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DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-V3, a mixture-of-experts model of 685B total parameters, with 37B activated per token, claiming it outperforms top open-source models (Shubham Sharma/VentureBeat)

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DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-V3, a mixture-of-experts model of 685B total parameters, with 37B activated per token, claiming it outperforms top open-source models (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 countries help the US remain dominant in tech, as some on the new "Tech Right" discover MAGA's racial-nationalist bigotry (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)

Source: Microsoft and OpenAI wrangle over Microsoft's stake in the for-profit entity, use of OpenAI's IP, continued collection of 20% of OpenAI's revenue, 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 Trending Topics in beta on its desktop and mobile apps in English; a user's muted words and phrases won't appear in their trending topics (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, followed by MicroStrategy, up 467%, and Palantir, up 380%; the Nasdaq jumped 33% (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 avoided 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 releases QvQ-72B-Preview, an experimental research model focused on "enhancing visual reasoning capabilities", built on Qwen2-VL-72B (Qwen)

Analysis: in 2024, ~66% of 39 public digital health companies lost value, while the Nasdaq rose 32%; in 2021, digital health startups raised a record $29.1B (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Analysis: Coinbase International saw its total trading volume grow 124% week-over-week to $119B+ this past week, up from $2.5B per day average 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 the remedial phase of Google's US antitrust case, saying it can't rely on Google to defend their revenue-sharing agreements (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace approves lifting its ban on "certain widely used foreign platforms", naming WhatsApp and Google Play as the first two apps (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 BTC, worth $308M, from Japanese crypto 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: Russia bans crypto mining in 10 regions from January 1, 2025, to March 15, 2031, due to its high 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 nearly 40% of DAX 40'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 supercharging the scientific method, as some scientists call "hallucination" a misleading term and say it helps them explore new ideas (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)

PitchBook: global edtech VC funding reached just $3B in 2024, the lowest amount since $2.3B in 2014, and down from $17.3B at the peak of the pandemic in 2021 (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report: data centers could account for 6.7% to 12% of US total electricity consumption by 2028, up from ~4% currently (Laila Kearney/Reuters)

Netflix sues Broadcom in California federal court, accusing VMware's cloud software of infringing five patents covering aspects of operating virtual machines (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Balderton Capital and Dealroom: European AI startups attracted 25% of the region's VC funding, or ~$13.7B, in 2024, compared to 15% in 2020 (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Hashed: Hyperliquid, the top DeFi derivatives exchange by volume, had $112M+ of USDC outflows on December 23, over concerns of trading by North Korean hackers (Muyao Shen/Bloomberg)

Filing: Chinese video surveillance provider Dahua to terminate or exit five government projects in Xinjiang; Hikvision made a similar announcement this month (Reuters)

Donald Trump announces Scott Kupor, a managing partner at a16z, will serve as director of OPM, and Michael Kratsios will serve as the White House OSTP director (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Internet freedom advocates criticize Vietnam's Decree 147, taking effect on December 25 and requiring social media users to verify their identities and more (Agence France-Presse)

xAI raised a $6B Series C from a16z, BlackRock, Fidelity, Kingdom Holdings, Sequoia, Nvidia, and others, at a reported valuation of at least $40B (Antonio Pequeo IV/Forbes)

Xerox agrees to acquire Lexmark from Ninestar, PAG Asia Capital, and Shanghai Shouda in a deal valued at $1.5B, including debt, closing in H2 2025 (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

Experts: Bitcoin has time to adopt newer encryption that's resistant to attacks via potentially upcoming quantum systems, but such an overhaul could take years (Alexander Osipovich/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Microsoft is working on adding more first- and third-party AI models to power 365 Copilot, to lower its reliance on OpenAI amid cost and speed concerns (Reuters)

The Animation Guild ratifies a contract with major studios, without AI demands such as letting members opt out of using AI or allowing AI training on their work (Gene Maddaus/Variety)

In a viral YouTube video, MegaLag claims PayPal's Honey browser extension doesn't show users the best coupons and deals, and steals creators' affiliate revenue (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

Kuo: Apple's M5 chip will use TSMC's advanced N3P node; M5 Pro, Max, and Ultra will use a new server-grade SoIC packaging featuring separate CPU and GPU designs (Ben Lovejoy/9to5Mac)

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition review: best e-reader screen, fast page turns, and color options, but mostly small upgrades and lacks stylus support (Andrew Liszewski/The Verge)

Dutch tech investor Prosus plans to acquire online travel agency Despegar.com for $1.7B, a 33% premium, to expand in Latin America, set to close in Q2 2025 (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg)

VC insiders say many partners left big firms in 2024, either quitting or being pushed out, as bleak market conditions led to less funding and leaner operations (Bloomberg)

Sources: Meta plans to add a display to its Ray-Ban glasses as soon as H2 2025 to show notifications or AI responses, and has accelerated Orion's development (Financial Times)

Telegram is set to be profitable in 2024, a first, with $1B+ in revenue, up from nearly $350M in 2023, and ending 2024 with ~$500M in cash, as it pays down debt (New York Times)

SEC filings: Spotify executives have sold $1.25B in stock in 2024, including CEO Daniel Ek selling nearly $350M and co-founder Martin Lorentzon selling $550M+ (Financial Times)

X raised US Premium+ prices by 37.5% to $22 per month, effective December 21, and EU prices 31% from 16 to 21 per month; the basic subscription still costs $3 (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

The Biden administration opens a trade investigation into China's production of older chips, a move that may lead to tariffs or other measures to block imports (New York Times)

Google says it plans to counter Japan's claims that it engages in anticompetitive practices in search; source: Japan's FTC sent Google a cease-and-desist order (Bloomberg)

AI platforms are unlikely to become a major source of traffic or ad revenue for media outlets, with content deals offering only a short-term revenue boost (Om Malik/On my Om)

The past month's announcements from Google, OpenAI, and others have transformed the state of generative AI, highlighting the breadth and pace of change (Ethan Mollick/One Useful Thing)

A look at new tech-based mental health treatments like the Tetris method and Avatar therapy that are offering promising early results and possibilities (Michael Peel/Financial Times)

OpenAI details "deliberative alignment", a new method it used to make o1 and o3 "think" about its safety policy before responding, to improve overall alignment (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Sources: SoftBank's Masayoshi Son has recently become singularly obsessed with how to build the next Nvidia and wants competitive AI chips ready to ship by 2026 (Bloomberg)

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan says AI spending frenzy will continue until the decade's end, and downplays an Intel bid, saying he had his "hands very full" in AI chips (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

Donald Trump announces that Sriram Krishnan, until recently a general partner at a16z, will serve as senior policy advisor for AI at the White House OSTP (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

A survey of 501 organizations globally estimates organizations contribute $7.7B annually to open source software and 86% of contribution value is employee labor (The Linux Foundation)