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Updated: 6 hours ago

Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recognition and a "digital travel credential" (Matt Burgess/Wired)

A look at Google's pressure-filled 2024 under Sundar Pichai, notching some AI wins with new Gemini models and navigating product mishaps, layoffs, and more (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

Analysis: mentions of deepfakes or AI-made content in X's Community Notes were more correlated with new image generation model releases than elections in 2024 (Clara Murray/Financial Times)

What to expect in 2025: increased hype around AI agents, new generative AI-powered gadgets, better weather forecasts due to Google DeepMind's GenCast, and more (Wall Street Journal)

Analysis: 50%+ of the US households showing highly-distorted power readings from February to October were within 20 miles of significant data center activity (Bloomberg)

Four districts in southern China announce a pilot framework for connected cars, with the goal of allowing autonomous robotaxis to travel across cities (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

Microsoft says that the issues with Xbox Cloud Gaming have now been resolved, after users experienced long wait times when launching games for over a day (Ian Carlos Campbell/Engadget)

Oracle's shares are up ~63% in 2024, lifting Larry Ellison's net worth to $217B+, as the company enjoyed its biggest stock rally since 1999 and the dot-com boom (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

A look at the EU's common charging regulations, which come into force on Dec. 28 and cover USB-C ports, fast charging, unbundling of charging bricks, and more (Callum Booth/The Verge)

A profile of Tron founder Justin Sun, who wants to be the "Elon Musk of the crypto world" and advises the Trump-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Some conservative critics of Elon Musk allege censorship and claim they were stripped of their X verification badges after challenging his views on H-1B visas (Angrej Singh/Axios)

Filing: Trump asks SCOTUS to pause the law that could ban TikTok, saying the court should give him time to "pursue a political resolution" of the dispute (Greg Stohr/Bloomberg)

OpenAI is tripling the size of its DC policy team to 12 and beefing up its lobbying as it tries to promote a sweeping plan for cheaper energy to data centers (Mohar Chatterjee/Politico)

DeepSeek-V3 sometimes identifies itself as ChatGPT when asked which model it is; some speculate that its training datasets may contain text generated by ChatGPT (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

Bookkeeping startup Bench, which raised $100M+ including from Shopify, closes down effective immediately; several employees say Bench also laid off staff (Natasha Mascarenhas/The Information)

Eight free-speech groups, including the EFF, and three members of Congress file briefs with SCOTUS in support of TikTok's appeal against the divest-or-ban law (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Experts say hackers compromised several companies' Chrome browser extensions, including Cyberhaven's, in a series of intrusions dating back to mid-December (Reuters)

The US says it has identified a ninth telecom company impacted by the Salt Typhoon hacks, and the number of individuals directly impacted is "less than 100" (Greg Otto/CyberScoop)

Sydney-based Sitemate, which offers no-code software tools for industries like infrastructure and utilities, raised a AU$27.5M Series A at a ~AU$150M valuation (Shivaune Field/Forbes Australia)

Meta expects AI-generated characters to "generate and share content" and "over time, exist on our platforms", similarly to regular accounts (Financial Times)

TSMC says it has started mass production at its first factory in Japan, located in Kumamoto, producing 12nm to 28nm chips for use in cars and image sensors (Kyodo News+)

Montenegro says Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon will be extradited to the US, potentially ending a standoff over competing demands by the US and South Korea (Bloomberg)

OpenAI says the PBC will oversee commercial operations, and the nonprofit will hire staff to pursue charitable activities in health care, education, and science (Hayden Field/CNBC)

OpenAI says its non-profit arm would receive shares in the new public benefit corporation at a valuation determined by independent financial advisors (Cade Metz/New York Times)

OpenAI says its board of directors is evaluating its corporate structure, including a plan to turn its for-profit arm into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (OpenAI)

Video game executives say making cinematic games is getting so expensive and time-consuming that investing in graphics is providing diminished financial returns (Zachary Small/New York Times)

US open-air shopping center vacancies drop to historically low levels, defying forecasts of a retail apocalypse caused by e-commerce, which has ~16% of US sales (Gregory Meyer/Financial Times)

Memecoin MIRA, created to fund research into a brain tumor affecting tech CEO Siqi Chen's daughter, hit an $80M market cap before falling as Chen began selling (Zack Abrams/The Block)

OpenAI says ChatGPT is mostly recovered and APIs and Sora fully operational, after an outage led to the services "experiencing high error rates" for a few hours (Emma Roth/The Verge)

A profile of Boring Company President and key Elon Musk deputy Steve Davis, who has spent 20+ years helping Musk cut costs and now helps recruit staff at DOGE (Sarah McBride/Bloomberg)

Advantest CEO Doug Lefever, whose company is the largest provider of chip testing machines, on AI chip demand, China, and more; Advantest's stock is up 95%+ YTD (Financial Times)

Tech lobbyists see new opportunities to expand access to high-skilled H-1B visas and green cards by leveraging the sway of Elon Musk over the GOP (Brendan Bordelon/Politico)

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3, an open-source MoE model of 671B total parameters, with 37B activated per token, claiming it outperforms top models like GPT-4o (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)

Microsoft adds Copilot to Microsoft 365 in Australia and Southeast Asia and raises 365's price, a sign of how it aims to turn a profit from its AI investments (Tom Dotan/Wall Street Journal)

US federal lobbying disclosure forms reveal how Meta, with a team of 14 directly employed lobbyists, led efforts to block the passage of KOSA in Congress (Ruth Reader/Politico)

An undisclosed 2023 agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI defines achieving AGI as the point when OpenAI develops AI systems that generate $100B+ in profits (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

How H-1B workers from India and other places help the US remain dominant in tech, as some on the new Tech Right discover the racial-nationalist bigotry of MAGA (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)

Source: Microsoft and OpenAI wrangle over Microsoft's stake in the for-profit, use of OpenAI's IP, continued collection of 20% of OpenAI's revenue, and more (The Information)

Finland says it suspects an oil tanker in Russia's shadow fleet of damaging three undersea internet cables on December 25, the latest Baltic Sea cable damaged (Richard Milne/Financial Times)

How some doctors are using AI tools, like DAX Copilot from Microsoft's Nuance, to automate administrative tasks like taking and summarizing notes (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

Bluesky launches a Trending Topics feature in beta on its desktop and mobile apps in English, and says users' muted words will transfer to Trending (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force that creates boom towns (New York Times)

Italian energy giant Eni launches its HPC6 supercomputer, the most powerful outside the US, costing 100M to build and using 14K AMD GPUs, to find oil and gas (Malcolm Moore/Financial Times)

Alibaba agrees to merge its South Korean operations with E-Mart's Gmarket, creating a 50-50 joint venture; sources say the new company could be valued at ~$4B (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)

An in-depth analysis of 62 AI queries: ChatGPT search beat Google on content gap analysis and disambiguation queries, but Google was better for most searches (Eric Enge/Search Engine Land)

AppLovin was 2024's top performing US tech stock, up 758% as of December 24, MicroStrategy was the second top performing, up 467%; Palantir was third, up 380% (Ari Levy/CNBC)

Japan Airlines halts ticket sales after a cyberattack hit its network equipment, causing delays to more than 40 flights and says flight safety was not impacted (New York Times)

Netflix's first livestream of NFL games solved the major buffering and freezing issues that plagued the Tyson-Paul fight for the most part, after early glitches (Richard Deitsch/New York Times)

A look at Toontown Rewritten, an unofficial recreation of Disney's Toontown Online game that shut down in 2013; Toontown Rewritten now has 10K DAUs and 50K MAUs (J. Clara Chan/Wired)

Examining Biden's tech legacy and the CHIPS Act, as the White House says $446B has been announced for chips and electronics manufacturing since he took office (Politico)

Alibaba's Qwen unveils QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on "enhancing visual reasoning capabilities", built upon Qwen2-VL-72B (Qwen)

