Techmeme
December 12, 2024, 12:10 PM

Top News

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
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
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.
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 …
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
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.
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 …
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  —  YouTube TV logo  —  Streaming services became a popular alternative to cable and satellite television because they were available …
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
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
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”:
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 …
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
Bloomberg:
Sources: Nvidia added ~200 staff to its self-driving R&D team in Beijing and will end 2024 with ~4,000 staff in China, up from ~3,000 at the start of the year  —  India Startup Rebel Foods Raises Funds Ahead of Planned IPO  —  US-China Tech War Fuels Asia Boomtowns Built on AI, Chips

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Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Katie Robertson / New York Times:
Brody Ford / Bloomberg:
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: