← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Alibaba halves Qwen3-Max's prices, from $0.861 to $0.459 per 1M input tokens and $3.441 to $1.836 per 1M output tokens for API users, amid China's AI price wars (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

India officially notifies its first data protection law to establish a framework for data processing, protection, and governance, including verifiable consent (The Economic Times)

After a backlash, Google reverses plans to require all Android app developers to verify their identities with government ID and pay fees from 2026 (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Draft plans: the EU is pushing to let markets regulator ESMA oversee all crypto businesses and authorize new ones, shifting oversight from national regulators (Bloomberg)

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company plans to "dramatically" expand its lending to commodities traders after extending ~$1.5B worth of credit to the sector (Bloomberg)

Sources: Samsung raised some memory chip prices by 30% to 60% compared to September, amid shortages, likely adding to stress for companies building data centers (Reuters)

Meta plans to launch WhatsApp third-party app integration in Europe "over the coming months", which is required by the DMA, starting with BirdyChat and Haiket (Thomas Ricker/The Verge)

Google proposes ad tech changes to settle a €2.95B EU antitrust fine, including boosting interoperability across its ad tech services, but still plans to appeal (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

An interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg on lessons from AOL, the rise of esports, turning around EA's Star Wars: The Old Republic, helping Zynga, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Indian payment startup Pine Labs' stock closed at ~$2.83, up 13.5% from its ~$2.49 IPO price, after a ~$440M IPO earlier this week that was 2x oversubscribed (Soumyajit Saha/Nikkei Asia)

Oracle's stock is down nearly 30% in the past month, more than rivals, reversing $250B+ in market value gains after its OpenAI deals announcement in September (Financial Times)

How Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google are managing the strain of AI's increased energy demand with their promises of net-zero carbon emissions (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg)

Australia-based AI infrastructure company Firmus raised AU$500M, or ~$325M, tripling its valuation to AU$6B in two months, after raising AU$330M in September (Tess Bennett/Australian Financial Review)

Sources: Amazon and Anthropic support the GAIN AI Act, which would give US buyers first priority on advanced AI chips, joining Microsoft; Nvidia opposes it (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI is piloting group chats in ChatGPT in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan; up to 20 users can be invited to prompt ChatGPT in a shared space (OpenAI)

Mozilla says it is building AI Window, a Firefox feature that will include an AI assistant and let users choose the model, but offers few additional details (Elissa Welle/The Verge)

Sources: OneTrust, which sells privacy and compliance software and was last valued at $4.5B in 2023, is exploring a sale, possibly to private equity buyers (The Information)

A US judge rules that Apple and OpenAI must answer to a lawsuit filed by X and xAI accusing them of conspiring to thwart competition in emerging markets in AI (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg)

OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 in the API, featuring a "no-reasoning" mode and extended prompt caching with up to 24-hour retention to generate faster responses (OpenAI)

Sundar Pichai proved to be the "wartime CEO" that Google needed after ChatGPT's launch, making the company an AI leader, in part by empowering Demis Hassabis (Dave Lee/Bloomberg)

StubHub reports Q3 revenue up 8% YoY to $468.1M, vs. $452M est., gross merchandise sales up 11% to $2.43B; STUB drops 5%+ after hours (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Maryland will use Claude across its agencies to help residents apply for food aid, Medicaid, and more, and deploy Percepta tools to speed up housing permits (Maria Curi/Axios)

Alembic, which offers AI-powered data analytics for marketers, raised a $145M Series B led by Prysm and Accenture at a $645M valuation, up from $49M in 2024 (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is in early talks to raise a new round of funding at a roughly $50B valuation, potentially rising to $55B-$60B (Bloomberg)

Baidu unveils Ernie 5.0, an AI model to process and generate text, images, audio, and video, claiming it beats GPT-5-High and Gemini 2.5 Pro on some benchmarks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Anthropic open sources a method to score AI model political evenhandedness; Gemini 2.5 Pro got 97%, Grok 4 96%, Claude Opus 4.1 95%, GPT-5 89%, and Llama 4 66% (Ina Fried/Axios)

