At this point, it’s pretty clear what Donald Trump wants from Mark Zuckerberg. But what does Zuckerberg, who has now gone to Mar-a-Lago twice since the November election, want from the President-elect?

That’s the question I’ve been asking sources in and around Meta over the last several days. They all described Meta’s relationship with the outgoing Biden administration as incredibly hostile. It’s safe to assume that Zuckerberg wants a reset for the MAGA regime, especially since Trump threatened not that long ago to imprison him for life.

In Trump’s America, removing tampons from the mens’ restrooms on Meta’s campuses, — a real thing that just happened — is as much a business decision as a political one. Destroying ‘woke’ ideology is a key pillar of Trump’s stated mandate. Others who know they need to play the game, like Amazon, are also starting to fall in line. Even still, Zuckerberg is transforming Meta for this new political reality at a speed that’s unusual for a company of its size and influence. Founder mode.

In his conversation with Joe Rogan and his video on Instagram, Zuckerberg shares a laundry list of issues that Trump could help him with: fighting other countries...

Read the full story at The Verge.

As promised, I’ve got a special mailbag issue this week. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions. Like last year, I picked a handful that hit some of the themes I plan to continue covering in 2025.

On to your questions…

I’m really concerned / worried / curious about the near-term future. Between now and 10 years from now, I think it is very clear AI will be replacing many job functions. What are we all going to do?

The leaders at the AI labs say that, yes, there will be job loss, but that doesn’t mean catastrophe. The optimistic take is that humans are creative and will invent new jobs, like they always have when technology changes things. At the moment, there’s also a macro belief among the CEOs driving a lot of the spending on infrastructure for AI that its impact will be deflationary and lead to GDP growth.

Job displacement will still be painful, of course. Sam Altman and others believe that some form of universal basic income will be necessary to offset the economic impacts of AGI. Altman has his other startup, Tools for Humanity, already scanning eyeballs and distributing cryptocurrency. But I think it’s way too early to be seriously concerned. As Altman himself recently...

Read the full story at The Verge.

President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him negotiate a deal to save TikTok from an imminent US ban.

In an amicus brief filed to the court, Trump says he “seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office,” and that he “alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform.”

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments that a bill passed by Congress banning TikTok on national security grounds violates the First Amendment. The bill gives wide latitude to the president to delay its enforcement if there’s progress being made towards a deal that ensures TikTok isn’t fully controlled by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

But the deadline for that determination is January 19th, which is one day before Trump is set to be sworn in.

In his Supreme Court filing, Trump asks for the bill’s January 19th deadline to be stayed, arguing that the deal he’d negotiate “would obviate the need for this Court to decide the historically challenging First Amendment question presented here on the current, highly expedited basis.”

He offers no details on what said deal would look like, though it would likely have to involve ByteDance selling a signification portion of its ownership in TikTok to an American company.

Trump argues that having over 14 million followers on TikTok, along with his ownership of Truth Social, gives him unique ability to “evaluate TikTok’s importance as a unique medium for freedom of expression, including core political speech.” He also cites Brazil’s temporary ban of Elon Musk’s X as an example of “the historic dangers presented” by a government banning a social media platform.

While Trump pushed aggressively for a TikTok ban during his first term, he changed his tune after his campaign successfully used the video app during the 2024 election. He recently met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew at Mar-a-Lago and told a crowd that “maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while.”

There’s still plenty of political pressure to enforce a TikTok ban, however. A group of senators and congressmen, including Mitch McConnell and Ro Khanna, filed petitions on Friday, joined by 22 U.S. states and former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, urging the Supreme Court to reject TikTok’s appeal.

For my last issue of the year, I’m focusing on the AI talent war, which is a theme I’ve been covering since this newsletter launched almost two years ago. And keep reading for the latest from inside Google and Meta this week.

But first, I need your questions for a mailbag issue I’m planning for my first issue of 2025. You can submit questions via this form or leave them in the comments.

“It’s like looking for LeBron James”

This week, Databricks announced the largest known funding round for any private tech company in history. The AI enterprise firm is in the final stretch of raising $10 billion, almost all of which is going to go to buying back vested employee stock.

How companies approach compensation is often undercovered in the tech industry, even though the strategies play a crucial role in determining which company gets ahead faster. Nowhere is this dynamic as intense as the war for AI talent, as I’ve covered before.

To better understand what’s driving the state of play going into 2025, this week I spoke with Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks. Rao is one of my favorite people to talk to about the AI industry. He’s deeply technical but also business-minded, having...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide New York and New Jersey authorities with an advanced drone detection system to help “determine what the heck is going on” with continued sightings in the Northeast.

“We’ve seen lots of recent sightings in New York, New Jersey, Long Island, Staten Island.” Schumer said during a December 15th press conference. “With all these sightings over the last while, why do we have more questions than answers?”

Over the weekend, parts of Stewart International Airport were temporarily shut down due to the drone sightings, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul to say, “this has gone too far.” Drone activity also shut down airspace over the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for over four hours.

President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that he’s canceling a trip to Bedminster, New Jersey due to drone sightings in the area. He said, “the government knows what is happening” and “they’d be better off saying what it is.”

During a press conference on Sunday, Schumer requested a “360-degree” detection system like the one built by Robin Radar Systems. The European company sells micro-doppler radars that it claims can distinguish between birds and drones moving up to 60 miles per hour in 3D space. Its website features case studies of its radars being used for security at airports, during the G7 Summit, and to study bird migration in the Netherlands.

Schumer also urged Congress to pass the “Safeguarding the Homeland from the Threats Posed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems Act,” which could give local law enforcement and federal authorities the power to detect drones.

