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Techmeme

Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases the GLM-4.6V open-weight vision models, with support for native function calling, available with 106B and 9B parameters (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

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Crunchyroll announces it is shutting down its free ad-supported streaming option on December 31; Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $7.99/month or $79.99/year (Luke Bouma/Cord Cutters News)

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Google adds new pinch and wrist gestures to the Pixel Watch 4 and says Watch 3 and Watch 4 will now use an on-device Gemma-based AI model for Smart Replies (Abner Li/9to5Google)

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Report: SpaceX is expected to make around $15B in revenue in 2025, increasing to between $22B and $24B in 2026, with the majority coming from Starlink (Juby Babu/Reuters)

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The US Navy and Palantir announce ShipOS, saying the software will speed up shipbuilding and improve supply chain visibility; the deal is valued at $448M (Colin Demarest/Axios)

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Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, steps down to launch Overtone, an "AI-driven" dating service backed by Match; Hinge promotes CMO Jackie Jantos to CEO (Yasmin Gagne/Fast Company)

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Sources: Nvidia's H200 chips for China, mainly manufactured in Taiwan, will travel to the US for an unusual national security review before they are exported (Wall Street Journal)

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Source: Trump allowed Nvidia to sell H200s to China after concluding the move carried a lower security risk as Huawei offers systems with comparable performance (Bloomberg)

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Australia's ban on social media for users aged under 16 comes into effect; platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to AU$49.5M (Josh Taylor/The Guardian)

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Sources: SpaceX plans an IPO in mid-to-late 2026, seeking to raise far above $30B and targeting a ~$1.5T valuation, potentially making it the largest IPO ever (Bloomberg)

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Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie says Substack is starting to test native sponsorships with some writers but won't take a cut for now (Emily Sundberg/Feed Me)

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Instagram appears to be generating often misleading SEO-style headlines and long descriptions for users' Instagram posts, appearing in Google Search results (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

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Duve, which offers AI-powered guest management tools for hotels, raised a $60M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth, bringing its total funding to $85M (Adriana Lee/Skift)

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Boom Aerospace, which is building a supersonic plane, announces Superpower, a 42MW natural gas turbine using Boom's supersonic engine, to power AI data centers (Boom)

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Denise Dresser, Slack CEO since 2023, is stepping down to join OpenAI as the company's chief revenue officer (Wired)

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Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $37B in 2025, up from $11.5B in 2024; Anthropic's share of enterprise LLM spend grew from 24% to 40% YoY (Menlo Ventures)

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Google Photos launches new video editing tools, including specialized templates with preset music and text overlays, as well as a redesigned video editor (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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Sources: OpenAI has become more guarded about publishing research on AI's economic harms, prompting at least two economic research staffers to leave (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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Anthropic donates the Model Context Protocol to the Agentic AI Foundation and says there are now more than 10,000 active public MCP servers (Anthropic)

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Spanish police arrest a suspected 19-year-old hacker in Barcelona over allegedly stealing and attempting to sell 64M records from breaches at nine companies (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

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Anthropic, OpenAI, Block, Google, AWS, Microsoft, and others launch the Agentic AI Foundation to build open-source agent standards under the Linux Foundation (Will Knight/Wired)

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Circle launches USDCx, a privacy-focused version of its USDC stablecoin on the Aleo blockchain, to give users "banking-level privacy" with a "compliance record" (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

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An EssilorLuxottica independent board director says Meta now holds an "at least 3%" stake in the Ray-Ban maker, and possibly up to 5%, confirming media reports (Mathieu Rosemain/Reuters)

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The US DOD says it has chosen Google's Gemini for Gov to power its new GenAI.mil platform for the US military, as part of a $200M contract from July (Jen Judson/Bloomberg)

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Some Biden-era officials say access to Nvidia chips could help China's AI companies buy time while China's chipmakers improve their chip supply and performance (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

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Stripe and Paradigm launch a public trial for their blockchain project Tempo, targeting real-world stablecoin payments, with Kalshi and UBS as new partners (Bloomberg)

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Mistral launches Devstral 2, an AI coding model with 123B parameters requiring at least four H100 GPUs, and Devstral Small, a 24B-parameter model for local use (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

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Wikimedia Foundation names Bernadette Meehan, who was the US Ambassador to Chile from 2022 to 2025, as its new CEO (Deborah Mary Sophia/Reuters)

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Saviynt, an identity and access management service focused on "human and nonhuman" identity controls, raised a $700M Series B led by KKR at a $3B valuation (Angus Loten/Wall Street Journal)

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Pebble unveils the Pebble Index 01, a $99 smart ring with an on-device LLM for processing voice notes, shipping in March 2026, initially for $75 (Julian Chokkattu/Wired)

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Spotify rolls out music videos to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada, following a beta launch in nearly 100 markets last year (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

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Source: ChatGPT has nearly 900M weekly active users; Sensor Tower: Gemini's MAUs grew ~30% to 346M between August and November while ChatGPT's rose ~5% to 810M (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

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Source: as soon as this week, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others are set to unveil the Agentic AI Foundation to build open-source agent standards (Aaron Holmes/The Information)

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Fal, which hosts generative AI models for developers, raised a $140M Series D led by Sequoia, a source says at a $4.5B valuation, up from $1.5B in July (Paayal Zaveri/Bloomberg)

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Satya Nadella says Microsoft plans to spend $17.5B on AI and cloud computing in India over four years, its largest Asia investment yet, after meeting with Modi (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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Microsoft plans to invest CA$7.5B in Canada over two years to build AI infrastructure, coming online in 2026, taking its investment to CA$19B from 2023 to 2027 (Deborah Sophia/Reuters)

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Anthropic and Accenture sign a three-year deal to sell AI services to businesses; the deal makes Accenture one of Anthropic's top three enterprise customers (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Meta is pursuing a Llama successor and new frontier AI model, codenamed Avocado, set for release in Q1 2026 and that could be a proprietary model (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Dutch media: ASML has sold parts to a subsidiary of a Chinese army supplier, per Chinese import and export data; ASML says it can't confirm the report (Toby Sterling/Reuters)

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Sources: Beijing is set to limit access to Nvidia's H200 chips despite President Trump allowing their export to China, in its push for chip self-sufficiency (Zijing Wu/Financial Times)

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South Korean media: police raided Coupang's HQ, searching for evidence related to a historic data breach that compromised 30M+ people's personal information (Jane Lanhee Lee/Bloomberg)

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As Australia prepares to enact the world's first under-16 social media ban on December 10, a look at the implications, reaction from parents and teens, and more (Nic Fildes/Financial Times)

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Mercedes partners with Chinese software developer Momenta to deploy Level 4 self-driving cars for Lumo Mobility in Abu Dhabi, its first foray into robotaxis (William Wilkes/Bloomberg)

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The European Commission opens an investigation into whether Google used publishers' content to provide AI services and YouTube content to train its AI models (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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The US DOJ detains two men for allegedly violating export controls by trying to smuggle $160M+ of Nvidia H100 and H200 chips to China; a third man pleads guilty (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Square product chief Willem Avé on Block's restructuring in 2024, AI automation, investing in crypto, the Lightning Network, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

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An overview of AI in 2025, including arguments for and against above-trend model capabilities growth, the state of evals, and the safety of reasoning models (Gavin Leech/LessWrong)

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AI browsers, still far from making legacy browsers obsolete, are forcing web developers to rethink whether they are designing websites for humans or for robots (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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The future of AI development could resemble the rivalry between iOS and Android, with China's AI approach closer to Google's open and customizable Android OS (Kai-Fu Lee/Financial Times)

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Reddit launches new safety features globally for under-18s, like stricter chat settings, ahead of Australia's social media ban for under-16s from December 10 (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)

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