| 10:39 AM • | Jay Peters / The Verge: Google says it is testing AI agents based on Gemini 2.0 that can understand rules in video games like Clash of Clans to help players out |
| 10:38 AM • | Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Google unveils Trillium, its sixth-gen AI chip powering Gemini 2.0, with 4x the training performance of its predecessor while using significantly less energy |
| 10:36 AM • | Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: Google unveils Jules, an AI coding assistant that can autonomously fix software bugs and prepare code changes, built on Google's new Gemini 2.0 platform |
| 10:34 AM • | Bloomberg: Google releases its new flagship model Gemini 2.0 and plans to test it in search and AI overviews, saying 2.0 makes “it possible to build agents that can think” |
| 10:25 AM • | Greg Stohr / Bloomberg: SCOTUS dismisses Nvidia's appeal over facing a lawsuit alleging it mislead shareholders about its reliance on crypto mining revenue, leaving it to face the suit |
| 9:55 AM • | Kurt Wilms / YouTube Official Blog: YouTube says viewers streamed 1B+ hours of content daily on TVs in 2024 globally, including 400M+ hours of podcasts monthly; sports content watchtime grew 30% |
| 9:25 AM • | Bloomberg: TechInsights: Huawei's new Mate 70 Pro Plus has a Kirin 9020 chip made by SMIC using the same 7nm process as in 2023's Mate 60 Pro, despite rumors of a 5nm chip |
| 9:15 AM • | The Information: Sources: Apple is working with Broadcom to develop its first AI server chip, codenamed Baltra and set for 2026 mass production, a milestone for its silicon team |
| 8:10 AM • | Igor Bonifacic / Engadget: Apple rolls out iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, adding major AI updates, including Image Playground on iPhone 15 Pro, 16, and 16 Pro, Genmoji, and ChatGPT integration |
| 7:30 AM • | Rebecca F. Elliott / New York Times: Exxon says it is in the early stages of designing a natural gas plant for data centers, the first time it would build a plant not supplying its own operations |
| 7:10 AM • | The Markup: The American Sunlight Project finds 35K+ mentions of nonconsensual intimate imagery depicting 25 female Congress members and one male member on deepfake sites |
| 6:35 AM • | Financial Times: As payment fraud grows, governments, banks, and tech companies disagree on who should cover losses; Deloitte says AI content added to $12B+ in US losses in 2023 |
| 6:20 AM • | Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Swedish startup Mynt, which offers smart expense cards for SMEs, raised €22M led by Vor Capital, a source says at a ~€200M valuation, and claims 12K SME clients |
| 6:05 AM • | Raphael Boyd / The Guardian: Similarweb: X's US DAUs dropped by 8.4% from 32.3M to 29.6M between early October 2024 and December 3, while Bluesky's US DAUs rose 1,064% from 254,500 to ~2.7M |
| 5:55 AM • | Financial Times: A look at the relationship between Tether and Trump transition co-Chair Howard Lutnick, who boasted about Cantor Fitzgerald handling $10B in redemptions in 2022 |
| 5:40 AM • | Richard Milne / Financial Times: Sweden's financial regulator fines BNPL startup Klarna $50M for “significant deficiencies” that broke AML regulations from 2021 to 2022, ahead of its US IPO |
| 5:30 AM • | Emilia David / VentureBeat: OpenAI expands Canvas, its side-by-side digital editing space, to all ChatGPT users and adds support for Python, more text pasting, and launching in custom GPTs |
| 4:25 AM • | Bloomberg: How 1,600 staff at Tencent's MoreFun Studios, on the verge of collapse a decade ago, now fuel the company's ambitions for “evergreen” global gaming franchises |
| 4:05 AM • | Deirdre Hipwell / Bloomberg: German online fashion retailer Zalando agrees to buy its smaller rival About You for ~€1.2B, or €6.50 per share, a ~67% premium on December 10's closing price |
| 3:55 AM • | Sonia Faleiro / Rest of World: How niche communities globally are repurposing WhatsApp, including for news, shows, sports, matchmaking, prayers, medical appointments, and finding blood donors |
| 3:15 AM • | Kate Park / TechCrunch: Singapore-based auto financing marketplace CarDekho SEA, a unit of India's CarDekho Group, raised $60M at a $300M+ valuation, its first external funding round |
| 2:55 AM • | Washington Post: An investigation into the suicide of a Minnesota man details how US domestic terror organization 764 has used Discord to find and torment vulnerable people |
| 2:35 AM • | Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Recorded Future: a recent Russian influence campaign “very likely” used AI-generated voiceovers from ElevenLabs and others to make videos appear more legitimate |
