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Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: Texas AG opens a probe into the World Federation of Advertisers to determine if it conspired to boycott “certain social media platforms”; X sued WFA in August  —  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday he is opening an investigation into the World Federation of Advertisers …

Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg: The UK plans to draft a regulatory framework to oversee stablecoins and staking services as part of a single overarching regime for cryptoassets in early 2025  —  - Planned legislation pushed back due to change of government  — New administration to publish single overarching crypto regime

Bloomberg: Klarna's planned US IPO in H1 2025 could presage an uptick in IPOs by fintechs like Trustly, Chime, Zilch, Plaid, and Revolut after a relatively slow period  —  - Trustly, Chime, Zilch among candidates for a stock listing  — Sector stocks have bounced back after painful IPO losses

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Brave Search introduces AI chat to let users ask follow-up questions to initial queries, bringing together capabilities of chat-first and search-first tools  —  Brave announced on Thursday that it's introducing an AI chat mode for follow-up questions based on initial queries on Brave Search.

Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Snap files to dismiss New Mexico's lawsuit over Snap's alleged child safety issues with predators, saying the complaint misrepresents the state's investigation  —  Snap says the basis of a scathing lawsuit suggesting it systematically recommends teens' accounts to child predators is backwards …

Emma Roth / The Verge: SafeRent, an AI screening tool used by landlords, agrees to pay ~$2.3M to settle a discrimination lawsuit and will no longer display certain tenant scores  —  SafeRent, an AI screening tool used by landlords, will no longer use AI-powered “scores” to evaluate whether someone using housing vouchers would make a good tenant.

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority: Source: Google has canceled the development of a second-generation Pixel Tablet, planned for release in 2025, due to concerns that it wouldn't sell very well  —  Google is pulling the plug on its next Pixel Tablet, citing fears the product wouldn't sell very well.  —  •  —  TL;DR

The Information: Sources: OpenAI considered making a browser, discussed deals to power AI features on Samsung devices and search on sites and apps from Condé Nast and others  —  OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google.  —  The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is testing a more conversational version of Siri, dubbed “LLM Siri”, with plans to release it in spring 2026 as part of iOS 19 and macOS 16  —  - Company is working on overhaul that employees call ‘LLM Siri’  — Unveiling planned for next year, with rollout coming in 2026

Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: Spotify adds new audiobook features for Premium users: video clips up to 30 seconds long, Author Pages, and visuals that appear while users listen  —  Spotify is enhancing the audiobook experience for premium users through three new experiments: video clips, author pages, and the ability to add visuals that appear while users listen.

Hannah Lang / Reuters: Sources: a16z, Ripple, Kraken, and Circle are jostling for a seat on Trump's promised crypto advisory council, which is expected to set up a bitcoin reserve  —  A slew of crypto companies including Ripple, Kraken and Circle are jostling for a seat on President-elect Donald Trump's promised …

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: Sources: Amazon will likely face an EU investigation next year into whether it breaches the DMA by favoring its own brand products on its online marketplace  —  Amazon (AMZN.O) will likely face an EU investigation next year into whether it favours its own brand products on its online marketplace …

Lukas Knigge / Table.Media: The EU Parliament confirms Spain's Teresa Ribera as the next Competition Commissioner of the EU, replacing Margrethe Vestager  —  Teresa Ribera has been confirmed as the European Union's new Commissioner for Competition in the hearings of the EU Parliament.

James Reddick / The Record: In its latest security report, Meta says it removed 2M+ accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the UAE  —  Meta has taken down more than 2 million accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates, the company said Thursday.

Brady Dale / Axios: SEC chair Gary Gensler will step down on January 20; it has been traditional for SEC chairs to resign if the administration changes in the middle of their term  —  - “I thank President Biden for entrusting me with this incredible responsibility. … The agency had resisted launching exchange …

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: A look at OpenScholar, an LLM for scientific research built by the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington that outperforms GPT-4o on accuracy  —  Scientists are drowning in data.  With millions of research papers published every year, even the most dedicated experts struggle …

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: Filing: the US DOJ's proposal requires Google to allow websites more ability to opt-out of its AI products and provide more ad placement controls to advertisers  —  - Antitrust officials propose options in historic lawsuit  — Google says government pushing ‘radical agenda’ beyond case

Brian Fung / CNN: As part of its proposed remedies, the US DOJ says Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines for the next decade  —  The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale …

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press: Filing: DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome, restrict Android from favoring Google's search engine, ban default search deals on iOS and other devices  —  U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI releases a free online course for K-12 teachers to integrate ChatGPT into their classrooms, but some educators remain skeptical about the technology  —  OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students.

Rod McGuirk / Associated Press: Australia introduces a bill in Parliament to ban children younger than 16 from social media; companies would face fines of up to AU$50M for violations  —  Australia's communications minister introduced a world-first law into Parliament on Thursday that would ban children younger than 16 from social media …

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: Neuralink receives approval from Canada to launch clinical trials of its brain implants and plans to run its first non-US trial with Toronto Western Hospital  —  The billionaire's brain device company is currently recruiting patients in the US, UK and Canada.

Matt Swayne / The Quantum Insider: Google researchers introduce AlphaQubit, a machine-learning decoder that surpasses existing methods in identifying and correcting quantum computing errors  —  - Google researchers introduced AlphaQubit, an AI-powered decoder that improves quantum error correction, reducing errors by 6% compared …

Sara Fischer / Axios: Adtech company The Trade Desk announces Ventura, a smart TV operating system, and plans to partner with TV manufacturers for its rollout, expected in H2 2025  —  - “We're looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity,” Green said.

Claudia Assis / MarketWatch: Palo Alto Networks reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $2.14B, vs. $2.12B est., and projects FY 2025 sales in line with estimates; PANW drops ~5% after hours  —  Merely in-line outlook for fiscal 2025 weighs on the stock, down 5% after hours  —  Referenced Symbols

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: Snowflake reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $942.09M, vs. $898.46M est., unveils a deal with Anthropic to bring Claude to Cortex AI; SNOW jumps 18%+ after hours  —  Snowflake said it has inked a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic's Claude models to Snowflake Cortex AI.

Daniel Howley / Yahoo Finance: Nvidia reports Q3 revenue up 94% YoY to $35.1B, vs. $33.2B est., Data Center revenue up 112% to $30.8B, vs. $29B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  Nvidia (NVDA) reported its Q3 earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: xAI has told investors it raised $5B in a funding round valuing it at $50B and that its revenue has reached $100M on an annualized basis  —  The artificial intelligence startup has more than doubled its valuation from the spring  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup …

Hayden Field / CNBC: Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $13.8B in 2024, up from $2.3B in 2023; OpenAI's marketshare in enterprise AI declined from 50% to 34%  —  Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, a “reasoning” AI model that it claims is competitive with OpenAI's o1, and plans to open source it  —  A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI's o1.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Los Angeles-based Moonvalley, which is developing “transparent” generative AI video tools, raised a $70M seed co-led by General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures  —  The wide availability of tools to build generative AI has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups in the space.

Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine: Bluesky is booming partly because it isn't hindered by bad adtech, AI slop, throttled links, and largely hostile user experiences, unlike some of its big rivals  —  No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links.  Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not  —  Greetings all —

Jason Del Rey / Fortune: Memo: Amazon employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking a question to the new AI-based Alexa and getting a response or completing a task  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.  —  Amazon's race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags …

Faris Mokhtar / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple has raised its offer to invest in Indonesia from about $10M to almost $100M, in a bid to persuade the government to lift its iPhone 16 sales ban  —  - Company increases investment proposal tenfold, sources say  — Indonesia banned sales of iPhone 16 over local content rules

NBC News: The US Library of Congress says hackers accessed some email communications between congressional offices and library staff between January and September 2024  —  The Library of Congress didn't specify who was behind the hack.  —  The Library of Congress said hackers broke into its communications systems …

Eugene Kim / Business Insider: Internal document: Amazon has held talks with several partners for handling specific tasks on the AI-powered Alexa, including Uber, Ticketmaster, and Instacart  —  - Amazon discussed partnerships with other companies for an AI-powered Alexa upgrade.  — Partners under consideration included Uber …

Daniel Wiessner / Reuters: Amazon and SpaceX argued the NLRB, which recently found issues at the companies, is unconstitutional; 5th Circuit judges questioned the timeline of the charges  —  A panel of U.S. judges on Monday seemed likely to rule that Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Elon Musk's SpaceX were too quick to bring …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Perplexity debuts a shopping feature offering product recommendations, one-click checkout, and more for Pro users in the US, alongside a merchant program  —  AI-powered search engine Perplexity is venturing into e-commerce.  On Monday, the company debuted a new shopping feature …

Bloomberg: Sources: DOJ antitrust officials plan to ask a judge to force Google to sell Chrome, license Search data, uncouple Android from Search and Google Play, and more  —  - Antitrust officials also to seek data licensing, AI measures  — Google says the proposals would harm consumers and developers

CNN: Two Baltic Sea internet cables, connecting Lithuania with Sweden and Finland with Germany, were suddenly disrupted, sparking concerns of Russian sabotage  —  Two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea have been suddenly disrupted, according to local telecommunications companies …

Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Xiaomi, the second largest smartphone vendor in India, plans to replace its app store there with one from PhonePe in January, amid ongoing geopolitical tensions  —  Xiaomi will replace its app store with fintech PhonePe's offering for customers in India starting in January.

Philip Stafford / Financial Times: Sources: Trump Media is nearing an all-share purchase of Intercontinental Exchange's crypto trading platform Bakkt; DJT closed up 16.65%, BKKT up 162.46%  —  Truth Social owner is close to an all-share takeover of Intercontinental Exchange's Bakkt  —  Donald Trump's social media company …

Kylie Robison / The Verge: A look at emails between Musk and Altman from the early days of OpenAI, discussing its partnership with Microsoft, fundraising, employee compensation, AGI, more  —  Emails in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI expose the startup's rocky origins. … As OpenAI was ironing out a new deal with Microsoft in 2016 …

Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Mistral adds web search, image generation, Canvas for in-line editing, more to its Le Chat chatbot, and unveils Pixtral Large, a 124B-parameter multimodal model  —  Mistral, the French startup that made waves last year with a record-setting seed funding amount for Europe …

Umar Shakir / The Verge: Telegram updates “mini-apps” to be able to run full screen and be pinned to homescreens; devs can now add subscription plans, a “gift” sending feature, and more  —  Full-screen mini-apps, including games such as Doom, can run in either portrait or landscape orientations inside Telegram …

Federal Trade Commission: The US FTC's DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021  —  FTC releases annual Do Not Call Registry Data Book showing total reports about unwanted calls decreased further in 2024

GovTech: US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks  —  A new series of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is designed to enable cloud providers, AI developers …

Bloomberg: Netflix says 60M households watched the Paul vs. Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65M concurrent streams  —  - Mike Tyson and Jake Paul faced off in heavily anticipated bout  — Users complained on social media of difficulty watching fight

Ben Quinn / The Guardian: FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK's Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners  —  Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine's drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion's tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming  —  Kyiv's drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can't be electronically jammed