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Techmeme

How the rise of AI has divided Hollywood, as some oppose the use of the technology while others say they are exploring ways to utilize AI tools (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

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Sources say Monzo CEO TS Anil, who announced his exit and handover to ex-Googler Diana Layfield in October, was pushed out by the board over an IPO timing clash (Financial Times)

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Shares in Chinese companies critical to AI infrastructure surged in 2025, with CATL up 45% and Sungrow up 130%, as exports boost margins despite Trump's tariffs (William Sandlund/Financial Times)

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CoreWeave's market value fell $33B in six weeks amid construction delays at its Denton, TX AI data center, criticism from short seller Jim Chanos, and more (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI's chief communications officer Hannah Wong will leave in January; Wong joined in 2021 and led PR during Sam Altman's brief ouster and return in 2023 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Sources: the US has paused a tech trade deal with the UK, signed in September, over disagreements about the UK's online safety rules and digital services taxes (New York Times)

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Allen Institute for AI launches Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, claiming they are "the first fully open byte-level language models", built on its Olmo 3 models (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

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Shares of Tesla closed at a 2025 high on Monday after the company confirmed it is testing driverless vehicles in Austin without a human safety operator (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

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PayPal says it has filed applications to establish PayPal Bank to provide loans more efficiently to US small businesses and reduce its reliance on third parties (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

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Ford plans to repurpose its US battery manufacturing capacity to launch a battery energy storage business for data centers, amid a shift away from large EVs (TechCrunch)

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Shares of Broadcom, CoreWeave, and Oracle, companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout, extend last week's decline; ORCL is down 46%+ since September 10 (Ari Levy/CNBC)

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Intel names Robin Colwell, deputy assistant to President Trump, as its head of government affairs, and Pushkar Ranade, the CEO's chief of staff, as interim CTO (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

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Sources: Disney's Sora deal is entirely in OpenAI stock rather than a cash licensing fee; Disney has the option to buy additional stock beyond the $1B stake (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Notion told staff it is doing a $300M tender offer at an $11B valuation, ahead of a potential IPO; it passed $600M in ARR, half of it from AI products (Anna Tong/Forbes)

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How crypto entrepreneur Bill Zanker helped Trump and Melania launch memecoins; as of December 10, $TRUMP was down 92% since its peak and $MELANIA was down 99% (Bloomberg)

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The US FTC, along with 21 states and DC, files an amended complaint against Uber, alleging deceptive billing and cancellation practices related to Uber One (Reuters)

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Cloudflare 2025 report: global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, ChatGPT was the most popular AI service, global traffic from Starlink grew 2.3x, and more (Cloudflare)

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GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

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Sources: xAI has created an enterprise AI sales group, but xAI's lack of experience in selling to big businesses is holding potential customers back (Theo Wayt/The Information)

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Lidar manufacturer Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and says it reached a deal to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M (Reshmi Basu/Bloomberg)

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Mexico-based fintech Plata raised up to $500M in a financing deal arranged by Nomura Securities International, as it moves toward becoming a full-fledged bank (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

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Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)

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NY-based Octane, which offers "instant" financing for large recreational and lifestyle purchases, raised a $100M Series F at a post-money valuation of $1.3B (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)

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Nvidia acquires SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, an open-source AI workload management system, and says it will keep distributing Slurm on an open-source basis (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

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The Trump administration launches US Tech Force to recruit ~1,000 staffers from Apple, Meta, xAI, and others for two-year stints to modernize the government (Natalie Alms/Nextgov/FCW)

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Source: Dragoneer raised $4.3B for its seventh VC fund and now has over $30B in AUM; it raised $3.8B for its sixth private fund in 2022 (Dan Primack/Axios)

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Thrive Holdings announces it has hired Palantir CIO Jim Siders to serve as CEO of Shield Technology Partners, a newly created business focused on IT services (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

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LG smart TV owners say a webOS update pinned Microsoft Copilot to the home screen, with no apparent way to remove the app; LG unveiled an AI TV strategy at CES (Luke James/Tom's Hardware)

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Internal docs: Meta earned $18B+ in annual ad sales from China in 2024, making up 10%+ of its global revenue, with $3B+ linked to fraudulent ads, like for scams (Reuters)

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Lightspeed raised $9B+ across six AI funds, including $3.3B to back breakout hits like Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral; Lightspeed has backed 165 AI startups (Erin Griffith/New York Times)

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Nvidia launches Nemotron 3, a family of AI models using a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture and the Mamba-Transformer design, in 30B, 100B, and ~500B sizes (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

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Memo: Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos lay out Netflix's WBD offer, moving to quell concerns about job losses and the end of theater releases, after Paramount's bid (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

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Berlin-based Mirelo, whose AI models can interpret videos to add synced sound effects, raised a $41M seed led by Index Ventures and a16z, after a $3M pre-seed (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Tech whistleblowers like Yaël Eisenstat say coming forward has unexpectedly derailed their lives and careers; Meta is in litigation with Sarah Wynn-Williams (Naomi Nix/Washington Post)

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AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery raised a $130M Series B led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst at a $1.3B valuation, taking its total funding to $225M (Caroline Hyde/Bloomberg)

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Teneo survey of 350+ public-company CEOs: 68% plan to spend more on AI in 2026 than in 2025, <50% of AI projects generated more returns than they cost, and more (Ben Glickman/Wall Street Journal)

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Analysis: Tata, Infosys, and Cognizant are set to bear the brunt of Trump's $100K H-1B fee; from 2020 to 2024, 93% of Infosys' H-1B hires would have had to pay (Bloomberg)

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Sources: the UK government wants Apple, Google, and others to block explicit images at the OS level by default to protect kids and have adults verify their ages (Financial Times)

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AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon's rivalry is moving beyond ads, with explicit customer poaching efforts and lawsuits; AT&T blocked T-Mobile's Easy Switch tool twice (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal)

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DTCC: credit default swaps tied to a handful of US tech groups have climbed 90% since early September, as investors seek ways to protect against an AI debt bust (Financial Times)

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London-based PolyAI, which makes call center AI voice assistants, raised an $86M Series D led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla, after raising $50M in 2024 (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

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Filing: Reddit says in its lawsuit against Australia's social media ban that it is "a collection of public fora" and social interaction isn't its "sole purpose" (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)

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US volunteer fire departments are scrambling to find software amid shrinking options and higher costs, as companies backed by private equity dominate the market (Mike Baker/New York Times)

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How David Sacks and AI adviser Sriram Krishnan overcame the opposition to Trump's AI EO, reaching out to lawmakers and finally modifying the text of the order (Washington Post)

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Interviews with copywriters on generative AI's impact: their work used for training, layoffs, wages and rates in free fall, freelancers losing clients, and more (Brian Merchant/Blood in the Machine)

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AI image generators like Nano Banana have increased realism by mimicking phone camera traits in contrast, exposure, and sharpening to avoid the uncanny valley (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

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How Nvidia's lobbying efforts grew after Howard Lutnick brokered Jensen Huang's access to Trump, ending with the president's approval of the H200 sales to China (Financial Times)

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Filing: Oracle signed ~$150B of data center leases in the three months ending November 30, raising its total data center and cloud capacity commitments to $248B (Martin Peers/The Information)

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A look at iRobot, founded in 1990, and its slow collapse after US regulatory pressure killed Amazon's $1.7B deal in 2024 amid increased Chinese competition (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

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Investigation: after Trump's return to office, the SEC eased up on or dismissed 60%+ of ongoing crypto cases, including ones involving Trump-linked companies (New York Times)

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