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Comparing ChatGPT's mini-apps with native iOS apps: some like Uber, OpenTable, and TripAdvisor fell short with frequent error messages, but Instacart did well (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

On top of nonconsensual porn images, X users seem to be using Grok to alter images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed (Maggie Harrison Dupré/Futurism)

Mumbai-based Knight Fintech, which builds core infrastructure connecting banks, lenders, platforms, and borrowers, raised $23.6M led by Accel (The Economic Times)

xAI launches Grok Business, priced at $30 per seat/month, for SMBs, and Grok Enterprise, whose price is not listed publicly, for larger organizations (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

India orders X to stop Grok from generating obscene content, giving it 72 hours to submit an action-taken report or risk losing its "safe harbor" protections (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Filing: OpenAI President and co-founder Greg Brockman donated $25M to Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc., in H2 2025; Crypto.com operator Foris DAX donated $20M (Bill Allison/Bloomberg)

Uber rewrote its UK driver contracts to act as an agent rather than a supplier of taxi services outside London, to avoid UK's new 20% "taxi tax" on total fares (Simon Goodley/The Guardian)

Pebble unveils the Pebble Round 2, a smartwatch with a rounded screen and basic health and activity tracking but no heart rate monitor, shipping in May for $199 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

An interview with analyst Benedict Evans on the role of productization in AI adoption, AI bubble, OpenAI, comparing Nvidia to Sun Microsystems, and more (The Circuit on YouTube)

xAI's Grok says "lapses in safeguards" led it to create sexualized images of people, including minors, in response to X user prompts; X took some images down (Bloomberg)

Yann LeCun admits that Llama 4's "results were fudged a little bit", and that the team used different models for different benchmarks to give better results (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

Tech analyst Dan Wang reflects on the Chinese Communist Party vs. Silicon Valley, AI and manufacturing, how China and the US are building the future, and more (Dan Wang)

UK crypto buyers are required to share their account details with tax officials starting January 1 or face penalties, as the UK seeks to collect unpaid taxes (Rachel Clun/BBC)

12h

How Meta's Reels became a hit, with a $50B+ annual run rate; Sensor Tower: users spend 27 minutes/day on Instagram Reels, 21 on YouTube Shorts, and 44 on TikTok (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

13h

How Nokia has reinvented itself for the AI revolution by expanding into cloud services, data centers, and optical networks, and by partnering with Nvidia (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

16h

Chinese AI chip startup Biren surged as much as 119% in its Hong Kong debut, after raising ~$717M in an IPO priced at ~$2.52 per share (Bloomberg)

18h

How Arizona is training talent for its growing chip industry as suppliers fear tighter US immigration policy; Arizona has drawn $200B+ in investments since 2020 (Nikkei Asia)

19h

Baidu says its AI chip unit Kunlunxin has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO, aiming for a spin-off; a December fundraising reportedly valued it at ~$3B (Sneha Kumar/Reuters)

21h

SpaceX plans to lower its Starlink satellites from orbiting at ~550km to ~480km in 2026 to improve space safety and reduce the likelihood of debris collisions (Rishabh Jaiswal/Reuters)

23h

Brookfield is starting cloud company Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, after saying it plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

How AI automation can fulfill Thomas Piketty's predictions on rising economic inequality, and why highly progressive taxes on capital can help slow the spiral (Philosopher Count)

A look at US tech laws coming in 2026, like California's SB 53 AI transparency law and Virginia's new social media limits for minors, effective from January 1 (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

Ukraine has become a live-fire test range for AI drones like the Bumblebee, provided by a secretive Eric Schmidt-led venture, raising alarms in Kremlin circles (C.J. Chivers/New York Times)

DeepSeek researchers detail mHC, a new architecture they used to train 3B, 9B, and 27B models, finding it scaled without adding significant computational burden (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

