Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- A White House official says the $100K H-1B fee will not apply to renewals or existing holders of valid visas re-entering the US, only new applicants (Ben Berkowitz/Axios)
- Memos: Amazon, which employs the most H-1B holders at 14K+, and Microsoft advise H-1B staff to avoid travel and return to the US before 12:01am ET on Sept. 21 (Yun Li/CNBC)
- In a 30-minute test, Meta Ray-Ban Display was as spotty as Zuckerberg's failed demos, with the wristband occasionally failing to register finger swipes (New York Times)
- White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok US and its algorithm would be US-controlled (Kasia Klimasinska/Bloomberg)
- Meta faces a backlash after using Instagram photos of teenage schoolgirls, posted by their parents with visible faces and names, to promote Threads to a man (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
- Huawei says DeepSeek-R1-Safe, which was trained on 1,000 of its Ascend AI chips, is "nearly 100% successful" in preventing politically sensitive topics (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)
- Perplexity struggles to scale its shopping and ad businesses nearly a year after launching ad sales and in-app purchasing, frustrating marketers and merchants (The Information)
- Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in and boarding systems, confirms a "cyber-related disruption" as Heathrow and other European airports report issues (Reuters)
- Nvidia and Intel sidestepping questions about manufacturing in their new deal only reinforces that Intel's best path forward is to spin off its foundry business (Asa Fitch/Wall Street Journal)
- China's market regulator opens a probe into Chengdu Kuaigou, a Kuaishou unit involved in livestream shopping, for suspected violations of e-commerce rules (Olivia Tam/Bloomberg)
- Happn, a dating app with 170M registered users that matches people based on where they cross paths, agrees to a takeover deal with Beijing-based Hello Group (Financial Times)
- China introduces new rules to curb monks' and clergy's use of livestreaming and AI for unlicensed online preaching and commercial activities, following scandals (Financial Times)
- xAI launches Grok 4 Fast, a multimodal model with a 2M context window and a unified architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning modes (xAI)
- BitGo's S-1 shows it had net income of $12.6M on revenue of $4.19B in H1 2025, compared with net income of $30.9M on revenue of $1.12B a year earlier (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)
- Microsoft says it will bring a $3.3B data center in Wisconsin online in early 2026 and calls it "the world's most powerful AI datacenter" (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
- A US judge temporarily orders Meta not to respond to DHS subpoenas seeking Instagram users' info after their accounts posted an ICE agent's name (Alfred Ng/Politico)
- The Trump administration says it would require companies to pay an annual $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, a move that could significantly impact the tech industry (Reuters)
- Tests show OpenAI's Sora can closely mimic Netflix shows, movies, TikTok videos, and Twitch streams, suggesting it was trained on versions of such content (Washington Post)
- Trump appears to suggest Xi Jinping approved a deal to divest TikTok's US operations during a call, but neither side elaborated on what the approval entailed (Emmett Lindner/New York Times)
- Sources: investors in the TikTok US deal are expected to pay the Trump administration a multibillion-dollar fee for negotiating a deal with China (Wall Street Journal)