| 2:00 AM • | Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal: A look at Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, which has grown to 11 people overseen by Rhodes scholar Logan Graham to evaluate catastrophic risks in its AI models |
| 1:55 AM • | Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Filing: as of June 30, 2024, the paper losses on Tiger Global's 15th fund were at 15%+, which PitchBook places in the bottom 10% of all VC funds raised in 2021 |
| 1:20 AM • | Alexandra S. Levine / Bloomberg: TikTok is offering users hundreds of dollars in Shop credits to spend time in the app, invite friends to join, and purchase products, ahead of a possible US ban |
| 1:10 AM • | Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is building a London-based team focused on consumer health by poaching staff from a similar Google DeepMind unit he once led |
| 12:55 AM • | Emily Birnbaum / Bloomberg: Google's top lobbyist Mark Isakowitz departs to become GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick's chief of staff, leaving a power vacuum in the company's lobbying team |
| 12:35 AM • | TechCrunch: Sources: several Cruise employees say they were “surprised” and “blindsided” by GM's decision to end Cruise's robotaxi program and that they expect job cuts |
| 10:55 PM • | Venkat / Windows Report: Mozilla is removing Do Not Track from Firefox in version 135, the first major browser to add and now remove it, saying few websites honor the privacy preference |
| 10:15 PM • | Scharon Harding / Ars Technica: Embodied, which made Moxie, an $800 companion robot for kids aged 5 to 10, says it is shutting down after a failed funding round and Moxie will soon be bricked |
| 9:45 PM • | Krystal Hu / Reuters: An interview with OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on Donald Trump being the “president of this AI generation”, Elon Musk's public threats, ChatGPT user growth, and more |
| 9:10 PM • | Sankalp Phartiyal / Bloomberg: Amazon plans to test a 15-minute delivery service for everything from groceries to household items in India in December, starting with some areas in Bengaluru |
| 7:20 PM • | Aaron Holmes / The Information: Source: Google asked the US to break up Microsoft's exclusive agreement to host OpenAI's tech on Azure, after the FTC asked Google about Microsoft's practices |
| 6:55 PM • | Emma Roth / The Verge: A California District Court judge orders Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with WP Engine's plugins |
| 6:21 PM • | Jody Godoy / Reuters: Trump picks FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to chair the FTC; Ferguson has said the FTC should tackle perceived censorship of conservative viewpoints online |
| 6:15 PM • | Canadian Press: TikTok files a legal challenge against Canada's order to stop operations in the country, claiming the “unreasonable” decision was “driven by improper purposes” |
| 6:05 PM • | Bobby Allyn / NPR: A lawsuit against Character.AI alleges its chatbots harmed two young Texas users, including telling a user that it sympathized with kids who kill their parents |
| 5:40 PM • | Quentyn Kennemer / The Verge: YouTube redesigns the YouTube Kids app to make it look and behave more like the standard YouTube app and lets users browse through videos in portrait mode |
| 4:45 PM • | Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: YouTube rolls out its auto-dubbing feature, which generates translated audio tracks, to hundreds of thousands of channels focused on knowledge and information |
| 4:30 PM • | David Welch / Bloomberg: GM says Cruise will exit the robotaxi business, combining Cruise's and GM's technical teams to focus on autonomous and driver safety tech for upcoming GM cars |
| 2:35 PM • | Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: 2025's Apple Watch Ultra is slated to get satellite connectivity for off-the-grid text messages via Globalstar, and may get blood pressure monitoring |
| 1:10 PM • | Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: NYC-based Stainless, which offers an AI-powered API-to-SDK generator to clients like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Cloudflare, raised a $25M Series A led by a16z |
| 12:05 PM • | Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: The US sanctions Chinese cybersecurity government contractor Sichuan Silence and one of its staff over Ragnarok ransomware ties and creating and using zero-days |
| 11:40 AM • | Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Instagram rolls out “trial reels”, which let creators experiment by publishing videos only to users who don't follow them, after testing the feature in May 2024 |
| 11:25 AM • | Kunal Khullar / Tom's Hardware: TSMC reports consolidated November revenue up 34% YoY to ~$8.5B, down 12% from its record in October, when it projected $26.1B-$26.9B Q4 revenue, up 11%-14% QoQ |
| 10:20 AM • | Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Solos debuts the AirGo Vision, a camera-equipped pair of smart glasses featuring visual recognition powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o, available now starting from $299 |
| 9:15 AM • | Boone Ashworth / Wired: Amazon launches Amazon Autos, letting US shoppers buy Hyundai cars, and plans to add more dealerships and manufacturers; it was announced in November 2023 |
| 9:01 AM • | Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg: AI language learning startup Speak, which focuses on speaking, not gamification, raised $78M led by Accel at a $1B valuation, taking its total funding to $162M |
| 7:20 AM • | Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: Paris-based Aqemia, which aims to scale drug discovery using quantum algorithms and AI, raised $38M led by Cathay Innovation, after raising €30M in January 2024 |
| 7:10 AM • | Deborah Sophia / Reuters: The US Commerce Department finalizes $6.1B+ for memory chipmaker Micron to fund its New York and Idaho factory projects, one of the largest CHIPS Act subsidies |
| 6:35 AM • | Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Software testing service LambdaTest, which supports 5K+ browser and OS combinations, raised a $38M Series D led by Avataar, taking its total funding to $108M |
| 6:20 AM • | Bloomberg: TikTok launches TikTok Shop in Spain, letting creators sell products from beauty to home appliances, from €3 to €60, the first step of its European rollout |
| 6:05 AM • | Bloomberg: TeamViewer says it plans to acquire 1E, which makes automated remediation software, from Carlyle for $720M, closing in early 2025, its biggest acquisition yet |
| 5:40 AM • | Dina Bass / Bloomberg: Microsoft unveils a data center design that uses zero water for cooling, down from the 125M+ liters per year a typical center uses, rolling out since August |
| 4:10 AM • | Ellen Barry / New York Times: Parents and school staff say student activity monitoring software that aims to intercept self-harm before it happens, while helpful, has unintended consequences |
| 2:20 AM • | Trefor Moss / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Vinted, a secondhand clothes app in the EU working to expand in the US that went from near collapse to a €5B valuation after a secondary share sale |
| 12:35 AM • | Financial Times: Sources: in October 2024, EU regulators asked Google for more information about its secret ads deal with Meta that skirted Google's rules for targeting minors |
| 10:35 PM • | Saritha Rai / Bloomberg: A growing cohort of AI startups are recruiting experts to train models on highly specialized tasks for sensitive sectors like finance, defense, and health care |
| 8:40 PM • | Kali Hays / Fortune: Stability AI CEO Prem Akkaraju says the startup, now focused on its API and licensing, has seen “triple digit growth” and has “a clean balance sheet, no debt” |
| 8:20 PM • | Issie Lapowsky / Rest of World: How WhatsApp evolved from a messaging app into a business messaging growth platform, aggressively luring big businesses to its suite of paid messaging products |
| 7:55 PM • | Patrick McKenzie / Bits about Money: A deep dive into “debanking”, which crypto advocates, including a16z, claim has been used against them by US political actors and agencies without due process |
| 6:00 PM • | Tim Hardwick / MacRumors: Norwegian payment service Vipps launches the world's first Apple Pay alternative on iOS, following Apple's move to open NFC access to developers from iOS 18.1 |
| 4:26 PM • | Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Oracle reports Q2 revenue up 9% YoY to $14.06B, vs. $14.1B est., and signs a deal with Meta to train Llama models on Oracle's cloud; ORCL drops 7%+ |
| 2:55 PM • | Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI says Sora limits the depiction of minors, and only a subset of users will be able to create videos of a real person using uploaded footage of that person |
| 1:35 PM • | Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: In mockups on GitHub, Bluesky teases Bluesky+, a $72-per-year or $8-per-month subscription offering profile customizations, higher video upload limits, and more |
| 1:11 PM • | OpenAI: OpenAI launches Sora in select countries; ChatGPT Pro offers up to 500 videos per month at up to 1080p, and ChatGPT Plus offers up to 50 videos at up to 720p |
