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Discord now lets users buy, wishlist, and gift in-game cosmetic items directly within its platform, starting with a store within Marvel Rivals' Discord server (Ash Parrish/The Verge)

Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium, spun out of the nonprofit AI lab Kyutai, raised $70M led by FirstMark and Eurazeo, after launching in September (Bloomberg)

Taiwanese prosecutors charge Tokyo Electron for failing to prevent staff from allegedly stealing TSMC trade secrets, indicting the company on several counts (Bloomberg)

At a Tokyo forum, Masayoshi Son says he "was crying" over SoftBank selling its $5.83B Nvidia stake but "I just had more need for money to invest in OpenAI" (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

Just Eat founder Jitse Groen plans to step down as CEO effective January 1, replaced by Prosus Europe head Roberto Gandolfo; Groen founded Takeaway.com in 2000 (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg)

Study: using the SCONE-bench benchmark of 405 blockchain smart contracts, Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 developed exploits together worth $4.6M (Anthropic)

A profile of Cursor CEO Michael Truell, a 25-year-old who started building the AI coding tool in 2023, as some question Cursor's reliance on third-party models (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

Polymarket's Ukraine war betting, based on ISW's map, generated $1M+ in volume for "Will Russia capture Myrnohrad?"; an "unauthorized" map edit resolved the bet (Matthew Gault/404 Media)

Americans express fear and negativity toward AI, often relying on bad arguments like water usage, a stark contrast with Asia and Europe's relative positivity (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)

UK pension funds are cutting exposure to US equities over worries about growing concentration in a few tech stocks and a potential bubble in the AI sector (Financial Times)

An interview with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on why there's no AI bubble, his view that Watson's healthcare push was "inappropriate", IBM's quantum bet, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

CANI files a CA ballot measure to let an oversight board review and undo science and tech nonprofit conversions since January 2024, indirectly targeting OpenAI (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple doesn't plan to comply with India's mandate to preload a state-owned cyber safety app on iPhones and will raise its concerns with New Delhi (Reuters)

South Korean trade data: South Korea's chip exports rose 38.5% YoY to a record $17.26B in November, driven by strong data center demand and higher memory prices (Reuters)

Shopify says it fixed an issue in its login authentication flow, resolving a December 1 outage that left some merchants unable to log in or access POS systems (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters)

Nvidia announces Alpamayo-R1, an AI model for autonomous driving research, and calls it the "first industry-scale open reasoning vision language action model" (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)

Texas AG Ken Paxton says he is investigating Shein to determine whether it violated state laws on unethical labor practices and the sale of unsafe products (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Google, with its structural advantages, is a threat for both OpenAI and Nvidia; OpenAI has a real moat with 800M+ ChatGPT users, but needs an advertising model (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal that could top $5B; Celestial was valued at $2.5B in March 2025 (The Information)

Internal memo: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares a "code red" to shift more resources into improving ChatGPT amid rising competition, delaying other plans like ads (The Information)

AWS and Google Cloud announce a jointly built multicloud networking solution and a new open interoperability spec; AWS plans a rollout with Azure later in 2026 (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

The Trump administration agrees to inject up to $150M in xLight, which develops lasers for EUV machines and has Pat Gelsinger on its board, for an equity stake (Wall Street Journal)

Samsung says the Galaxy Z TriFold will go on sale in South Korea on December 12 for ~$2,440, in China later in 2025, and in the US as early as Q1 2026 (Heekyong Yang/Reuters)

Samsung unveils the Galaxy Z TriFold, with a 6.5" outer screen, a 10" inner screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC, and a 3.9mm body at its thinnest point (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

Marques Brownlee plans to shut down his wallpaper app Panels on December 31; Appfigures: it had 900K downloads and $95K in user spending since its 2024 launch (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

Amazon launches Amazon Now, a new service that aims to deliver household essentials and groceries in ~30 minutes or less, available in Seattle and Philadelphia (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Kalshi says users can now trade tokenized versions of their wagers on Solana, in a bid to court crypto holders; Polymarket already allows on-chain trading (Liz Napolitano/CNBC)

Apple says its AI chief, John Giannandrea, is stepping down; former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya will lead AI, reporting to Craig Federighi (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Vanguard will allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies to be traded on its platform starting Tuesday, reversing a longstanding position (Emily Graffeo/Bloomberg)

Dozens of US universities and colleges have announced new AI departments and programs over the last two years; an AI program is now MIT's second-largest major (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

Shopify suffers an outage, leaving some merchants unable to log in or access POS systems, and says it has fixed an issue and is seeing signs of recovery (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Memo: Adam Mosseri asks Instagram US staff to return to office five days a week, starting February; sources: it's the first such RTO mandate for a big Meta unit (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A look at ElevenLabs, as ~50% of its $193M in trailing 12-month revenue now comes from corporates, like Cisco, and ~50% from YouTubers, podcasters, and authors (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Michael Saylor's Strategy creates a $1.44B cash reserve funded by stock sales after cutting full-year profit and BTC yield targets due to bitcoin price drops (Stephen Alpher/CoinDesk)

Car sharing service Zipcar UK plans to shut down after London extended its Congestion Charge to EVs; Zipcar had losses of £11.7M in 2024 vs. £364,000 in 2023 (Simon Hunt/City A.M.)

Tutor Intelligence, which makes AI-powered warehouse robots, raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Swiss and German law enforcement agencies jointly shut down Cryptomixer, a major bitcoin mixing platform suspected of laundering money from criminal activities (Ludwig Burger/Reuters)

The reaction to NYT's David Sacks story aside, Sacks is pushing policies to help the US win the AI race, which also benefit him, his allies, and even his foes (Dan Primack/Axios)

Nevis, which develops AI agents to automate wealth advisers' grunt work, raised a $35M Series A from Sequoia and others at a $200M valuation, after a $5M seed (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which it calls "reasoning-first models built for agents", after releasing V3.2-Exp in September (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: 80+ tech startups passed $1B valuations in 2025 so far, many of them AI-related, save for exceptions like Kalshi (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Runway debuts the Gen-4.5 AI video generation model, highlighting its physical accuracy; it holds the top spot on Artificial Analysis' Video Arena leaderboard (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

OpenAI takes a stake in Thrive Capital's Thrive Holdings and says it will embed agents in its companies, which already include an accounting and an IT business (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Nvidia buys $2B of Synopsys' common stock and unveils a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and AI engineering products, including with CUDA libraries (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Netflix quietly removes support for casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs and streaming devices, including Chromecasts, regardless of subscription tier (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

Sources: consultancies like McKinsey froze graduate pay offers for 2026, the third consecutive year, as AI reshapes the industry and threatens its pyramid model (Financial Times)

ByteDance launches an AI voice assistant powered by its Doubao LLM, available first on ZTE's Nubia M153 smartphone prototype; Doubao has an estimated 159M MAUs (Reuters)

Germany-based Black Forest Labs, which develops the open-source Flux image generation models, raised a $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation, up from $1B in 2024 (Financial Times)

Indian government order: India's telecom ministry privately gives smartphone makers 90 days to preload state cybersecurity app Sanchar Saathi on all new devices (Reuters)