Techmeme
December 12, 2024, 7:20 AM

Top News

Bloomberg:
Google debuts Gemini 2.0 and plans to test the model in search and AI Overviews, saying it enables “agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action”  —  Company expects AI assistants will follow its users around the web  —  Google debuted a new version …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
Gemini 2.0 Flash LLM early impressions: spatial reasoning performance is impressive and its new streaming API is one of those “we live in the future” moments  —  Huge announcment from Google this morning: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era.
Ina Fried / Axios:
Emma Roth / The Verge:
Wall Street Journal:
Meta donates $1M to president-elect Trump's inaugural fund; sources: Mark Zuckerberg gifted Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on November 27  —  President-elect had blasted the tech tycoon during the presidential campaign, but ties have been improving
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says Russia-backed hacking group Secret Blizzard targeted Ukraine's military using other cybercriminals' tools, in order to make attribution harder  —  A Russian-government backed hacking group targeted Ukraine's military using tools and infrastructure developed by cybercriminals, according to new research.
Joe Rossignol / MacRumors:
Apple launches Apple Intelligence outside of the US for the first time, making it available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, and South Africa  —  Apple Intelligence is officially launching outside of the U.S. for the first time today, as a result of the features gaining expanded language support.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Wes Davis / The Verge:
Zaheer Kachwala / Reuters:
SemiAnalysis:
A deep dive into AI scaling laws, including an outline of the old pre-training trends as well as the new scaling trends for post-training and inference time  —  In our pursuit of becoming a better full service research firm, we've moved off Substack.  For any questions please read https://semianalysis.com/faq/ #substack
Nic Fildes / Financial Times:
Australia plans a new levy on tech companies like Meta with $250M+ in revenue to force them to pay publishers for journalism, after Meta quit the previous deal  —  Move is designed to close loophole after Meta walked away from existing deal to use media content
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
Meta says it is “99% of the way” to resolving a global outage that hit Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, starting at approximately 12:40pm ET  —  Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp suffered a massive worldwide Wednesday afternoon, with services impacted in varying degrees based on user's region.
Sheena Vasani / The Verge:
Google rolls out two updates to Android's unknown tracker alerts feature, letting users pause location updates from their phone and pinpoint unfamiliar trackers  —  Google is rolling out two new updates to its unknown tracker alerts feature that should make it easier for Android device owners …
Muyao Shen / Bloomberg:
Binance and Circle partner to promote USDC; Binance plans to list more crypto trading pairs denominated in USDC and hold USDC for its own corporate treasury  —  - Circle faces increased challenges in the stablecoin market  — Binance will support more USDC usage on its platform
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Adobe reports Q4 revenue up 11% YoY to $5.61B, vs. $5.54B est., Digital Media revenue up 12%, forecasts FY 2025 revenue below est.; ADBE drops 8%+  —  - Fiscal year sales, profit forecasts fall short of estimates  — Software maker plans a new higher-priced tier for AI tools
Sean Hollister / The Verge:
Telefónica, one of the world's largest carriers, plans to preinstall the Epic Games Store on every new compatible Android phone it sells, including Samsung's  —  Telefónica, one of the largest carriers in the world serving the UK, Spain, Germany, and Latin America with the O2 …
George Winslow / Tv Technology:
The FCC opens all 1,200 megahertz of the 6GHz band for unlicensed use by very-low-power devices, citing growth in wearables, AR/VR, and other cutting-edge tech  —  The move, which the agency says will spur innovation, had been opposed by the NAB for its potential impact on newsgathering
The Information:
Katie Robertson / New York Times:
The NYT Tech Guild and its 600+ members reach a tentative deal with management on a contract enhancing job security, setting flexible hybrid schedules, and more  —  The union, which represents some 600 tech workers at the publication, had been negotiating for a contract for more than two years.

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Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Ari Levy / CNBC:
Jane Lanhee Lee / Bloomberg:
Alexander Maxham / Android Headlines:
Greg Stohr / Bloomberg: