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December 4, 2025, 5:20 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
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 …
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.
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:
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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
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 …
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.
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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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 5:20 PM ET, December 4, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: Byron Allen sold his 10.7% Starz stake over August and September, netting a bit less than $45M; he acquired it from Steve Mnuchin's Liberty 77 for $25M

Wall Street Journal:
MGM Resorts says talks with People Incorporated are over, after each weighed buying the other; MGM amended its voting deal with People, which owns ~27% of MGM

Reuters:
Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta plans to shut down after 30+ years, following pressure from Russian authorities and the persecution of its reporters

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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