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Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla., the billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr. Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space policy and artificial intelligence, helping to put together councils for A.I. development and crypto policy.

Shaun Maguire, another Musk friend, is now advising Mr. Trump on picks for the intelligence community. Mr. Maguire, a brash Caltech Ph.D. in physics who is an investor at Sequoia Capital, has been a staple of the Trump transition over the last month, including interviewing potential candidates for senior Defense Department jobs.

Among them, reports the outlet: Jared Birchall, the head of Elon Musk’s family office, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department; Marc Andreessen has talked with candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Health and Human Services; Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital is poring over picks for the intelligence community; Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar have both spoken to Trump transition officials about roles at the Pentagon; and entrepreneurs Mark Pincus and David Marcus have been involved in interviews with “prospective Trump personnel.”

Per the Times, even Musk’s mother, Maye, has been involved in the transition, saying to a recent interviewer that she “likes to sit in on meetings” with her son.

The launch of viral influencer Haliey Welch’s Hawk Tuah memecoin sparked outrage across social media as the newly launched token briefly pumped and then dumped rapidly following a controversial deployment involving allegations of snipers and insider wallets.

Welch has denied any insider sales or activity on behalf of her team or any affiliated entities.

The Hawk Tuak (HAWK) memecoin was launched at 10:00 pm UTC on Dec. 4 and quickly rose to a peak market cap of $490 million.

The price of the token then plummeted and was trading at a valuation of $41.7 million at the time of publication, marking a 91% downturn in less than three hours, according to DexScreener data.

Threads is testing the ability for its users to see how well their individual posts performed on the social network. Up until now, Threads’ “Insights” feature only showed you aggregated metrics for all of your posts. Now, the feature can show you metrics for each post.

If you’re in the test, you can sort posts by the highest or lowest number of views, likes, and replies that they received. Plus, you can see a breakdown of views and interactions by followers and non-followers for each post. You will also be able to see how many people followed you from a specific post.

If you’re an Android user, today is your lucky day; Google has announced a swath of new AI features for the entire ecosystem. Broadly speaking, the features make Android devices more accessible, but there’s something here for everyone.

For instance, one of the new enhancements, Expressive Captions, automatically generates subtitles that attempt to capture the emotion and intensity of what’s being said. So, let’s say you’re video chatting with a friend who groans after you make a lame dad joke. The feature will not only transcribe what they said, but it will also include “[groaning]” in the transcription. This works for other subtleties of human speech, too, such as when someone gasps or whispers something, and is compatible across Android, including streaming and social media apps. Per Google, Expressive Captions are available on Pixel 6 and newer Pixel phones, as well as “other compatible” Android devices.

Donald Trump says he is selecting venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures LLC to serve as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar, a newly created position that underscores the president-elect’s intent to boost two rapidly developing industries.

“David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness. David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas,” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network.

Trump said that Sacks would also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.

Now, a new artificial intelligence tool from DeepMind, a Google company in London that develops A.I. applications, has smashed through the old barriers and achieved what its makers call unmatched skill and speed in devising 15-day weather forecasts. They report in the journal Nature on Wednesday that their new model can, among other things, outperform the world’s best forecasts meant to track deadly storms and save lives.

“It’s a big deal,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the DeepMind research. “It’s an important step forward.”

The attorney general of the District of Columbia sued Amazon on Wednesday, accusing it of violating consumer protection laws by making slower deliveries to Prime members in historically lower-income neighborhoods.

In one of the first complaints of its kind, which was filed with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb said Amazon had deliberately and secretly stopped its fastest delivery service to the nearly 50,000 Prime subscribers in certain ZIP codes that were lower-income neighborhoods.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has used third parties like United Parcel Service and the Postal Service to make Prime deliveries in those areas for the past two years. That resulted in slower deliveries than those made by Amazon’s own delivery drivers, who serve other Washington residents.

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.

The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.

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Meta has conceded it was too heavy-handed with certain content moderation in the past, in an overture to Donald Trump as its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg seeks an “active role” in shaping tech policy debates with the incoming US administration. 

Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said the social media platform previously “overdid it a bit” when moderating pandemic-related content, a concession that appears designed to placate the president-elect, who has repeatedly accused the company of censorship and silencing conservative speech.

Clegg’s comments come as Silicon Valley leaders are jockeying to curry favour with Trump, who in the past has repeatedly clashed with what he considers a left-leaning constituency that has funded his opponents and censored him.

In a briefing with journalists, Clegg said Zuckerberg was keen to play “an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere”.

In the wake of high-profile hacks affecting hundreds of millions of Americans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing a rule limiting data brokers’ ability to sell Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information.

Under the proposed rule, data brokers that sell information about consumers’ income, credit history, credit score, or debt payments would be considered consumer reporting agencies. As such, they’d be required to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a law limiting how these agencies can obtain and use the information provided in consumer reports. In other words, they’d be treated like credit bureaus and background check companies, which already have to comply with the FCRA.

Antitrust enforcers with the Federal Trade Commission have opened a wide-ranging investigation into Microsoft’s business practices, starting a big legal project that an incoming Trump administration must take up or abandon.

The FTC is investigating Microsoft’s cloud computing business and related product lines such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, according to a person who was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

It’s the latest action of more than three years of aggressive antitrust enforcement shepherded by FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was elevated to lead the agency by President Joe Biden after he came into office pledging tougher scrutiny of monopolistic behavior by Big Tech companies.

Intel (INTC) stock rallied early Monday on news that CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down. But the stock later retreated underlining the market's uncertainty about the chip giant's future in what Gelsinger himself called a "challenging year."

"Today is, of course, bittersweet as this company has been my life for the bulk of my working career," Gelsinger said in a statement. "It has been a challenging year for all of us as we have made tough but necessary decisions to position Intel for the current market dynamics.

The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang. Adobe said that in the U.S., consumers made a record-breaking $10.8 billion of purchases, up 10.2% on last year. Meanwhile, Salesforce is giving a much higher overall spent estimate: $17.5 billion spent in the U.S., up 7% YoY. Globally, Salesforce said spending also reached a new high: $74.4 billion was spent in the 24-hour period, up 5% on a year ago.

For a point of comparison, in 2023, Adobe said Black Friday online spend in the U.S. was $9.8 billion, and Salesforce said global spend was $70.9 billion.

Attorneys for tech billionaire Elon Musk have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI, several of its co-founders, and its investor and close collaborator, Microsoft, to prevent OpenAI and other named defendants from engaging in what Musk’s counsel claims is anticompetitive behavior.

The motion for an injunction, which was filed late on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder and former OpenAI board member Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton of various illicit activities — and seeks to halt them. The allegations include:

It is also not clear exactly which platforms will be covered by the ban. The prime minister has said that Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and X will be included, but YouTube and messaging apps including WhatsApp are expected to be exempt.

France last year passed a law requiring parental consent for social media users under 15, and it has been pushing for similar measures across the European Union. Florida this year imposed a ban for users under 14 and required parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, but that law could face constitutional challenges.

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For These TikTok Dramas, It Is All About the Storytelling Leo Puglisi, a 17-year-old Australian teenager who runs a news site, 6 News, that is staffed mostly by teens, said he had full confidence that his 14-year-old brother would easily find a way to circumvent any restriction.

TechCrunch has confirmed with sources close to the company that Meta plans to build a new, major, fibre-optic subsea cable extending around the world — a 40,000+ kilometer project that could total more than $10 billion of investment. Critically, Meta will be the sole owner and user of this subsea cable — a first for the company and thus representing a milestone for its infrastructure efforts.

Sunil Tagare, a subsea cable expert (and pioneer in the space, as founder of Flag Telecom), who was the first to report Meta’s plans back in October, told TechCrunch that the plan is to start with a budget of $2 billion but as the project builds out that figure is likely to go up to more than $10 billion as the project extends into years of work.

Sources close to Meta confirmed the project but said it is still in its early stages. Plans have been laid out, but physical assets have not, and they declined to discuss budget. The expectation is that Meta will talk more publicly about it in early 2025, when it will confirm plans for the cable, including intended route, capacity, and some of the reasoning behind building it.