Techmeme RSS Feed

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 (Ashish Vaswani/Essential AI)

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 (Bjarke Smith-Meyer/Politico)

Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon (Sally Ward-Foxton/EE Times)

India's digital transformation has exposed citizens to scams like "digital arrests", where victims are coerced into transferring funds under false accusations (Bloomberg)

10h

Simular, which is building AI agents for Mac and Windows PCs, raised a $21.5M Series A led by Felicis; Simular has released its 1.0 version for macOS (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

10h

Excelsior Sciences, which aims to use AI and robots for small-molecule drug discovery and development, raised a $70M Series A from Khosla Ventures and others (Aayushi Pratap/Chemical & ...)

10h

South Korea says it has signed an MOU with Arm to strengthen its chip and AI sectors, including a program to train ~1,400 high-level chip design specialists (Reuters)

10h

PermitFlow, which develops AI-powered workflow software for construction permitting, raised a $54M Series B led by Accel, a source says at a ~$500M valuation (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes)

10h

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 (Financial Times)

11h

In recent months, several companies like Airtable, Handshake, and Opendoor have announced that they are "refounding", as they scramble to add new AI features (Lora Kelley/New York Times)

14h

Digital asset treasuries, one of the hottest trends in public markets in H1 2025, saw a dramatic reversal in H2; SharpLink stock has fallen 86% from its peak (Monique Mulima/Bloomberg)

16h

A profile of Byron Cook, a VP at Amazon who is leading the company's effort to reduce AI hallucinations with a feature called Automated Reasoning Checks (John Pavlus/Fast Company)

19h

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 (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

21h

A technical deep dive into Amazon's Trainium3 accelerator, including its server SKUs' specifications, silicon design, power budget, and bill of materials (SemiAnalysis)

21h

Sources: Apple's chip chief Johny Srouji told Tim Cook that he is seriously considering leaving soon; some execs floated elevating him to the CTO role (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Some Reddit moderators say a surge of AI slop on the site is eroding its authenticity and could lead to a feedback loop of AI models training on AI content (Kat Tenbarge/Wired)

A look at Phreeli, a privacy-focused phone carrier that lets users sign up with only a ZIP code and uses an encryption system based on "zero-knowledge proofs" (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

A look at various quirks in AI-generated prose, mainly influenced by "overfitting" in AI models, as humans increasingly mimic AI language in writing and speech (Sam Kriss/New York Times)

Short seller Grizzly shorts London-listed Trustpilot, alleging the review site pressures businesses to pay for subscriptions; Trustpilot refutes the claims (Bloomberg)

Parents are pressuring LA Unified, the second-largest US school district, to reduce mandatory student screen time on school-issued iPads and Chromebooks (Tyler Kingkade/NBC News)

Source: Microsoft is in talks to design future custom chips with Broadcom, which would involve Microsoft switching its business from Marvell (Abram Brown/The Information)

Leaked memos: Meta is delaying the release of its MR glasses codenamed "Phoenix" from H2 2026 to H1 2027 for "more breathing room to get the details right" (Jyoti Mann/Business Insider)

An analysis of 100T+ tokens from the past year shows reasoning models now represent over half of all usage, open-weight model use has grown steadily, and more (OpenRouter)

Seattle-based Yoodli, which sells AI-powered communication training software, raised a $40M Series B led by WestBridge Capital, valuing the startup at $300M+ (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Waymo plans to issue a voluntary software recall over how its robotaxis operate around school buses following an NHTSA investigation opened in October (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

A US judge rules Google must renegotiate annually any contract that makes its search engine or AI app the default on smartphones and other devices (Bloomberg)

A look at the uphill battle to win regulatory approval for Netflix's acquisition of WBD, and the roles of the US DOJ, EU regulators, and state attorneys general (Ted Johnson/Deadline)

WBD confirms that Warner Bros. Games will be acquired by Netflix along with its wider streaming and television business (Chris Kerr/Game Developer)

Meta acquires Limitless, which makes a pendant-style AI wearable that records and transcribes real-world conversations; Limitless has raised more than $33M (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Sources: SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it is aiming for an IPO in the second half of 2026 (Katie Roof/The Information)

Netflix's WBD bid marks a striking strategy shift for a company long known for pivots, especially after years of avoiding full commitment to theatrical releases (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Sources: SpaceX is planning a secondary share sale that would value the company at $800B, surpassing OpenAI to make it the most valuable US private company (Wall Street Journal)

Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr denounce the EU's €120M X fine (Liv McMahon/BBC)

Cloudflare says it has fixed an issue that caused a 25 minute outage on Friday, following a major, hours-long outage last month (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

Marc Benioff says it "would not shock" him if Salesforce changed its name to Agentforce; the company started using Agentforce for many of its offerings (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)

Sources: Dell alerts customers to 15% to 20% price hikes as soon as mid-December amid surging DRAM costs; Lenovo says current quotes will expire in January 2026 (TrendForce)

Polish lawmakers fail to override the president's veto on a crypto assets regulation bill; Poland is the last EU country not to adopt EU's crypto regulation (Bloomberg)

Hugging Face details how it used its new tool, Skills, to fine tune an LLM using Claude, including for writing scripts, submitting jobs to cloud GPUs, and more (Hugging Face)

The Ninth Circuit affirms a temporary order blocking OpenAI from using "io" as a trademark in some instances while an infringement lawsuit against it proceeds (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law)

The New York Times sues Perplexity, claiming the AI startup violated its copyrights and kept using its content despite repeated demands over the past 18 months (New York Times)

Netflix has lined up a $59B unsecured bridge loan from Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and HSBC to support its WBD deal, one of the largest ever loans of its kind (Bloomberg)

Meta strikes commercial AI data deals with news publishers, including CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, to provide real-time answers in its Meta AI chatbot (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Netflix says it "expects to maintain Warner Bros.' theatrical releases for films" but "the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly" (Tony Maglio/The Hollywood Reporter)

Sources and docs: India's government is considering forcing phone makers to enable always-on satellite location tracking; Apple, Google, and Samsung are opposed (Reuters)

Netflix agrees to acquire WBD's studios and streaming business in an $82.7B cash-and-stock deal, including debt, to close after WBD splits in two in Q3 2026 (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

The EU fines X €120M for breaching online content rules, the first fine under the DSA, citing issues like its deceptive blue checkmarks, after a two-year probe (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

The US CFTC announces that spot crypto asset contracts will begin trading for the first time on CFTC-registered futures exchanges (Shashwat Chauhan/Reuters)

AWS unveils its 192-core Graviton5 chip, with an up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity (About Amazon)

Japan faces data center bottlenecks due to labor shortages, rising costs, and outdated building processes; DC Byte: Japan's capacity has tripled over five years (Tsubasa Suruga/Nikkei Asia)

Sources: WBD begins exclusive talks with Netflix to sell its film and TV studios and HBO Max; Netflix is offering a $5B breakup fee if the deal isn't approved (Bloomberg)