← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Pennsylvania's Supreme Court rules that police can get Google search data without a warrant; an expert warns it may encourage warrantless searches nationwide (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

Mistral launches Mistral OCR 3, featuring improvements in processing forms, scanned documents, complex tables, and handwriting, priced at $2 per 1,000 pages (Mistral AI)

Memo: the TikTok US deal is set to close on Jan. 22; terms include retraining the recommendation algorithm on US user data and Oracle overseeing data protection (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Internal memo: TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US unit; Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX will collectively own 45% of the US entity, and ByteDance will retain ~20% (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Sources: OpenAI's new fundraising round could value it at as much as $830B; it aims to raise up to $100B and complete the round by the end of Q1 at the earliest (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Meta is developing a new image and video-focused AI model codenamed Mango, expected to be released in H1 2026 along with its new LLM dubbed Avocado (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

France charges a crew member of an Italian passenger ferry for allegedly infecting the ship with a remote access tool on behalf of a foreign power (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

YouTube terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers; the platform earlier suspended the channels' ads (Jake Kanter/Deadline)

In an experiment, Claude ran a vending machine in the WSJ newsroom and lost $1,000+ after it dropped prices to zero, gave away a free PlayStation, and more (Joanna Stern/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Salient, which uses AI to automate loan servicing, raised $10M following a $60M Series A in June, pushing its valuation to ~$500M; its ARR hit $25M (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Instacart will pay $60M to settle FTC allegations that it used deceptive tactics in its subscription signup and "satisfaction guarantee" advertising (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Amazon rolls out Alexa+ on the web to early access users, with chat functionality, smart home controls, file management, and cross-device conversations (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

Sources: Armadin, launched by Mandiant's founder Kevin Mandia to fight AI hacking, raised a $24M seed and is in talks to raise $100M+ at a $600M+ valuation (Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI releases GPT‑5.2-Codex, with improvements on long-horizon work through context compaction, stronger performance on large code changes, and more (OpenAI)

Twenty-four companies, including Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI, and AWS, join the US Genesis Mission to boost the use of AI for scientific discovery (Courtney Subramanian/Bloomberg)

Netflix hires ESPN anchor Elle Duncan as its first on-air sports host in a multiyear deal; Duncan will also cover other live events for the company (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Nirvana, which uses real-time driving telematics to build insurance policies for truckers, raised a $100M Series D at a $1.5B valuation, up from $830M in March (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

Anthropic launches Agent Skills as an open standard with a specification and SDK, and says VS Code, GitHub, Cursor, Goose, and others already support the format (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

Sources describe tensions between OpenAI's research and ChatGPT product groups, leading to the "code red"; OpenAI is set to beat its 2025 revenue goal of $13B (The Information)

Edison, which last month released AI tool Kosmos to speed up and automate complex scientific hypothesis generation, raised $70M at a $250M valuation (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

Rivian launches Universal Hands-Free driving for second-generation R1 EVs, expanding coverage from 135,000 highway miles to 3.5M+ miles across the US and Canada (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

Endra, whose AI tools automate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design for commercial buildings, raised a $20M seed led by Notion (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)

Luma AI launches Ray3 Modify, which allows users to modify existing footage by providing character reference images; users can also define start and end frames (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Boat rental services Boatsetter and GetMyBoat plan to merge; Boatsetter CEO Michael Farb says the combined company is set to have $100M+ in bookings in 2025 (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal)

Imprint, which helps retailers like Brooks Brothers offer co-branded credit cards and manage loyalty programs, raised $150M led by Khosla at a $1.2B valuation (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

North Korean hackers stole a record $2.02B in crypto in 2025, a 51% YoY rise that takes its cumulative stolen total to $6.75B; individual wallet hacks hit 158K (Chainalysis)

Stockholm-based vibe coding startup Lovable raised $330M led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures at a $6.6B valuation, up from $1.8B after raising $200M in July (Niko Gallogly/New York Times)

Documents: OpenAI has sold 700K+ ChatGPT licenses to ~35 US public universities for students and faculty, who used it 14M+ times in September, beating Copilot (Bloomberg)

Study: AI's 2025 power demand could hit 23GW, above 2024 Bitcoin mining levels, and AI carbon emissions could hit 32.6M to 79.7M tons, compared to NYC's 50M (Justine Calma/The Verge)

Trump Media agrees to merge with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE in a $6B deal and build the "world's first utility-scale fusion power plant" in 2026 (Financial Times)

UK AI Security Institute report: AI models are rapidly improving at potentially dangerous biological and chemical tasks, and show fast jumps in self-replication (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer)

Apple says it will roll out more App Store ads in 2026 "to increase opportunity in search results"; Apple's website says 800M+ users visit the App Store weekly (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)

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 (Jake Bleiberg/Bloomberg)

Circana: Xbox Series console sales fell 70% YoY to an all-time low in November, compared to the PS5's 40% YoY drop and Switch 1 and 2's combined 10% YoY fall (Rebekah Valentine/IGN)

Honda plans to halt production in Japan and China from December 29 to January 6, showing the ongoing fallout of the global chip shortage and Nexperia takeover (Bloomberg)

Sources: Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500M for his startup at a ~€3B valuation, and plans to name Alexandre LeBrun as CEO, ahead of a January launch (Financial Times)

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr tells a Senate committee the FCC "is not an independent agency"; the agency removed "independent agency" from its site as he testified (Axios)

An in-depth look at a recent research paper that offered a roadmap to the viability of 3D HBM-on-GPU integration for improved AI performance and utilization (Gavin Bonshor/More Than Moore)

Rome-based Exein, which offers cybersecurity tools for protecting connected devices including cars and home routers, raised €100M led by Blue Cloud Ventures (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

Sources detail how Tiger Global fueled the COVID-era unicorn bubble that burst ahead of the AI boom; the firm recently shared its $12.7B 2021 fund is now up 16% (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)

Filing: Sony and Tencent reach a "confidential settlement" over Tencent's Light of Motiram, a game that Sony alleged was a "slavish clone" of its Horizon series (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Tokyo-based Resonac, a crucial cutting-edge chip chemicals supplier whose shares are up 40%+ YTD, says it has bolstered China production capacity to meet demand (Bloomberg)

Oilfield service companies are moving into the data center business by supplying power and cooling tech as demand from traditional drilling customers weakens (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

Sources: Pinduoduo and Temu owner PDD fires dozens following a fistfight between employees and Chinese officials probing fraudulent deliveries on its platform (Bloomberg)

Tim Sweeney says Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025, as Apple is "charging a competition-crushing 21% junk fee on third-party in-app payments" (Tim Sweeney/@timsweeneyepic)

In a letter, Rocket Internet minority shareholder Scherzer & Co accuses the company of marking down startup valuations to buy out backers at "bargain prices" (Financial Times)

Manus says it crossed $100M ARR eight months after launch and is growing at 20%+ MoM since Manus 1.5's release; its total revenue run rate is now over $125M (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

SoftBank Group was among the Japanese tech stocks that fell on December 18, as Wall Street's AI infrastructure spending worries crossed into the Asian markets (Lim Hui Jie/CNBC)

Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer says Amazon canceled a $150M advance for a Texas AI data center campus; FRMI fell 34% on December 12 after saying a tenant canceled (Dakin Campbell/Business Insider)

Wall Street clearinghouse DTCC selects the Canton Network blockchain as a real-world asset tokenization partner after receiving a No-Action Letter from the SEC (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)