News

Bloomberg: A look at Microsoft Excel’s evolution, as it remains the most widely used spreadsheet software with 500M paying users despite competition from Google and others  —  Before it took over her life, Leila Gharani mostly took Microsoft Excel for… Read More »A look at Microsoft Excel’s evolution, as it remains the most widely used spreadsheet software with 500M paying users despite competition from Google and others (Bloomberg)

Marcus Schuler / Implicator.ai: A profile of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said his 2025 re:Invent keynote was his last to make room for other voices and warned devs about “verification debt”  —  Werner Vogels ends his 14-year keynote streak… Read More »A profile of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said his 2025 re:Invent keynote was his last to make room for other voices and warned devs about “verification debt” (Marcus Schuler/Implicator.ai)

Casey Newton / Platformer: A look back at five years of Meta’s Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases it hears have generally had limited impact  —  Five years after the Oversight Board’s creation, few are… Read More »A look back at five years of Meta’s Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases it hears have generally had limited impact (Casey Newton/Platformer)

Robert Hart / The Verge: Researchers claim that prompts framed as riddle-like poems could skirt AI chatbots’ safety features designed to block production of explicit or harmful content  —  Riddle-like poems tricked chatbots into spewing hate speech and helping design… Read More »Researchers claim that prompts framed as riddle-like poems could skirt AI chatbots’ safety features designed to block production of explicit or harmful content (Robert Hart/The Verge)

Matthias Bastian / The Decoder: Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks  —  New data from Similarweb reveals massive spikes in traffic and… Read More »Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks (Matthias Bastian/The Decoder)

Lily Hay Newman / Wired: CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI  —  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the… Read More »CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal: A review of LinkedIn profiles shows dozens of Apple staffers with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics, and more have joined OpenAI in recent months  —  Four top lieutenants have left in the past… Read More »A review of LinkedIn profiles shows dozens of Apple staffers with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics, and more have joined OpenAI in recent months (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Google Research: Google debuts Titans, an architecture combining RNN speed with transformer performance for real-time learning, able to scale effectively to a 2M+ context window  —  Ali Behrouz, Student Researcher, Meisam Razaviyayn, Staff Researcher, and Vahab Mirrokni, VP and Google… Read More »Google debuts Titans, an architecture combining RNN speed with transformer performance for real-time learning, able to scale effectively to a 2M+ context window (Google Research)

David Shepardson / Reuters: The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October  —  A U.S. agency said on Thursday it has… Read More »The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October (David Shepardson/Reuters)

Wall Street Journal: Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan’s trade deal  —  SoftBank billionaire seeks to build ‘Trump Industrial Parks’ on federal… Read More »Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan’s trade deal (Wall Street Journal)