullish in the long term  —  What are we scaling?
Steven Levy / Wired:
A profile of AI hearing aid startup Fortell, which has raised $150M so far and is targeting affluent clients in NYC with a $6,800 device that uses a custom chip  —  AI-powered startup Fortell has become a secret handshake for the privileged hearing-impaired crowd who swear by the product.
Jacob Bogage / Washington Post:
Sources: Amazon, the USPS' top customer, providing $6B+ in 2025 revenue, is considering ending its deal at the end of 2026 and expanding its US delivery network  —  Amazon has long been the Postal Service's top customer, providing more than $6 billion in annual revenue to the agency in 2025.
Barbara Moens / Financial Times:
The European Commission opens a new antitrust investigation into Meta over its rollout of its AI assistant in WhatsApp; the probe will not fall under the DMA  —  Brussels concerned that US tech group's business terms may prevent competition from third-party AI providers
Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
OpenAI is testing training LLMs to produce “confessions”, or self-report how they carried out a task and own up to bad behavior, like appearing to lie or cheat  —  OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models.
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
A US federal judge rules that OpenAI must produce 20M anonymized ChatGPT chat logs in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other news outlets  —  OpenAI must produce millions of anonymized chat logs from ChatGPT users in its high-stakes copyright dispute with the New York Times …
Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg:
DealBook Summit: Dario Amodei suggests some AI companies are taking on too much risk by “YOLO-ing” and committing to spend hundreds of billions on data centers  —  Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei suggested that some artificial intelligence companies are taking …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
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.
Christina Kyriasoglou / Bloomberg:
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 …
The Information:
Sources: Fluidstack, an AI cloud provider that is aiding Google's effort to expand access to its TPUs, is in talks to raise $700M+ led by Situational Awareness  —  Fluidstack, a cloud provider aiding Google's AI chip push, is in talks to raise more than $700 million in new financing, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
Stephen Nellis / Reuters:
Nvidia says GB200 Blackwell AI servers, which pack 72 chips in one unit, boost performance 10x over H200 servers for MoE models like Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) on Wednesday published new data showing that its latest artificial intelligence server can improve the performance …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:10 PM ET, December 4, 2025.

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From Mediagazer

New York Times:
Sources: WaPo is reversing course on its plans not to send any sports staffers to cover the Winter Olympics in Italy and now expects to send four journalists

Max Tani / Semafor:
An interview with Minnesota Star Tribune editor Kathleen Hennessey about becoming the central hub of local information amid a surge of immigration operations

Ben Fritz / Wall Street Journal:
Disney's Zootopia 2 grossed $624.6M in China through January 25, nearly as much as every other Hollywood movie released in the country in 2025 combined

More News

Earlier Picks

AI Alignment Forum:
Google DeepMind's mechanistic interpretability team details why it shifted from fully reverse-engineering neural nets to a focus on “pragmatic interpretability”
Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: last summer, Sam Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, for OpenAI to secure a controlling stake; the talks are no longer active
Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal:
Snowflake and Anthropic announce a multiyear $200M deal to make Anthropic's Claude models available on Snowflake's platform and deploy AI agents for enterprises
Sam Sabin / Axios:
The US DOJ indicts two Virginia twin brothers, Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, for allegedly deleting 96 US government databases while working as Opexus contractors
The Hacker News:
React discloses a React Server Components flaw that allows unauthenticated remote code execution; Wiz says 39% of cloud environments have vulnerable instances
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