Analysis: roughly two-thirds of 39 public digital health companies have lost value in 2024, while the Nasdaq is up 32% (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week; it averaged just $2.5B per day in November 2024 (The Block)

Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions (Gleb Bryanski/Reuters)

A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench (Tharin Pillay/Time)

Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+ (Bloomberg)

Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and Total Cost of Ownership, but software bugs hold it back (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

Kaiko: the share of BTC-USD trades in US market hours has now climbed to ~53% from 40% in 2021, with crypto liquidity back at levels seen before FTX's collapse (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

Opensignal ranks Japan #1 in G7 mobile reliability experience between July 1 and September 28, followed by France, Germany, the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK (Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu/Financial Times)

Singapore issued 13 crypto licenses in 2024, pulling ahead of Hong Kong, where authorities have been more cautious, in the race to become a regional crypto hub (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Ant splits Alipay into the Digital Payment Business Group focused on new payment products, and the Alipay Business Group focused on user growth and monetization (Ann Cao/South China Morning Post)

Fiserv to acquire Toronto-based Payfare, which lets gig workers on platforms like Uber access their wages early, for $140M, expected to close in H1 2025 (Niket Nishant/Reuters)

President Biden signs the $895B 2025 defense policy bill, including $3B for the FCC's "rip and replace" program to get rid of Chinese networking equipment (Martin Matishak/The Record)

A look at OpenAI's interest in robotics, from investing in startups like Figure and Physical Intelligence to, sources say, considering making a humanoid robot (The Information)

Sources: Founders Fund seeks ~$3B for its third growth equity fund; it raised $3.4B for its second growth fund and $1.8B for its eighth early-stage fund in 2022 (Dan Primack/Axios)

Elon Musk is one of two paid subscribers of an X account that has implied South Africa was better off under apartheid, slammed "Black ruled" countries, and more (Isaac Schorr/Mediaite)

Two major China-based Amazon merchants say Amazon reps have recently been offering incentives like free ads and lower commissions if they stop selling on Temu (The Information)

Filing: Apple asks to participate in Google's upcoming US search antitrust trial, saying it can't rely on Google to defend their revenue-sharing agreements (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

Iran claims it will lift its ban on "certain widely used foreign platforms", naming WhatsApp and Google Play as the first two apps to be unblocked (Bloomberg)

The biggest online dating companies are in crisis, as women and younger users increasingly look elsewhere, toward niche apps, websites, or real-life meetups (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

West Bank residents, who have long complained of missing and outdated data on Google Maps, say the Israel-Hamas war has made the app even worse for navigation (Paresh Dave/Wired)

US and Japanese law enforcement say North Korean hackers were responsible for stealing 4,502.9 bitcoin, worth $308M, from Japanese exchange DMM in May 2024 (Sheldon Reback/CoinDesk)

Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

The US FTC orders Marriott and Starwood to implement a robust customer data security scheme after Starwood's 2014 to 2018 breaches and Marriott's 2018 breach (Bill Toulas/BleepingComputer)

Tass: the Russian government bans crypto mining in 10 regions from January 1 to March 15, 2031, citing power consumption, after legalizing mining in July 2024 (Sheldon Reback/CoinDesk)

Sources: the EU will conditionally approve US chip design software company Synopsys' $35B Ansys acquisition, the largest tech deal since Broadcom bought VMware (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Analysis: SAP accounts for ~40% of Frankfurt DAX's 18.7% gains in 2024, with SAP up 70%+ as the software company transitions its business customers to the cloud (Financial Times)

How AI hallucinations are transforming scientific discovery, with some scientists calling the term "hallucination" misleading and likening it to exploration (William J. Broad/New York Times)

OpenAI's o3 performance on benchmarks suggests that test-time compute is the next best way to scale AI models, raising new questions about costs and usage (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

An investigator says he reported 26 OnlyFans accounts suspected of containing CSAM to NCMEC and that all of the accounts were removed within a day of his report (Reuters)

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