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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 without a permanent CEO after Pat Gelsinger ousted

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 court to hold hearing on remedy proposals in April

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 agreements with Apple (AAPL.O) and others to set Google …

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 requires that we first file proposed remedies.  This is a case about contracts.

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 artificial-intelligence project, code-named Orion

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 expected to reach approximately 9.6 million units in 2024, representing a YoY increase of 8.8%.

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.  —  Messaging giant WhatsApp won a landmark ruling Friday …

David Scheer / Bloomberg: Tai Mo Shan, part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agrees to pay $123M to settle SEC's claims it misled investors about the stability of TerraUSD  —  Tai Mo Shan Ltd., part of Jump Trading's crypto unit, agreed to pay $123 million to settle a US regulator's claims it misled investors …

Kali Hays / Fortune: Sources: David Sacks' role as WH AI and crypto czar will be limited to an adviser role, overseen by Michael Kratsios, partly because he won't divest from Craft  —  David Sacks may already be getting a taste of how difficult it can be to get things done in Washington D.C.

Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: A study by Waymo and insurer Swiss Re finds Waymo's vehicles were safer than those driven by humans, with a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims and more  —  Waymo's autonomous vehicles cause less property damage and fewer bodily injuries when they crash than human-driven vehicles …

Stephen Alpher / CoinDesk: Rumble announces a $775M investment from Tether and plans to use $525M to fund a tender offer for ~70M shares of its common stock; RUM jumps 35%+ after hours  —  YouTube competitor Rumble (RUM) is in a deal for a $775 million strategic investment from stablecoin giant Tether.

Sylvia Varnham O'Regan / The Information: Google hired 100+ staffers of Magic Leap as contractors to assist with Google's work on its new Android XR OS, raising questions about the future of Magic Leap  —  Google has hired more than 100 staffers at augmented reality firm Magic Leap as contractors to assist with Google's work …

Bloomberg: SAP promoted a team lead five female staff allege has a pattern of targeting female reports, raising questions about its culture and workplace discrimination  —  Women who worked for a team lead at the tech giant's Signavio unit say that the company failed to address complaints of bullying and discrimination.

Bloomberg: Sony shares surged ~50% from an August trough to reach an all-time high last week, as investors are bullish on Sony's gaming business growth in 2025  —  - Next year ‘one of the greatest’ for video games: Smithers  — M&A and good management boost stock's appeal: Janus Henderson

Yantoultra Ngui / Reuters: Singapore-based bolttech, a B2B2C startup that offers “embedded” insurance products, raised a $100M+ Series C led by Dragon Fund at a $2.1B valuation  —  Singapore-headquartered insurance technology firm bolttech has raised more than $100 million in its latest funding round …

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch: Sources: Anysphere, developer of GitHub Copilot rival Cursor, raised a $100M Series B at a $2.6B valuation, up from a $400M valuation in August 2024  —  Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, raised $100 million Series B at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Malcolm Owen / AppleInsider: Apple researchers say the company's open-source ReDrafter method on Nvidia GPUs led to a 2.7x speed increase in generated tokens per second for greedy encoding  —  Apple's latest machine learning research could make creating models for Apple Intelligence faster, by coming up with a technique …

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Researchers unveil Genesis, an open-source generative physics engine that trains robots in simulated reality 430K times faster than in the real world  —  On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Charlotte, NC-based Aiwyn, which provides automation software for accounting firms, raised $113M led by KKR and Bessemer, bringing its total funding to $127M  —  Accounting firms are struggling to adopt high-tech solutions.  That's according to a survey earlier this year from Rightsworks …

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: YouTube plans to start a crackdown on “egregious clickbait”, or videos where the titles or thumbnails make claims the videos don't back up, beginning in India  —  A lot of YouTube videos have flashy, misleading titles and thumbnails, such as “BREAKING NEWS” or “The president steps down …

Bloomberg: A look at Frank McCourt's efforts to acquire TikTok and the obstacles he faces, as he lobbies Congress and Trump's team and recruits former TikTok executives  —  - TikTok hopes Supreme Court will halt ban at final hour  — McCourt is pitching his bid to Congress, Trump's team

Charles Rollet / TechCrunch: Backflip, which is building AI models that can generate 3D designs using text, sketches, or photos as prompts, raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and a16z  —  What if it were as easy to generate a usable 3D design as prompting ChatGPT?  That's the mission of Backflip …

Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has vocally opposed Donald Trump, and OpenAI look to hire more people with ties to Trump and the GOP for their policy teams  —  Lately, AI developer Anthropic has been riding high, with its models' impressive performance on tasks like code generation helping …

New York Times: Sources: the US' proposed AI chip framework would block adversaries entirely, and give others quotas based on their US alignment, threatening Nvidia's expansion  —  The chipmaker expects more than $10 billion in foreign sales this year, but the Biden administration is advancing rules that could curb that growth.