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Techmeme

Demis Hassabis says there aren't "any plans" to put ads in Gemini and, in response to OpenAI testing ads, says "maybe they feel they need to make more revenue" (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A Massachusetts judge grants a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi from letting state residents bet on sports through its online platform (Nate Raymond/Reuters)

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Snap reaches an agreement to settle a social media addiction lawsuit in California, a week before the start of a trial in the first of several such lawsuits (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

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Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT (Theo Wayt/The Information)

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Netflix's ad revenue hit $1.5B in 2025, up by more than 2.5x vs. 2024, and viewing hours grew 2% YoY in H2, driven by a 9% rise in viewing of branded originals (Dade Hayes/Deadline)

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Netflix reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to $12B vs. $11.97B est., 325M paid subs, 2025 revenue up 16% to $45.2B, plans to increase content spend by 10% in 2026 (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

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The US DOJ says at least two DOGE employees accessed Social Security data that was off-limits under a court ruling and shared agency data on third-party servers (April Rubin/Axios)

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The US FTC files a notice to appeal a November 2025 ruling that found Meta did not hold an illegal monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

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OpenAI rolls out age prediction on ChatGPT globally to identify users under 18 and apply automatic content protections as it prepares to introduce adult content (Juby Babu/Reuters)

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Filings from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit detail Microsoft's decade-long OpenAI relationship, like establishing a new subsidiary for Sam Altman while he was fired (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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xAI co-founder Greg Yang says he is stepping back from the startup into an informal advisory role to focus on his health after being diagnosed with Lyme disease (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

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Sources: AI inference startup Baseten raised $300M led by IVP and CapitalG at a $5B valuation, more than doubling its previous valuation; Nvidia invested $150M (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

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OpenAI and ServiceNow sign a three-year deal to integrate OpenAI's models into ServiceNow's business software, including using OpenAI's AI agents for IT tasks (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

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World Economic Forum panel: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI-driven job displacement will "make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration" (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg)

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Netflix adds a real-time voting feature with the premiere of its Star Search reboot, available on mobile, smart TVs, and streaming devices, but not in a browser (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Demis Hassabis says Chinese AI companies are about six months behind leading western labs and the response to DeepSeek's R1 in 2025 was a "massive overreaction" (Bloomberg)

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The World Economic Forum in Davos is now dominated by tech giants, whose interests shunt aside topics like climate change, as Trump and AI take center stage (Peter S. Goodman/New York Times)

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Setapp Mobile, one of the first alt iOS app stores launched in 2024 after the EU's DMA, plans to shut down, blaming "still-evolving and complex business terms" (Tim Hardwick/MacRumors)

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Ethernovia, which builds automotive ethernet chips and software, raised a $90M+ Series B led by Maverick Silicon (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

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Substack challenger Beehiiv expects to nearly double its annual revenue to $50M in 2026; it now has over 40,000 MAUs, including nearly 15,000 paying subscribers (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)

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Ukraine says it plans to share nearly four years of combat data, including millions of hours of drone footage, with allies to help train AI models (Max Hunder/Reuters)

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Filings: Michael Saylor's Strategy has bought more than $3B in Bitcoin since January 5, marking its biggest two-week purchase since December 2024 (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg)

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Legal AI startup Ivo, which aims to reduce hallucinations by breaking legal reviews into 400+ tasks, raised a $55M Series B, a source says at a $355M valuation (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

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Nielsen: Christmas Day 2025 set a record for US streaming usage with 55.1B minutes, or 54% of all TV viewing for the day, up by 3.9B minutes on Christmas 2024 (Rick Porter/The Hollywood Reporter)

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Portugal orders Polymarket to stop operations and blocks it in the country after heavy activity tied to its recent presidential election, with €110M+ in volume (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says selling AI chips to China is like "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea" and has "incredible national security implications" (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

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Humans&, founded by ex-Anthropic, xAI, and Google staff to build collaborative AI, raised a $480M seed from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4.48B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)

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Sensor Tower: Reels accounted for 50%+ of all Instagram ads in 2025, up from 35% in 2024; Reels accounted for 46% of time spent on Instagram in the US in 2025 (Zach Vallese/CNBC)

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How Zynga uses a secretive VIP program with personal account managers and exclusive sweepstake entries to keep top players spending on games like FarmVille (Michael Thomsen/New York Times)

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Netflix and WBD say Netflix revised its WBD offer to an all-cash deal for $27.75/share, with the same $82.7B value; its original bid had $59B in debt financing (Brian Stelter/CNN)

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Vibe coding startup Emergent raised a $70M Series B led by Khosla and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, after a $23M Series A in September 2025, and claims 5M+ users (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

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Meta VP of Public Policy Simon Milner, the company's most senior Asia-Pacific policy executive, plans to leave after 14 years to retire from full-time work (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Baidu's Ernie Assistant passes 200M MAUs, as competition intensifies among Chinese tech giants in AI; Ernie is linked to apps like JD.com and Meituan (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: UK and Chinese security officials set up a forum to discuss cyberattacks after hacking accusations, the first of its kind, to help prevent escalation (Alex Wickham/Bloomberg)

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Sony and TCL sign a non-binding agreement to spin off Sony's TV and home audio hardware business into a new joint venture, aiming to finalize the deal by March (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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Sources: China broadens its probe into Temu owner PDD, dispatching 100+ investigators to its Shanghai HQ, after staff exchanged physical blows with regulators (John Liu/Bloomberg)

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PE firm Everstone combines India's Wingify, which helps A/B test sites, and France's AB Tasty, which improves e-commerce UX; Everstone bought Wingify for $200M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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French accounting software startup Pennylane raised $204M led by TCV, a source says at a ~$4.25B valuation, with participation from Blackstone, DST, and others (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

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A look at South Korea's Independent AI Foundation Model competition, which aims to find the best homegrown AI models, in a bid to compete with the US and China (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Sources: ByteDance boosts its cloud via more sales hires and lower prices; IDC: ByteDance had 13% of China's AI cloud market in H1 2025, behind Alibaba's 23% (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

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Pune-based supply chain robotics startup Unbox Robotics raised a $28M Series B in a mix of primary and secondary capital, after raising $15M in earlier rounds (Anjali Jain/Inc42)

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xAI faces a growing outcry from global regulators over Grok's generation of nonconsensual explicit photos, but has faced little regulatory action in the US (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic details the "Assistant Axis", a pattern of neural activity in language models that governs their default identity and helpful behavior (Anthropic)

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The UK Treasury committee says the government and Bank of England's "wait-and-see approach" to AI risks in the financial sector poses "serious harm" to the UK (Kalyeena Makortoff/The Guardian)

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Cursor's recent experiment involved running hundreds of AI agents for nearly a week to build a web browser, writing 1M+ lines of code across 1,000 files (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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The UK launches a consultation on whether to ban under-16s from using social media, alongside restrictions on addictive app features like infinite scrolling (Kiran Stacey/The Guardian)

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Q&A with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan on the use of AI in game development, the gaming community's pushback against AI, partnering with Grok, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

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Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch revives investor fears about disruption that weighed on SaaS stocks in 2025; Morgan Stanley's SaaS index is down 15% YTD (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

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The UK government plans to take a £25M stake in Octopus Energy's tech spin-off Kraken, last valued at $8.65B, in an effort to encourage Kraken to list in London (Financial Times)

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Sources: Seoul-based AI chip designer FuriosaAI seeks to raise a $300M to $500M Series D to fund mass production of its second-gen RNGD chip and eyes a 2027 IPO (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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