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Techmeme
December 19, 2025, 10:50 PM
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Ashley Gold / Axios:
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the RAISE Act into law; the AI safety bill's text was modified earlier to more closely resemble California's SB 53  —  Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed the RAISE Act into law Friday, making New York the latest state to have broad safety rules for the most advanced AI models.
Blake Brittain / Reuters:
Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third parties  —  Google on Friday sued a Texas company that “scrapes” data from online search results, alleging it uses hundreds of millions …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
The Delaware Supreme Court rules that Elon Musk's 2018 Tesla CEO pay package, worth around $56B when it vested, must be restored, ending a years-long fight  —  Elon Musk's 2018 CEO pay package from Tesla, worth some $56 billion when it vested, must be restored, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled Friday.
Andrej Karpathy / karpathy:
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more  —  2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs.  The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising …
Beatrice Nolan / Fortune:
Cursor-developer Anysphere acquires code review startup Graphite and says Graphite will continue operating as an independent product  —  The AI coding market is booming amid enterprise adoption.GRAPHITE  —  Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal …
Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI rolls out an update to let users adjust ChatGPT's characteristics, including how warm or enthusiastic it is, and its use of headers, lists, and emojis  —  OpenAI is making it easier to edit emails with ChatGPT, too. … OpenAI will now give you the ability to dial up — or down — ChatGPT's warmth and enthusiasm.
Financial Times:
Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew says ByteDance's US entities will retain direct control over core US revenue drivers, including ecommerce, ads, and marketing  —  Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to invest in new data security joint venture as part of Trump-brokered deal
Karl Bode / Techdirt:
The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China
Echo Wang / Reuters:
Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras plans to file for a US IPO as soon as next week, targeting a Q2 2026 listing, after withdrawing its prior IPO filing in October  —  AI chip maker Cerebras Systems is preparing to file for a U.S. initial public offering as soon as next week …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Netflix acquires avatar creation platform Ready Player Me to let its subscribers carry their personas and fandoms across games; the startup raised $72M  —  After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it's acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform based in Estonia.
Physical Intelligence:
AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence says it saw improvements in its vision-language-action model by including human video data in the fine-tuning process  —  HUMAN DATA  —  NEW ROBOT CAPABILITIES  —  One of the most exciting (and perhaps controversial) phenomena in large language models is emergence.
Bloomberg:
Sources: ByteDance is on track for ~$50B profit in 2025 after generating a ~$40B net income in the first three quarters, surpassing its internal target for 2025  —  ByteDance Ltd. is on track for profits of roughly $50 billion in 2025, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader …
Emily Mullin / Wired:
Source: Sam Altman's Merge Labs, which seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of LA-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech  —  Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit.
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Sources: Resolve AI, which is developing an autonomous site reliability engineering tool, raised a Series A at multiple valuation tiers, including at $1B  —  Resolve AI, a startup developing an autonomous site reliability engineer (SRE), a tool that automatically maintains software systems …
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
Coinbase sues Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan over attempts to regulate prediction markets, arguing that the markets fall under CFTC's jurisdiction  —  Coinbase Global Inc. said it is suing the US states of Michigan, Illinois and Connecticut over their attempts to regulate prediction markets.
Jacob Adelman / Barron's Online:
Source: Tencent has secured access to Nvidia's Blackwell chips through a cloud service operated by Tokyo-based Datasection  —  encent Holdings 700 +1.49% has secured access to high-end Nvidia NVDA +3.93% artificial-intelligence chips that remain restricted to Chinese buyers …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:50 PM ET, December 19, 2025.

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From Mediagazer

Rajeev Syal / The Guardian:
A UK jury convicts two Iranians of assisting Iranian intelligence in a plan to “eliminate” journalists at London-based Persian broadcaster Iran International

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Source: NBC News will stop airing one hour of primetime programming on the NBC News Now streaming service, eliminating the Stay Tuned show and a handful of jobs

Bloomberg:
Sources: Internet Brands, which owns WebMD and CarsDirect, is exploring a roughly $3.5B debt package to refinance its existing loans

More News

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company:
Sequoia's Shaun Maguire speculated in an X post that an innocent Palestinian student was behind the Brown University shooting; the post was later deleted

Earlier Picks

Miranda Bryant / The Guardian:
Denmark says Russia was behind “destructive and disruptive” cyberattacks on a water utility in 2024 and DDoS attacks in the lead-up to local November elections
Bloomberg:
Sources: the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut ties with FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, eliminating its main funding source
Alex Heath / Sources:
Meta's head of Threads Connor Hayes says that fediverse compatibility isn't a top priority, but it is something that “we're maintaining”
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority:
Samsung unveils the Exynos 2600, the world's first smartphone SoC built on a 2nm Gate-All-Around process, expected to power some Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models
Vicky Ge Huang / Wall Street Journal:
The administrator winding down Do Kwon's Terraform Labs sues Jump Trading for $4B, alleging it unlawfully profited from and contributed to Terraform's collapse
Jake Bleiberg / Bloomberg:
Amazon CSO Stephen Schmidt says subtle keystroke data lag, measuring 110ms instead of the expected tens of milliseconds, helped catch a North Korean IT worker
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