Cursor says it has crossed $1B in annualized revenue, has 300+ employees, and its in-house models "generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Apple and Major League Soccer agree to make all MLS games available on Apple TV for no extra charge from 2026, ending the MLS Season Pass subscription (Paul Tenorio/The Athletic)

Netflix shifts its video game strategy to focus on popular titles like Pictionary, Boggle, and Tetris, playable in its app on TVs using phones as controllers (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Red Queen Bio, spun out of mRNA therapeutics company Helix Nano to focus on blocking creating biological weapons powered by AI, raised a $15M seed led by OpenAI (Deepa Seetharaman/Reuters)

The UK CAT refuses to let Apple appeal a ruling that it abused its dominance by charging "excessive and unfair" App Store fees; lawyers: the damages are £1B+ (Sam Tobin/Reuters)

Apple unveils Mini Apps Partner Program, offering a reduced 15% commission on IAPs for mini apps, or "self-contained" experiences built with web tech like HTML5 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Ubisoft delays publishing its H1 financial results on the day they were due and requests that its shares be halted from trading until then; UBI is down 47%+ YTD (Bloomberg)

Google says all NotebookLM users will get access to Deep Research in the service within a week; users get to choose between two research styles: fast or deep (Elissa Welle/The Verge)

Amazon renames Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo, a nod to "low Earth orbit"; Amazon has so far launched 150+ satellites as part a constellation set to have 3,200+ (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)

Meta overhauls Facebook Marketplace, adding collections, collaborative buying, reactions, comments, an improved checkout experience, and Meta AI integrations (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Anthropic says China's state-sponsored hackers used its tools to automate 80% to 90% of a September hacking campaign that targeted corporations and governments (Wall Street Journal)

Exowatt, which aims to use concentrated solar power to generate 1¢ per kWh electricity for data centers, raised a $120M Series A from a16z, Sam Altman, and more (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

TikTok launches Bulletin board, which lets brands and creators share public, one-to-many messages to their followers, similar to Instagram's broadcast channels (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

San Diego-based Fabric8Labs, which uses electrochemical additive manufacturing to create chip-cooling plates for data centers, raised $50M led by NEA and Intel (Colin Campbell/Axios)

Sources: Verizon plans to cut ~15,000 jobs, its largest workforce reduction yet, and transition ~200 stores into franchised operations, seeking to reduce costs (Wall Street Journal)

LinkedIn rolls out AI-powered people search to LinkedIn Premium subscribers in the US, with plans to expand it to other countries in the coming months (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Google DeepMind unveils SIMA 2, a video-game-playing agent built on top of Gemini to navigate and solve problems inside 3D virtual worlds like Goat Simulator 3 (Will Douglas Heaven/MIT Technology Review)

Sources: xAI raised $15B, adding $5B to the $10B it reportedly raised in September at a $200B valuation; Elon Musk replies "false" to an X post about the report (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Salesforce buys Doti AI for $100M; the Israeli startup raised $7M and its Work AI tool lets enterprises securely access and use internal knowledge in real time (Meir Orbach/CTech)

OnePlus debuts the $900+ OnePlus 15, with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a 7,300mah battery, and a 6.78" 165Hz screen; the US government shutdown delays a US debut (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Grayscale files for an IPO, reporting $203.3M in net income on $318.7M in revenue for January to September 2025; the DCG unit has ~$35B in AUM and 40+ products (Isabelle Lee/Bloomberg)

Google launches AI-powered shopping features in the US, including conversational search, side-by-side item comparisons, price tracking, and an agentic checkout (Mia Sato/The Verge)

Dresden-based chip startup Ferroelectric Memory raised €100M, including €77M equity led by HV Capital and DTCF, to commercialize energy-saving memory chips (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

Spotify starts rolling out Recaps, a new AI feature for audiobooks that summarizes what users have listened to so far, in beta on iOS (Elissa Welle/The Verge)