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Lauren Forristal / TechCrunch: Spotify adds new audiobook features for Premium users: video clips up to 30 seconds long, Author Pages, and visuals that appear while users listen  —  Spotify is enhancing the audiobook experience for premium users through three new experiments: video clips, author pages, and the ability to add visuals that appear while users listen.

Hannah Lang / Reuters: Sources: a16z, Ripple, Kraken, and Circle are jostling for a seat on Trump's promised crypto advisory council, which is expected to set up a bitcoin reserve  —  A slew of crypto companies including Ripple, Kraken and Circle are jostling for a seat on President-elect Donald Trump's promised …

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: Sources: Amazon will likely face an EU investigation next year into whether it breaches the DMA by favoring its own brand products on its online marketplace  —  Amazon (AMZN.O) will likely face an EU investigation next year into whether it favours its own brand products on its online marketplace …

Lukas Knigge / Table.Media: The EU Parliament confirms Spain's Teresa Ribera as the next Competition Commissioner of the EU, replacing Margrethe Vestager  —  Teresa Ribera has been confirmed as the European Union's new Commissioner for Competition in the hearings of the EU Parliament.

James Reddick / The Record: In its latest security report, Meta says it removed 2M+ accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the UAE  —  Meta has taken down more than 2 million accounts this year connected to pig butchering scams conducted from Southeast Asia and the United Arab Emirates, the company said Thursday.

Brady Dale / Axios: SEC chair Gary Gensler will step down on January 20; it has been traditional for SEC chairs to resign if the administration changes in the middle of their term  —  - “I thank President Biden for entrusting me with this incredible responsibility. … The agency had resisted launching exchange …

Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat: A look at OpenScholar, an LLM for scientific research built by the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington that outperforms GPT-4o on accuracy  —  Scientists are drowning in data.  With millions of research papers published every year, even the most dedicated experts struggle …

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: Filing: the US DOJ's proposal requires Google to allow websites more ability to opt-out of its AI products and provide more ad placement controls to advertisers  —  - Antitrust officials propose options in historic lawsuit  — Google says government pushing ‘radical agenda’ beyond case

Brian Fung / CNN: As part of its proposed remedies, the US DOJ says Google should be required to syndicate its US search results to other rival search engines for the next decade  —  The US government formally proposed a partial breakup of Google on Wednesday, urging a federal judge to force a sale …

Michael Liedtke / Associated Press: Filing: DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome, restrict Android from favoring Google's search engine, ban default search deals on iOS and other devices  —  U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through …

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI releases a free online course for K-12 teachers to integrate ChatGPT into their classrooms, but some educators remain skeptical about the technology  —  OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students.

Rod McGuirk / Associated Press: Australia introduces a bill in Parliament to ban children younger than 16 from social media; companies would face fines of up to AU$50M for violations  —  Australia's communications minister introduced a world-first law into Parliament on Thursday that would ban children younger than 16 from social media …

Sarah McBride / Bloomberg: Neuralink receives approval from Canada to launch clinical trials of its brain implants and plans to run its first non-US trial with Toronto Western Hospital  —  The billionaire's brain device company is currently recruiting patients in the US, UK and Canada.

Matt Swayne / The Quantum Insider: Google researchers introduce AlphaQubit, a machine-learning decoder that surpasses existing methods in identifying and correcting quantum computing errors  —  - Google researchers introduced AlphaQubit, an AI-powered decoder that improves quantum error correction, reducing errors by 6% compared …

Sara Fischer / Axios: Adtech company The Trade Desk announces Ventura, a smart TV operating system, and plans to partner with TV manufacturers for its rollout, expected in H2 2025  —  - “We're looking at a concentration around a handful of players that lack objectivity,” Green said.

Claudia Assis / MarketWatch: Palo Alto Networks reports Q1 revenue up 14% YoY to $2.14B, vs. $2.12B est., and projects FY 2025 sales in line with estimates; PANW drops ~5% after hours  —  Merely in-line outlook for fiscal 2025 weighs on the stock, down 5% after hours  —  Referenced Symbols

Larry Dignan / Constellation Research: Snowflake reports Q3 revenue up 28% YoY to $942.09M, vs. $898.46M est., unveils a deal with Anthropic to bring Claude to Cortex AI; SNOW jumps 18%+ after hours  —  Snowflake said it has inked a multi-year deal to bring Anthropic's Claude models to Snowflake Cortex AI.

Daniel Howley / Yahoo Finance: Nvidia reports Q3 revenue up 94% YoY to $35.1B, vs. $33.2B est., Data Center revenue up 112% to $30.8B, vs. $29B est., and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates  —  Nvidia (NVDA) reported its Q3 earnings after the bell on Wednesday, beating analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines …

Wall Street Journal: Sources: xAI has told investors it raised $5B in a funding round valuing it at $50B and that its revenue has reached $100M on an annualized basis  —  The artificial intelligence startup has more than doubled its valuation from the spring  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup …

Hayden Field / CNBC: Menlo Ventures: business spending on generative AI hit $13.8B in 2024, up from $2.3B in 2023; OpenAI's marketshare in enterprise AI declined from 50% to 34%  —  Business spending on generative AI surged 500% this year, from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion, according to data released by Menlo Ventures on Wednesday.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveils DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview, a “reasoning” AI model that it claims is competitive with OpenAI's o1, and plans to open source it  —  A Chinese lab has unveiled what appears to be one of the first “reasoning” AI models to rival OpenAI's o1.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Los Angeles-based Moonvalley, which is developing “transparent” generative AI video tools, raised a $70M seed co-led by General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures  —  The wide availability of tools to build generative AI has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups in the space.

Brian Merchant / Blood in the Machine: Bluesky is booming partly because it isn't hindered by bad adtech, AI slop, throttled links, and largely hostile user experiences, unlike some of its big rivals  —  No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links.  Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not  —  Greetings all —

Jason Del Rey / Fortune: Memo: Amazon employees have found there is too much of a delay between asking a question to the new AI-based Alexa and getting a response or completing a task  —  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.  —  Amazon's race to create an AI-based successor to its voice assistant Alexa has hit more snags …