Open Links In New Tab
Mobile Archives Advertise Site News
Techmeme
December 15, 2025, 8:25 PM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter

Top News

Natalie Alms / Nextgov/FCW:
The Trump administration launches the US Tech Force to recruit ~1,000 staffers from Apple, Meta, xAI, and others for two-year stints to modernize the government  —  After pushing hundreds of thousands of government employees to leave their posts and dismantling many government technology units …
Financial Times:
Sources: the UK government wants Apple, Google, and others to block explicit images at the OS level by default to protect kids and have adults verify their ages  —  Home Office expected to encourage companies to introduce controls  —  The UK government wants technology companies …
Reuters:
Internal docs: Meta earned $18B+ in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10%+ of its global revenue, with $3B+ linked to fraudulent ads, like for scams  —  A Reuters investigation reveals the owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp decided to accept high levels of fraudulent advertisements from China.
Arsheeya Bajwa / Reuters:
Nvidia acquires SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open-source AI workload management system, and says it will keep distributing Slurm on an open-source basis  —  Nvidia (NVDA.O) said on Monday it acquired AI software firm SchedMD, as the chip designer doubles down on open-source technology …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Shares of Tesla closed at a 2025 high on Monday after the company confirmed it is testing driverless vehicles in Austin without a human safety operator  —  Nearly six months after launching a limited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas with safety drivers in the car, the company …
TechCrunch:
Ford plans to repurpose its US battery manufacturing capacity to launch a battery energy storage business for data centers, amid a shift away from large EVs  —  Amid Ford's shift away from making large electric vehicles, the automaker is adding a new product line to find a home for its batteries.
Emilia David / VentureBeat:
Nvidia launches Nemotron 3, a family of AI models using a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture and the Mamba-Transformer design, in 30B, 100B, and ~500B sizes  —  Nvidia launched the new version of its frontier models, Nemotron 3, by leaning in on a model architecture that the world's …
Reshmi Basu / Bloomberg:
Lidar manufacturer Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and says it reached a deal to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M  —  Luminar Technologies Inc, which manufactures laser-based sensors for cars, filed for bankruptcy shortly after it lost a contract with Swedish carmaker Volvo Car AB.
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal:
PayPal says it has filed applications to establish PayPal Bank to provide loans more efficiently to US small businesses and reduce its reliance on third parties  —  The payments company says it filed applications with the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the FDIC to establish PayPal Bank
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge:
GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023  —  General Motors is racing to add more native apps to make up for its decision to block Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026  —  One of the lesser-known features that Google offers is a “Dark Web Report” monitoring tool, but it's about to shut down in early 2026.
Emilia David / VentureBeat:
Allen Institute for AI launches Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, claiming they are “the first fully open byte-level language models”, built on its Olmo 3 models  —  Enterprises that want tokenizer-free multilingual models are increasingly turning to byte-level language models to reduce brittleness in noisy or low-resource text.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare 2025 report: global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, ChatGPT was the most popular AI service, global traffic from Starlink grew 2.3x, and more  —  Internet connectivity is critically important to everyday communication, commerce, entertainment, and transportation.
Bloomberg:
iRobot files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reaches a restructuring agreement to hand over control to its secured lender and main Chinese supplier Shenzhen Picea  —  iRobot Corp., the company that revolutionized robot vacuum cleaners in the early 2000s with its Roomba model …
Bloomberg:
How crypto entrepreneur Bill Zanker helped Trump and Melania launch memecoins; as of December 10, $TRUMP was down 92% since its peak and $MELANIA was down 99%  —  No one wants to claim credit for helping the first couple launch cryptocurrencies that plummeted more than 90% from their peak.
More: Mother Jones.  X: @maxabelson.  Bluesky: @carnage4life, @kuromaku.com, and @petertl
Caroline Hyde / Bloomberg:
AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery raised a $130M Series B led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst at a $1.3B valuation, taking its total funding to $225M  —  Chai Discovery, an artificial intelligence drug-discovery company backed by OpenAI, has raised $130 million to build a “computer-aided design suite” for molecules.
Ben Glickman / Wall Street Journal:
Teneo survey of 350+ public-company CEOs: 68% plan to spend more on AI in 2026 than in 2025, <50% of AI projects generated more returns than they cost, and more  —  Teneo's annual survey finds 68% of chief executives plan to increase AI spending in 2026  —  Chief executives …

Sponsor Posts

ElevenLabs:
ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs  —  You know us for voice.  Now meet ElevenAgents — featuring Expressive Mode, our most human-sounding AI voice technology in 70+ languages with ultra-low latency.  Hear it for yourself.
Intel:
5G's most deployed platform  —  Powering live networks with built-in Inference across Core and RAN.  That's the power of Intel Inside®
Zoho:
Build vs Buy Embedded Analytics: The Decision That Defines Your Product Roadmap  —  Every SaaS product team eventually hits the analytics wall.  Your customers want insights inside your app.  Your roadmap has no room to spare.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

The Talk Show With John Gruber:
 'Apple at 50', With John Siracusa
The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.
Big Technology Podcast:
 OpenAI President Greg Brockman: AI Self-Improvement, The Superapp Bet, Path To AGI, Scaling Compute
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
 Brad Lightcap from OpenAI
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
 Why We Need to Pay Attention to Elon Musk Again
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Cheeky Pint:
 Compliance at scale and why TAM is a distraction with Christina Cacioppo of Vanta
Stripe cofounder John Collison interviews founders, builders, and leaders over a pint.
Subscribe to Cheeky Pint.
Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
 Ryan Roslansky: Turning AI Anxiety into Skills for the Future of Work
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
Add your podcast here
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:25 PM ET, December 15, 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

New York Times:
Sources: an Iranian-aligned militia in Iraq is seeking the release of several detained militia members in exchange for freeing journalist Shelly Kittleson

Neel Dhanesha / Nieman Lab:
Three independent journalists experiment with a 30-day bundle of their newsletters for $8.50, half the normal price, using a service called Trustfnd

Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:
Netflix averaged 3M viewers for its Opening Night MLB game March 25, a bit short of NBC and Peacock's MLB broadcast the next night, with 3.2M viewers

More News

Luke James / Tom's Hardware:
LG smart TV owners say a webOS update pinned Microsoft Copilot to the home screen, with no apparent way to remove the app; LG unveiled an AI TV strategy at CES
Rose Henderson / Bloomberg:
Memo: Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos lay out Netflix's WBD offer, moving to quell concerns about job losses and the end of theater releases, after Paramount's bid
Anna Heim / TechCrunch:
Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret videos to add synced sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index Ventures and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed
Naomi Nix / Washington Post:
Tech whistleblowers like Yaël Eisenstat say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives and careers; Meta is in litigation with Sarah Wynn-Williams

Earlier Picks

Financial Times:
DTCC: credit default swaps tied to a handful of US tech groups have climbed 90% since early September, as investors seek ways to protect against an AI debt bust
John Reynolds / Tech.eu:
London-based PolyAI, which makes call center AI voice assistants, raised an $86M Series D led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla, after raising $50M in 2024
Mike Baker / New York Times:
US volunteer fire departments are scrambling to find software amid shrinking options and higher costs, as companies backed by private equity dominate the market
Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine:
Interviews with copywriters on generative AI's impact: their work used for training, layoffs, wages and rates in free fall, freelancers losing clients, and more
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter