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December 12, 2024, 2:05 PM
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Victoria Song / The Verge:
Google unveils Android XR, a mixed reality OS with Gemini built in for headsets and smart glasses, and plans a 2025 launch with Samsung's Project Moohan headset  —  I demoed Google's new Android XR platform, Samsung's Project Moohan, and prototype smart glasses.  I felt as close to Tony Stark in a controlled demo as I'll ever be.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Hands-on with Samsung's Project Moohan headset: lighter than the Vision Pro, Android XR is highly reminiscent of visionOS, Gemini is the killer app, and more  —  - Google aims to mimic phone success with Android XR software  — Samsung headset coming next year with Vision Pro-like features
CNET:
An interview with Google President of Android Ecosystem Sameer Samat on Android XR, why AI can make mixed reality work, Gemini, privacy concerns, and more  —  CNET sat down with Google's Sameer Samat to talk about Android XR and why now is the right time for mixed reality to go mainstream.
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.
Wall Street Journal:
Meta donates $1M to President-elect Trump's inaugural fund; sources say Mark Zuckerberg gifted Ray-Ban Meta 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
Nic Fildes / Financial Times:
Australia plans a levy on tech companies like Meta with $250M+ in local revenue to force them to pay publishers for journalism, after Meta quit the prior deal  —  Move is designed to close loophole after Meta walked away from existing deal to use media content
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 …
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Microsoft says Russia-backed hacking group Secret Blizzard targeted Ukraine's military using other cybercriminals' tools, “to make attribution more difficult”  —  A Russian-government backed hacking group targeted Ukraine's military using tools and infrastructure developed by cybercriminals, according to new research.
Kate Knibbs / Wired:
Harvard releases a high-quality dataset of nearly 1M public-domain books, created with funding from Microsoft and OpenAI, that anyone can use to train AI tools  —  The project's leader says that allowing everyone to access the collection of public-domain books will help “level the playing field” in the AI industry.
Reuters:
Forbes: Elon Musk's net worth crossed $400B on December 12, boosted by Tesla stock and SpaceX's valuation; Jeff Bezos has a $244B net worth, the second highest  —  Tesla (TSLA.O) CEO Elon Musk's net worth crossed $400 billion on Thursday, the Forbes real-time billionaires list showed …
Jessica Toonkel / Wall Street Journal:
Current and former Netflix staff say the company has walked back its parental-leave benefits, after shifting its focus from subscriber growth to profitability  —  Employees worry the pullback and other new restrictions mean the entertainment giant is losing the identity that fueled its success
Matt Yoder / Awful Announcing:
YouTube tells customers that the monthly price for YouTube TV's base plan will jump from $73 to $83 in January 2025, after raising it from $65 to $73 in 2023  —  Streaming services became a popular alternative to cable and satellite television because they were available for far cheaper with consumer-friendly options.
SemiAnalysis:
A deep dive into AI scaling laws, including an outline of the old pre-training scaling trend and 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
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
Erin Griffith / New York Times:
An interview with Evan Williams on his new app Mozi, which raised $6M and aims to foster in-person connections as a return to social media's original intention  —  Evan Williams's new app, Mozi, is aimed at fostering in-real-life connections.Carolyn Fong for The New York Times
Ana Swanson / New York Times:
Sources: in the past year, US chip companies have lobbied the US government against a China sales ban, citing billions in lost revenue, shocking US officials  —  An intense struggle has unfolded in Washington between companies and officials over where to draw the line on selling technology to China.
More: IER
John Gruber / Daring Fireball:
The Information: Apple this past summer canceled the development of a high-performance Mac chip to let some engineers in Israel work on its first AI server chip  —  Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”:
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

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From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
BuzzFeed reaches a deal to sell Hot Ones owner First We Feast for $82.5M in cash to a consortium of investors led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Warner Bros. Discovery announces a restructuring to create two separate units: one for linear TV networks and one for production studios and streaming platforms

Costas Pitas / Reuters:
Donald Trump picks former news anchor and hardline Republican Kari Lake to be the director of US government-funded media outlet Voice of America

More News

Earlier Picks

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
Wes Davis / The Verge:
visionOS 2.2's ultrawide Mac display option is probably the closest thing to a killer app and makes the Vision Pro's $3,499 price feel a little closer to right
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