Sunday, December 7, 2025

Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Sources: Ted Sarandos met with President Trump in November, and both agreed WBD should go to the highest bidder; Sarandos argued that Netflix wasn't a monopoly  —  Netflix Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos ventured to the White House in mid-November for a meeting with President Donald Trump.



Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o (Ashish Vaswani/Essential AI)

Ashish Vaswani / Essential AI:
Essential AI, whose CEO co-wrote Google's Attention Is All You Need paper, unveils Rnj-1, an 8B-parameter open model with SWE-bench performance close to GPT-4o  —  The long-term advancement and equitable diffusion of AI technologies crucially depend on their development in the Open.



Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account (Bjarke Smith-Meyer/Politico)

Bjarke Smith-Meyer / Politico:
Nikita Bier accuses the European Commission of trying to deceptively amplify the reach of its post about the €120M fine on X; X terminates the EC's ad account  —  Nikita Bier, X's head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying …



Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon (Sally Ward-Foxton/EE Times)

Sally Ward-Foxton / EE Times:
Lemurian Labs, which aims to develop hardware-agnostic portability software for AI workloads, raised a $28M Series A co-led by Pebblebed Ventures and Hexagon  —  AI software startup Lemurian Labs has pivoted away from AI hardware, having raised a $28-million series A to build its AI software stack.



Saturday, December 6, 2025

A technical deep dive into Amazon's Trainium3 accelerator, including its server SKUs' specifications, silicon design, power budget, and bill of materials (SemiAnalysis)

SemiAnalysis:
A technical deep dive into Amazon's Trainium3 accelerator, including its server SKUs' specifications, silicon design, power budget, and bill of materials  —  Step-Function Software & System Improvements, “Amazon Basics” GB200 NVL36x2, NL72x2/NL32x2 Scale Up Rack Architecture, Optimized Perf per TCO, Trainium4



Sources: Apple's chip chief Johny Srouji told Tim Cook that he is seriously considering leaving soon; some execs floated elevating him to the CTO role (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple's chip chief Johny Srouji told Tim Cook that he is seriously considering leaving soon; some execs floated elevating him to the CTO role  —  Apple Inc., long the model of stability in Silicon Valley, is suddenly undergoing its biggest personnel shake-up in decades …



Some Reddit moderators say a surge of AI slop on the site is eroding its authenticity and could lead to a feedback loop of AI models training on AI content (Kat Tenbarge/Wired)

Kat Tenbarge / Wired:
Some Reddit moderators say a surge of AI slop on the site is eroding its authenticity and could lead to a feedback loop of AI models training on AI content  —  Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits.



A look at Phreeli, a privacy-focused phone carrier that lets users sign up with only a ZIP code and uses an encryption system based on "zero-knowledge proofs" (Andy Greenberg/Wired)

Andy Greenberg / Wired:
A look at Phreeli, a privacy-focused phone carrier that lets users sign up with only a ZIP code and uses an encryption system based on “zero-knowledge proofs”  —  Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order.



Thursday, December 4, 2025

DealBook Summit: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says "the more constitutional you want to make" the US' Caribbean boat strikes "the more you're going to need" Palantir (Ece Yildirim/Gizmodo)

Ece Yildirim / Gizmodo:
DealBook Summit: Palantir CEO Alex Karp says “the more constitutional you want to make” the US' Caribbean boat strikes “the more you're going to need” Palantir  —  Alex Karp vows to use his “whole influence” on immigration and defense policy.  —  Read Later Read Later



Jimmy Wales says Wikimedia is working with Big Tech on AI deals similar to Google and reader donations are "not to subsidize OpenAI costing us a ton of money" (Reuters)

Reuters:
Jimmy Wales says Wikimedia is working with Big Tech on AI deals similar to Google and reader donations are “not to subsidize OpenAI costing us a ton of money”  —  Wikipedia is working with Big Tech on deals similar to its arrangement with Google, the online encyclopedia's co-founder …



Sources: Beijing-based Cambricon plans to more than triple its AI chip production to 500K units in 2026, including 300K of its advanced Siyuan 590 and 690 chips (Yuan Gao/Bloomberg)

Yuan Gao / Bloomberg:
Sources: Beijing-based Cambricon plans to more than triple its AI chip production to 500K units in 2026, including 300K of its advanced Siyuan 590 and 690 chips  —  Cambricon Technologies Corp. plans to more than triple its production of AI chips in 2026, aiming to wrest market share …



London-based PolyAI, which makes call center AI voice assistants, raised an $86M Series D led by Georgian, Hedosophia, and Khosla, after raising $50M in 2024 (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)

John Reynolds / Tech.eu : London-based PolyAI, which makes call center AI voice assistants, raised an $86M Series D led by Georgian, Hedo...