Sources: OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its AI-powered personal device, which is expected to be largely audio-based (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Startups have started to offer free nicotine pouches as a perk, as some employees claim the products help them focus during the workday, despite health hazards (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

A look at the rise of AI companionship apps; a researcher found 206 on Apple's App Store and 253 on Google Play, with a total of 220M+ downloads as of July 2025 (Financial Times)

Hundreds of megawatts of new data center capacity are being planned for Vernon, a town near LA, which is a key US-Asia cable-linking hub and is becoming crowded (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)

Sources: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could all go public in 2026; those three deals alone would outstrip the total proceeds from the ~200 US IPOs in 2025 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index rose 28% in 2025, its best percentage performance since 2017, driven by tech and Hong Kong reclaiming the top spot in IPOs (Wall Street Journal)

Analysts and manufacturers warn that smartphone, PC, and consumer electronics prices could rise by up to 20% in 2026, as AI demand drives up memory chip costs (Song Jung-a/Financial Times)

Report: China-based Moonshot AI, which makes Kimi AI models, raised a $500M Series C at a $4.3B valuation led by IDG Capital; Alibaba and Tencent also invested (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

Some LLM takeaways for 2025: reasoning as a signature feature, coding agents were useful, subscriptions hit $200/month, and Chinese open-weight models impressed (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

IDC expected Apple to ship just 45,000 units of the Vision Pro in Q4 2025; Sensor Tower said Apple cut digital ad spend for the headset by 95% in 2025 (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

How AI labs are deploying on-site gas generators for power as the US electric grid struggles to keep pace with the growing demands of AI infrastructure (SemiAnalysis)

Elon Musk says Neuralink plans to start "high-volume production" of brain-computer interface devices and move to an almost automated surgical procedure in 2026 (Reuters)

Adam Mosseri details trends shaping Instagram and says it'll be more practical to authenticate real media than label AI, as AI gets better at imitating reality (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

The FBI says fraudsters bilked Americans out of $333.5M via bitcoin ATM scams from January through November 2025, up from roughly $250M in 2024 (Lucien Bruggeman/ABC News)

Thiel Capital opens an office in Miami, as Peter Thiel and others reportedly look to cut ties with California over a proposed ballot measure to tax billionaires (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

TSMC says the US government has granted the company an annual license to import US chip manufacturing equipment to its facilities in Nanjing, China (Reuters)

Internal docs reveal Meta's tactics to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers, including efforts to make scam ads "not findable" for regulators and others (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)

Filing: Chinese AI chip startup Biren raises ~$717M in its Hong Kong IPO; institutional and retail tranches were oversubscribed ~26x and ~2,348x, respectively (Himanshi Akhand/Reuters)

Unsealed documents detail a US operation that stopped the alleged smuggling of $160M worth of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs to China between Oct. 2024 and May 2025 (CNBC)

Sources: Uber is in talks to acquire the parking space reservation app SpotHero; the parking app was last valued at $290M (The Information)

Trump Media, owner of Truth Social, plans to distribute a new token to shareholders with partner Crypto.com, expected to operate on the Cronos blockchain (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

Finland seizes a ship suspected of damaging an undersea cable linking Helsinki and Estonia in the Gulf of Finland; Estonia says a second cable was also damaged (Essi Lehto/Reuters)

Dealroom: 76 European deep tech and life sciences companies spun out from universities reached $1B valuations or $100M in revenue in 2025, or both (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

How the AI data center boom boosted Caterpillar's power and energy unit; generator sales are up 28% YoY through Sept. 2025, after growing 22% to $7.8B in 2024 (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Nvidia has approached TSMC to ramp up H200 chip production; Chinese companies have placed orders for 2M+ H200 chips for 2026, while Nvidia holds 700K (Reuters)

Filing: China's top DRAM maker CXMT plans to raise $4.2B in a Shanghai IPO; CXMT held a 4% global share in Q2 2025 and targets HBM production by the end of 2026 (Reuters)