Techmeme
December 20, 2025, 11:05 PM

Top News

Mariella Moon / Engadget:
Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices; Google previously planned to complete the transition by the end of 2025  —  The transition from Assistant to Gemini will continue into 2026.  —  Google wanted to remove Assistant from most Android phones …
Business Insider:
Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules  —  - Google and Apple are advising some employees with visas not to travel outside the US, per memos viewed by Business Insider.
April Roach / CNBC:
S&P Global: data center deals hit $61B globally in 2025; debt issuance nearly doubled YoY to $182B, with Meta raising $62B debt since 2022, ~50% of that in 2025  —  Global data centers dealmaking surged to hit another record high this year, driven by a rush to build out the infrastructure required for energy-intensive AI workloads.
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:
The RAISE Act requires AI companies with $500M+ in revenue to publish safety protocols and disclose safety incidents within 72 hours, with fines up to $3M  —  Days after President Trump moved to block states from regulating AI, New York's governor signs what the bill's sponsor calls the strongest AI safety law in the U.S.
Jon Keegan / Sherwood News:
A look at Meta's 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, with the first phase opening in 2028; an analysis shows sales tax breaks on GPUs could total $3.3B+  —  $10 billion of investment.  Code names to disguise projects and companies.  Mixed opinions.  Skyrocketing property values.
OpenAI:
OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system  —  We introduce evaluations for chain-of-thought monitorability and study how it scales with test-time compute, reinforcement learning, and pretraining.
Dan Gallagher / Wall Street Journal:
Micron projects FY Q2 sales to grow over 2x YoY to $18.7B and adjusted operating income to rise over 5x to $11.3B, signaling higher memory chip prices in 2026  —  The AI gold rush is creating shortages for memory chips that could raise prices for all sorts of gadgets
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.
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  —  The discovery of the body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who studied physics at Brown University …

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More News

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:

Earlier Picks

Blake Brittain / Reuters: