China is leading research in nearly 90% of the crucial technologies that "significantly enhance, or pose risks to, a country's national interests," according to a technology tracker run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) -- an independent think-tank. Nature: The ASPI's Critical Technology Tracker evaluated research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the 64 technologies it analyzed last year. China is ranked number one for research on 66 of the technologies, including nuclear energy, synthetic biology, small satellites, while the United States topped the remaining 8, including quantum computing and geoengineering. The results reflect a drastic reversal. At the beginning of this century, the United States led more than 90% of the assessed technologies, whereas China led less than 5% of them, according to the 2024 edition of the tracker. "China has made incredible progress on science and technology that is reflected in research and development, as well as in publications," says Ilaria Mazzocco, who researches China's industrial policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a non-profit research organization based in Washington DC. Mazzocco says the general trend identified by the ASPI is not a surprise, but it is "remarkable" to see that China is so dominant and advanced in so many fields compared with the United States.

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A new study of roughly 80,000 bachelor's degree recipients from a large urban public college system finds that characteristics of a graduate's first job can explain nearly two-thirds of the otherwise-unexplained earnings gap between students from low-income and high-income families five years after graduation. The research [PDF], published as an NBER working paper by economists at Columbia University, tracked graduates from 2010 to 2017 using administrative education data linked to state unemployment insurance records. Low-income students -- defined as those receiving Pell grants throughout their undergraduate enrollment -- earned about 12% less than their high-income peers at the five-year mark. A substantial gap of roughly $4,900 persisted even after the researchers controlled for GPA, college attended, major, and other pre-graduation characteristics. That residual gap fell to about $1,700 once first-job variables entered the equation. Graduates from lower-income families tended to start at employers paying lower average wages and were less likely to have their first job secured before graduation. Just 34% of low-income graduates continued at a pre-graduation employer compared to 40% of their higher-income peers. The firms employing low-income graduates paid average wages that were 18% lower than those employing high-income graduates. The researchers say that while the study cannot establish causation, the patterns suggest that supporting low-income students during their transition from college to the labor market may be a fruitful area for policy intervention.

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The Washington Post's top standards editor Thursday decried "frustrating" errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. From a report: Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper's mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could "shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology." But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source's quotes as the paper's position on an issue. According to four people familiar with the situation, the errors have alarmed senior newsroom leaders who have acknowledged in an internal Slack channel that the product's output is not living up to the paper's standards. In a message to other WaPo staff shared with Semafor, head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the errors have been "frustrating for all of us."

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Carl Rinsch, the director behind the 2013 Keanu Reeves film "47 Ronin," has been found guilty of defrauding Netflix out of $11 million that was meant to fund a science fiction series called "Conquest," which the streaming company ultimately cancelled in 2021 after Rinsch failed to meet any production milestones. A jury in the Southern District of New York convicted the 48-year-old on seven charges: one count each of wire fraud and money laundering, and five counts of transacting in illicitly obtained property. Prosecutors alleged that Rinsch funneled the $11 million through multiple bank accounts into a personal brokerage account, lost more than half of it on securities within two months, and then began speculating on cryptocurrency. Court records show he also spent $2.4 million on a Ferrari and five Rolls Royces, $3.3 million on furniture and antiques, and $387,000 on a Swiss watch. Netflix has written off $55 million in total and has not recovered any funds. Rinsch faces up to 90 years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing on April 17, 2026.

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Major automakers have urged Washington to prevent Chinese government-backed automakers and battery manufacturers from opening U.S. manufacturing plants, warning the industry's future is at stake. From a report: The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and other major automakers, sounded the alarm and said Congress and the Trump administration needed to act. "China poses a clear and present threat to the auto industry in the U.S.," the group wrote in a statement for a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles. The group also said lawmakers should maintain the U.S. Commerce Department's prohibition on importing information and communications technology and services from China that effectively bars the import of vehicles from Chinese manufacturers. "No amount of investment by automakers and battery manufacturers operating inside the U.S. can counter a China that is enabled by subsidies to chronically oversupply around the world. This is a recipe for dumping that Congress and the Trump Administration must prevent from happening inside the U.S.," the auto industry group said.

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Google's Chrome team has built an experimental browser called Disco that takes a query or prompt, opens a cluster of related tabs, and then generates a custom application tailored to whatever task the user is trying to accomplish. The browser launched Thursday as an experiment in Google's Search Labs. GenTabs, the core feature powering Disco, are information-rich pages created by Google's Gemini AI models -- ask for travel tips and the system builds a planner app; ask for study help and it creates a flashcard system. Disco -- named partly for fun and partly as shorthand for "discovery" -- started as a hackathon project inside Google before catching the team's imagination. Parisa Tabriz, who leads the Chrome team, said that Disco is not intended as a general-purpose browser and is not an attempt to cannibalize Chrome. The experiment aims to test what happens when users move from simply having tabs to generating personalized, curated applications on demand. The capability relies on features in the recently launched Gemini 3, which can create one-off interactive interfaces and build miniature apps on the fly rather than just returning text or images.

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Cisco's stock price touched $80.25 on Wednesday, finally eclipsing its dotcom-era peak of $80.06 set on March 27, 2000 -- when the networking giant briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company. The journey back took 25 years, eight months and 13 days. The company's fundamentals improved dramatically over that period, of course. Revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout. Investors who bought at the peak still lost money to inflation for a generation. Cisco's trajectory draws obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant "picks and shovels" supplier for the AI boom. Nvidia trades at a price-to-earnings ratio above 45 and an enterprise value-to-sales ratio near 24. At its 2000 peak, Cisco traded at a P/E above 200 and EV/sales of 31.

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New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed two bills aimed at regulating the use of AI in entertainment, requiring disclosure when ads feature AI-generated performers and mandating consent from heirs before a deceased person's likeness can be used commercially. Hochul described both measures as "first in the nation" policies during a signing ceremony at SAG-AFTRA's New York City offices. The first bill compels ad producers to disclose the use of synthetic performers, and the second requires companies to obtain consent from heirs or executors before using a person's name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes after their death. "We will have responsible AI policies in the state of New York," Hochul said. "It's a time where we do want to embrace innovation. But not to the detriment of people." The signing came the same day Disney announced a partnership allowing users of OpenAI's Sora to create clips featuring Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.

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Uber has discontinued its monthly electric vehicle bonuses for drivers in the United States and Canada, marking the latest in a series of rollbacks from a company that once pledged to pour $800 million into helping its drivers transition away from gasoline-powered cars. The ride-hailing giant had previously eliminated its $1-per-ride EV perk last year, replacing it with monthly bonuses that required drivers to complete 200 rides. Those monthly payments are now gone too. The company is far behind its self-imposed climate targets. Uber had pledged to reach 100% EVs in London by 2025 and across North America and Europe by 2030. Current figures paint a different picture: roughly 40% of miles in London come from EVs, while Europe sits at about 15% and North America at just 9%. The company's emissions have nearly doubled over the past three years and now exceed Denmark's total carbon footprint. Uber executives acknowledged to Bloomberg that they will likely miss their green targets. The company has doled out $539 million of its $800 million pledge through the end of 2024. Meanwhile, Uber's operating profits are set to double this year, and the company recently committed $20 billion to stock buybacks.

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OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-5.2, its latest and what the company calls its "best model yet for everyday professional use," just days after CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" internally to marshal resources toward improving ChatGPT amid intensifying competition from Google's well-received Gemini 3 model. The GPT-5.2 series ships in three tiers: Instant, designed for faster responses and information retrieval; Thinking, optimized for coding, math, and planning; and Pro, the most powerful tier targeting difficult questions requiring high accuracy. OpenAI says the Thinking model hallucinated 38% less than GPT-5.1 on benchmarks measuring factual accuracy. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, denied that the launch was moved up in response to the code red, saying the company has been working on GPT-5.2 for "many, many months." She described the internal directive as a way to "really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in this one particular area." The competitive pressure is real. Google's Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, compared to OpenAI's 800 million weekly active users. In October, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT Nick Turley sent an internal memo declaring the company was facing "the greatest competitive pressure we've ever seen," setting a goal to increase daily active users by 5 percent before 2026. GPT-5.2 is rolling out to paid ChatGPT users starting Thursday, and GPT-5.1 will remain available under "legacy models" for three months before being sunset.

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Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting in 2018, 39 states have legalized the activity, and college campuses have emerged as ground zero for what appears to be a generational gambling problem among young men. A 2023 NCAA survey found that 60% of college students have gambled on sports, and 16% of 18-to-22-year-olds engage in what the organization classifies as problematic gambling. A Siena University poll from January found that 28% of men aged 18-to-34 who use sports-betting apps have had trouble meeting a financial obligation because of a lost bet. Timothy Fong, a psychiatry professor at UCLA, says every one of his recent clients has been an 18-to-24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. John Simonian, a personal-bankruptcy lawyer in Rhode Island, says he never used to see young men filing for bankruptcy -- now it's common. On November 7th, the NCAA announced it had uncovered three separate betting scandals in men's basketball where athletes intentionally played poorly in games on which they or a friend had placed wagers.