| 12:00 PM • | Marques Brownlee / Marques Brownlee on YouTube: A review of OpenAI's Sora video generator: excels at landscapes, people, and stylistic content, but often fails with basic physics like object permanence |
| 11:16 AM • | John Russell / HPCwire: Google says it made a major quantum error correction breakthrough, unveils its Willow quantum chip with 105 improved qubits, and shares benchmarks and a roadmap |
| 10:20 AM • | Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman on AGI, Copilot, AI agents, the OpenAI deal, joining Microsoft in March 2024, managing ~10K staff, DeepMind, and more |
| 10:05 AM • | David Belson / The Cloudflare Blog: Cloudflare 2024 report: global internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024, Google remained the top service, global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, and more |
| 9:45 AM • | Sabrina Willmer / Bloomberg: Filing: TikTok asks a US court to put on hold a law forcing a sale or ban of the app until SCOTUS can review it and the Trump admin can determine its position |
| 9:15 AM • | Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: WaveForms, which aims to create AI assistants that pick up on emotional cues from verbal interactions, raised a $40M seed from a16z at a $200M valuation |
| 9:10 AM • | Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Reddit says it is testing Reddit Answers, which lets select US users ask questions and receive curated summaries of relevant responses and threads in English |
| 8:30 AM • | Jason Schreier / Bloomberg: A look at Grand Theft Auto VI, set for release in 2025 after Rockstar started development in 2018, as Rockstar tries to improve its culture after the 2022 hack |
| 8:05 AM • | New York Times: Ukrainian officials worry about Telegram, which has soared in popularity during the war with Russia, questioning if its upsides outweigh its security risks |
| 7:50 AM • | Bloomberg: Russian docs and sources: how Putin's forces kept buying US chips, including $5.9M from Texas Instruments from January to August 2024, via a Russian distributor |
| 7:35 AM • | Les Pounder / Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi 500 review: the Pi 5's power in a convenient keyboard form factor with awesome thermal performance, but lacks NVMe and no camera or display ports |
| 7:20 AM • | Amy Thomson / Bloomberg: Chinese state media: the State Administration for Market Regulation opened an anti-monopoly investigation into Nvidia tied to its Mellanox acquisition in 2020 |
| 7:05 AM • | SemiAnalysis: A look at Intel's problems, starting with 2016's 10nm node: 7/11 board members have no chip experience, most CEO options are worse than Pat Gelsinger, and more |
| 6:50 AM • | Bloomberg: A look at Donald Trump's collision course with the EU over its Big Tech crackdown: targeting Elon Musk's X under the DSA, Apple's and Meta's fines, and more |
| 6:35 AM • | Reuters: Filing: Japanese chipmaker Kioxia set its IPO price at ~$9.70, in the middle of its range, raising ~$800M and valuing it at ~$5.2B, for its December 18 listing |
| 6:20 AM • | Daniel Zuidijk / Bloomberg: Report: a network of 24 Facebook Pages ran 3.6K+ ads allegedly breaking Meta ad rules and attacking Romania's pro-EU candidate, with up to 179M views since Aug. |
| 6:00 AM • | Jeanna Smialek / New York Times: How FRED, a data tool the St. Louis Federal Reserve created in 1991, recently gained a major following, from <400K website users in 2009 to nearly 15M in 2023 |
| 5:40 AM • | Evgeny Morozov / Boston Review: A look at generative AI's impact, its structural issue of concentrated power among just a few companies, and utopian questions over an alternative vision for AI |
| 4:20 AM • | Paula Span / New York Times: Researchers say cashless policies, which are picking up pace in the US, disadvantage many groups, including low-income peoples, the homeless, and older adults |
| 3:55 AM • | Daniel Thomas / Financial Times: GroupM expects global ad industry revenue to grow 9.5% in 2024, passing $1T for the first time, with Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon, and Alibaba earning 50%+ |
| 2:10 AM • | Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg: How Russia-linked Akira group's ransomware attack on Knights of Old in June 2023 led to the 158-year-old UK delivery firm's bankruptcy after it refused to pay |
| 1:15 AM • | Margherita Bassi / Gizmodo: A study involving 747,604 women finds those who paid extra for AI-enhanced mammograms were 21% more likely to have breast cancer detected than those who didn't |
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