Techmeme

Paresh Dave / Wired:As part of its remedies proposal, Google says it won't require device makers and other partners to distribute Gemini to US users for three years  —  Google dominated the last era of search.  Now the company and the US Justice…

Bloomberg:The US awards a $4.75B CHIPS Act grant to Samsung and $1.6B to Texas Instruments for new factories in Texas and Utah, rounding out the program's largest grants  —  - Incentives will go toward new factories in Texas and Utah  — Biden…

Jason Del Rey / Fortune:A profile of AWS CEO Matt Garman, including his first few months on the job, what his stewardship means for the business, and his opportunities and challenges  —  Matt Garman joined Amazon Web Services as an intern nearly two…

Olivia Carville / Bloomberg:A look at a lawsuit from 64 families against Snap that alleges Snapchat's design is responsible for connecting teens to dealers selling counterfeit drugs  —  “I'm a survivor, and that's bad for you, CEO of Snapchat, because,…

Manish Singh / India Dispatch:Sensor Tower: Indian quick commerce startup Zepto had 31M MAUs in Nov. 2024, up from 6M in May 2022; Blinkit had 30M MAUs in Nov. 2024, up from 28M in May 2022  —  Quick-commerce rivals Zomato-owned Blinkit and Zepto are…

Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:Researchers at Anthropic, Oxford, Stanford, and MATS create Best-of-N Jailbreaking, a black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities  —  New research from Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies and…

Reuters:Dealogic data: the global M&A activity in the tech sector in 2024 jumped 20%+ YoY to $534B, accounting for the largest share of the total $3.45T in M&A activity  —  Bankers expect global deal volumes to surpass $4 trillion next year, the highest in…

Wency Chen / South China Morning Post:Report: Alibaba splits the team developing apps for its AI chatbot Qianwen from the team that builds its LLM, following similar moves by ByteDance and Baidu  —  It follows similar moves by ByteDance and Baidu, which…

Bloomberg:Sources: Intel shortlists buyout firms for the next round of bidding for its Altera unit, including Francisco Partners, Silver Lake, and Lattice Semiconductor  —  - Company asks suitors to submit formalized bids by late January  — Intel is…

Bloomberg:Google calls DOJ's proposed Chrome sale “extreme” and at odds with the law, urging the judge to take caution to avoid stifling innovation and future investment  —  - Justice Department seeking forced sale in antitrust case  — DC federal…

Jody Godoy / Reuters:As part of its remedies proposal, Google would make its Android agreements with OEMs non-exclusive and allow them to unbundle Play Store from Chrome and Search  —  Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google proposed on Friday a loosening of its…

Lee-Anne Mulholland / The Keyword:Google files its proposed remedies in the DOJ's search antitrust lawsuit, including letting browser companies have multiple default agreements across platforms  —  We will appeal the Court's decision but the process…

Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:Sources: OpenAI's GPT-5, codenamed Orion, is behind schedule and faces technical hurdles, including high computing costs and limited high-quality training data  —  OpenAI has run into problem after problem on its new…

TrendForce:Global shipments of VR and MR headsets are expected to reach ~9.6M units in 2024, up 8.8% YoY; Meta remains the global leader with a 73% market share  —  TrendForce's latest report estimates that global shipments of VR and MR headsets are…

Joseph Menn / Washington Post:A US judge finds NSO Group liable for exploiting a bug in WhatsApp to spy on 1,400 users and that WhatsApp is entitled to sanctions against NSO  —  Israel-based maker of Pegasus program loses five-year-old landmark case. …