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The Game Awards, which broadcasts tonight on Twitch, YouTube, and Prime Video, has become the biggest night on the video game calendar since launching in 2014, but the show's treatment of developers has drawn increasing criticism. At the 2023 ceremony, acceptance speeches were often cut off after roughly 30 seconds while Hideo Kojima received five minutes to discuss his upcoming game OD -- enough time for 13 acceptance speeches, Aftermath calculated. That year's show also ignored the industry's mass layoffs entirely; host Geoff Keighley acknowledged the labor crisis only at the 2024 ceremony. The show's Future Class program, launched in 2020 to celebrate game makers representing an inclusive future for the industry, has quietly ended. No new class has been named for two years. "At this time, we are not planning a new Future Class for this year," organizer Emily Weir told Game Developer.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level -- imposing a cap on its population [non-paywalled link]. The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries. Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country's unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there's a chance they'll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland's competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. [...] The right-wing Swiss People's Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity.

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Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance. "We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox. Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.

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Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and has entered into a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises. The new features are expected to launch in 2026 through Sora, OpenAI's short-form video platform, and ChatGPT. A selection of user-generated short videos will also be available to stream on Disney+. The licensing agreement excludes any talent likenesses or voices. Disney will receive warrants to purchase additional OpenAI equity as part of the arrangement, and its employees will gain access to OpenAI tools including ChatGPT for building new products.

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Opera has opened its AI-powered browser Neon to the public after a couple of months of testing, and anyone interested in trying it will need to pay $19.90 per month. The Norway-based company first unveiled Neon in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Like Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, and The Browser Company's Dia, Neon bakes an AI chatbot into its interface that can answer questions about pages, create mini apps and videos, and perform tasks. The browser uses your browsing history as context, so you can ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week. The subscription also grants access to AI models including Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1.

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Tourists from dozens of countries including the UK could be asked to provide a five-year social media history as a condition of entry to the United States, under a new proposal unveiled by American officials. From a report: The new condition would affect people from dozens of countries who are eligible to visit the US for 90 days without a visa, as long as they have filled out an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) form. Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has moved to toughen US borders more generally - citing national security as a reason. Analysts say the new plan could pose an obstacle to potential visitors, or harm their digital rights. Asked whether the proposal could lead to a steep drop-off in tourism to the US, Trump said he was not concerned. "No. We're doing so well," the president said on Wednesday. "We just want people to come over here, and safe. We want safety. We want security. We want to make sure we're not letting the wrong people come enter our country."

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Wells Fargo expects more job cuts and higher severance costs in this quarter that ends in three weeks, bank CEO and President Charlie Scharf said Tuesday at an investors conference in New York. He's also betting on AI to drive efficiency and, eventually, further workforce reduction.From a report: "As we've gone through the budgeting process, and even pre AI, we do expect to have less people as we go into next year," Scharf said at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference in New York City. "We'll likely have more severance in the fourth quarter." The fourth quarter runs Oct. 1 through Dec. 31 for the San Francisco-basaed bank. Wells Fargo already has shrunk from 275,000 employees to about 210,000 since Scharf joined the bank in 2019 -- about a 24% decrease. Its largest employee base remains in Charlotte, with about 27,000 workers.

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As the battle over Warner Bros. Discovery grows, two Democratic lawmakers are warning that their party may try to block or unravel any acquisition by Paramount when it returns to power. Semafor: In a letter to the WBD board and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent first shared with Semafor, Reps. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said they were concerned about the national security risk of letting foreign entities control a large portion of the US entertainment and media industry. They also hinted that a future Democratic Congress and administration could try to unravel any Paramount-WBD deal. "Future Congresses ... will review many of the decisions of the current Administration, and may recommend that regulators push for divestitures, which would undermine the strategic logic of this merger," they wrote. "We urge the Board to weigh these national security and regulatory liabilities in evaluating a transaction burdened by uncertain but potentially extensive mitigation obligations, foreign influence risks, or adverse regulatory action."

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Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free ebooks in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats. From a report: The decision to use Digital Rights Management (DRM), a copyright protection mechanism, is set by the authors when they publish their ebooks on Amazon's platform. The company notes these changes won't impact previously published titles. If authors want to change the status of older titles, they'll have to log into the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) author portal and change an option in the settings. (Instructions on how to make that change are on Amazon's KDP support site here.) This move may actually incentivize authors to apply DRM to their ebooks.

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