The head of the ubiquitous chip design firm on the ‘breathtaking’ pace of AI. 

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is asking California Attorney General Rob Bonta to block OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity.

In a letter sent to Bonta’s office this week, Meta says that OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”

The letter, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal and you can read in full below, goes so far as to say that Meta believes Elon Musk is “qualified and well positioned to represent the interests of Californians in this matter.” Meta supporting Musk’s fight against OpenAI is notable given that Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were talking about literally fighting in a cage match just last year.

OpenAI started as a non-profit but stumbled into commercial success with ChatGPT, which now makes billions of dollars a year in revenue. CEO Sam Altman has been clear that the company needs to shed its non-profit status to become more attractive to investors and continuing funding its ambitions. The stakes are so high that OpenAI will have to return the billions of dollars it raised this year (with interest) if it can’t successfully...

Read the full story at The Verge.

So far, ByteDance has shown zero willingness to spin off TikTok in the US. The Chinese parent company seems to be banking on the Supreme Court or President-elect Donald Trump rescuing the app before it’s banned next month.

The obvious names that would would buy TikTok if they could — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. — are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks. The clock is ticking. Congress just sent letters to Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook reminding them that they will be legally liable for continuing to host TikTok in their app stores after January 19th.

Then there’s Frank McCourt, the real estate billionaire and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. For months, McCourt has been very public about his desire to buy TikTok. He has ramped up his drumbeat since ByteDance recently lost its legal fight on appeal. This week, he pitched more investors on his Project Liberty plan to buy the app’s US operations.

When I spoke with McCourt over Zoom in between those investor meetings, he told me he currently has roughly $20 billion behind him for a bid. He has asked Kevin Mayer, who was briefly TikTok’s CEO the last time it was almost...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Arm CEO Rene Haas has a unique, bird’s eye view of the tech industry. His company’s chip designs are in the majority of devices you use on a daily basis, from your smartphone to your car. The SoftBank-backed company he leads is worth almost $150 billion, which is now considerably more than Intel.

With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger “retired” and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that he approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted. At the same time, Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs.

Haas and I touched on all that and more in an exclusive interview earlier today, which will air in full on a future episode of Decoder. (You can listen to my episode about AI spending in the enterprise that just came out as well.) In the meantime, I wanted to give subscribers the first peek at the highlights from my conversation with Haas.

The following interview has been edited and condensed:

On what he makes of the Intel...

Read the full story at The Verge.

AI investment is massive even though AI profits are not. How are investors justifying this pricey gamble on the future?

Read the full story at The Verge.

Jeff Bezos and President-elect Donald Trump famously didn’t get along the last time Trump was in the White House. This time, Bezos says he’s “very optimistic” and even wants to help out.

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”

Trump railed against Bezos and his companies — Amazon, Blue Origin, and The Washington Post — during his 2016 term. Bezos defended himself but it did little to help his reputation with Trump. Now, his companies have a lot at stake in the coming administration, from the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with SpaceX for government contracts.

Onstage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos called Trump “calmer this time” and “more settled.” He said he will try to “talk him out of” the idea that the press, which includes The Washington Post, is an enemy of the people.

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too.”

Bezos also echoed Sam...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nearly two years ago, OpenAI said that artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the thing the company was created to build — could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.”

Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to lower expectations.

“My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “And a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call superintelligence.”

This isn’t the first time Altman has downplayed the now seemingly imminent arrival of AGI, which OpenAI’s charter once said will be able to “automate the great majority of intellectual labor.” He has recently teased that it could arrive as soon as 2025 and will be achievable on existing hardware. We at The Verge have heard that OpenAI intends to weave together its large language models and declare that to be AGI.

At the DealBook Summit,...

Read the full story at The Verge.

During a recent flight from Los Angeles to New York City, I put a headset on my face to watch a movie.

I wasn’t wearing the Vision Pro or a Meta Quest. I was trying the latest pair of AR glasses from Xreal, a Chinese startup taking an unusually focused approach to face computers.

To call the Xreal One, which is available for preorder starting on Wednesday for $499, a pair of AR glasses feels like a stretch. While they do technically overlay graphics onto your field of vision, they really just function as a display mirror for your phone, laptop, or gaming console. But given the display advancements in the One over Xreal’s last Air 2 glasses, that may be enough.

The Xreal One uses a custom birdbath lens system to achieve what the company says is equivalent to a 1080p display with a 50-degree field of view. Practically, based on my experience watching Netflix’s Rebel Ridge from my plane seat (a very good movie), that translates to a fairly immersive viewing experience.

It’s not like watching something in the Vision Pro. But the fact that I was wearing an 84-gram pair of glasses that didn’t fully occlude my vision more than made up for the difference. The only time I felt the...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is mistakenly removing too much content across its apps, according to a top executive.

Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, told reporters on Monday that the company’s moderation “error rates are still too high” and pledged to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.”

“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” Clegg said during a press call I attended. “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”

He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the COVID-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration.

“We had very stringent rules removing very large volumes of content through the pandemic,” Clegg said. “No one during the pandemic knew how the pandemic was going to unfold, so this really is wisdom in hindsight. But with that hindsight, we feel that we overdid it a bit. We’re acutely aware because users quite rightly raised their voice and...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met President-elect Donald Trump for dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday.

“It’s an important time for the future of American Innovation,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement shared with The Verge. “Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.”

While it’s unclear what the two men discussed, the meeting suggests Trump may be softening his view of Zuckerberg. He has said the tech billionaire should be jailed for Facebook’s role in the 2020 presidential race and his personal donations to mail-in ballet initiatives.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has intentionally distanced himself from politics this...

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