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Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico: Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account -
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly -
Bloomberg: President Trump says Netflix's planned acquisition of WBD will have “to go through a process” and he will be personally involved in the decision-making process -
Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal: Sources: IBM is in advanced talks to buy data streaming software maker Confluent for ~$11B, above its market value of ~$8B as of December 5 close -
Lisa Bonos / Washington Post: A look at an “etiquette camp” for young founders in San Francisco, which teaches them how to dress, act, and talk, amid shifting expectations for tech founders -
Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI: Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o -
John Thornhill / Financial Times: Impressions from a test ride in London in a car using Wayve's self-driving tech; Wayve has raised $1.3B since launch and is testing cars with Level 2+ autonomy -
New! Aaron Krolik / New York Times: How “cash to crypto” swaps allow users everywhere to convert national currencies to stablecoins and then debit cards, avoiding financial oversight and sanctions -
Bloomberg: India's digital transformation has exposed citizens to scams like “digital arrests”, where victims are coerced into transferring funds under false accusations -
Emma Jacobs / Financial Times: An interview with Headspace CEO Tom Pickett on its AI chatbot Ebb, which he insists isn't for serious mental health issues, Ebb's upgrade to voice, and more -
Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Sources: Aaru, which uses AI to simulate user behavior, has raised a Series A led by Redpoint Ventures at multiple valuation tiers, including a $1B tier -
Lora Kelley / New York Times: In recent months, several companies like Airtable, Handshake, and Opendoor have announced that they are “refounding”, as they scramble to add new AI features -
Financial Times: Chinese smartphone makers are promoting apps to help users switch from iOS in a race for market share, as Apple struggles to roll out AI features in China -
Matthias Bastian / The Decoder: ChatGPT head says screenshots of ChatGPT ads are “either not real or not ads”; OpenAI's research chief says “anything that feels like an ad” is now turned off