OpenAI's average stock-based compensation for its roughly 4,000 employees is about $1.5 million per employee. The company's equity awards, aimed at helping it keep its lead in the AI race, are inflating its heavy operating losses and diluting existing shareholders. OpenAI recently announced the discontinuation of a policy that required employees to work at the company for at least six months before their equity vests. This could lead to further compensation increases.
2025.12.31·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Softbank sent over the final amount to complete its $40 billion investment in OpenAI last week. The company's stake in OpenAI is now around 11%. Softbank has been betting big on technology and AI companies. It recently agreed to pay $4 billion for data center investment firm DigitalBridge to strengthen its AI push.
Tesla has released a year-in-review video for 2025 that recaps major achievements for the company. The montage celebrated the company's progress on EVs, energy, and Robotaxi development. It also confirmed that the production of the Cybercab has started. The video can be viewed in the article.
2025.12.31·teslarati.com·2 min read·TLDR There is too little money to be made in rare earth to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry in the US has fallen to small companies. Metal prices have risen in recent months as China has restricted exports in response to US tariffs. It will be difficult for local startups to compete as China's grip on the industry is tight, and it is known to sell rare-earth metals for less than it costs to produce them. The biggest question is whether the US government will continue to subsidize the domestic industry, and at what level.
2025.12.31·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Efficiency improvements reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. The pattern is consistent throughout history. We are about to see an increase in knowledge work output of several orders of magnitude. This will likely reveal that humanity has been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive.
2025.12.31·addyosmani.com·6 min read·TLDR The primary impact of AI tooling so far is that the marginal cost of producing code has gone down significantly. However, producing code is only part of the job, so the bottlenecks for engineering time will shift elsewhere. The software engineering field seems poised to be more mechanized, but more productive as a result. Most of the effects of the mindset shift that has been accelerating for the last few months have yet to be fully realized.
2025.12.31·benjamincongdon.me·5 min read·TLDR Progress is a smooth trend that obscures jagged details. History is a record of thousands of years of stasis before hundreds of years of growth. There hasn't been any constant normal trend ever, so no one should expect AI to be the same. Nothing is truly inevitable, but it would be strange if progress stopped tomorrow.
2025.12.31·zhengdongwang.com·72 min read·TLDR A lot of the assumptions across the tech industry were seriously put to the test this year. This post takes a look at some of the things that happened to see what the future may bring. It covers OpenAI's business, Google's dominance in AI, Alan Dye's role at Apple, software on-demand, and what Apple needs to do to win next year.
2025.12.31·parkerortolani.blog·7 min read·TLDR It's easy to make progress when you start doing something, but that will plateau over time, and it can be hard to come to terms with the change.
2025.12.31·coryzue.com·11 min read·TLDR 10 ideas to consider in the coming year.
2025.12.31·shreyasdoshi.substack.com·3 min read·TLDR As big business, big government, and big mob get stronger, they can no longer avoid frequently interacting.
2025.12.31·vitalik.eth.limo·25 min read·TLDR Companies like Palantir are giving employees free nicotine products through vending machines.
2025.12.31·links.tldrnewsletter.com·7 min read·TLDR Entrepreneurship is hard, but it gives you a type of freedom that is difficult to give up.
2025.12.31·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Find a way to prove that you can identify useful work before you are even hired by the company.
2025.12.31·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Meta has agreed to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based company that conducts deep research and performs tasks for paying users. Meta will continue to operate and sell Manus' services while integrating it into its suite of social media products. The deal will help Meta cement its position in the product segment of AI agents. It is one of the first times a major US tech company has bought a startup with Chinese roots.
2025.12.30·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Nvidia locked in a purchase price of $23.28 per share for Intel when the companies struck a deal in September. The deal had been under scrutiny by the US Federal Trade Commission, but was then greenlighted on December 18. The purchase of 214 million shares closed on December 26, and Intel shares closed Monday at $36.68, making Nvidia's $5 billion purchase worth $7.58 billion. The deal will involve the companies jointly developing multiple generations of chips for datacenters and PCs.
2025.12.30·theregister.com·4 min read·TLDR Chinese researchers have created an artificial robotic skin that can sense pressure and locate input and injuries. The neuromorphic robotic e-skin (NRE-skin) is assembled from a collection of segments that snap together using magnetic interlocks, automatically linking up any necessary wiring. Each segment broadcasts a unique identity code, so it is relatively easy to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware if the system identifies damage.
2025.12.30·arstechnica.com·5 min read·TLDR Biomedical progress has become less productive for the last several years despite staggering advances in basic science. One of the reasons for this is that institutional bureaucracy has become harder to overcome. Increasing the number and efficiency of clinical trials would help create a faster feedback loop and result in better data to inform models and ideas. This could help decrease the cost of bringing new drugs to market and break a trend that has held since the 1950s.
2025.12.30·press.asimov.com·16 min read·TLDR that's helped users lose over 18 million pounds. Take a quick quiz and get a science-backed plan built just for you—plus Blinky, a Tamagotchi-style accountability buddy that keeps you on track. It's crazy effective. Get your personalized plan for at least 50% OFF [8].
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The primary users of infrastructure software are rapidly shifting from developers to AI agents. AI uses systems very differently from how developers do, and it changes many long-held assumptions about how databases should be used. Many things developers took for granted need rethinking. The focus of engineers is shifting from perfected individual systems to designing foundational capabilities that AI can use at scale, iterate on, and run cheaply.
2025.12.30·me.0xffff.me·20 min read·TLDR AI will likely make 24/7 on-call a thing of the past. 24/7 monitoring is a lot simpler than the development process. There are often reference documents that engineers can follow to bring systems back up, and if they fail, there's always a backup and recovery plan in place. On-call jobs have always been more systematic. This post introduces an autonomous monitoring agent that does what an on-call engineer would do, but autonomously, forever.
2025.12.30·denislavgavrilov.com·8 min read·TLDR Labor and capital have traditionally complemented each other. While wealthy people can keep accumulating capital, it becomes less valuable when there aren't enough hands to use all of it, and hands grow more valuable when capital is plentiful. However, this correction mechanism breaks in the world of advanced robotics and AI. A global and highly progressive tax on capital (or at least capital income) may be the only way to prevent inequality from growing extreme.
2025.12.30·philiptrammell.substack.com·58 min read·TLDR The immediate AI risk comes from people overestimating AI's capabilities. A lack of reliability and trust is preventing wide adoption. There is a growing AI perception gap between quantitative users and qualitative users. AI leaders aren't even attempting to explain how AI works because it's complicated, and they're also incentivized to oversimplify and overpromise.
2025.12.30·dbreunig.com·10 min read·TLDR Both human and computer expertise grow quickly in the beginning, for a short while, then more slowly, until growth is imperceptible.
2025.12.30·evalapply.org·6 min read·TLDR AI models excel at isolated React tasks, but don't do as well on multi-step integrations.
2025.12.30·addyo.substack.com·25 min read·TLDR Generic design advice is useless for most practical software design problems.
2025.12.30·seangoedecke.com·11 min read·TLDR The software engineering field will broadly become more mechanized and more productive.
2025.12.30·benjamincongdon.me·5 min read·TLDR 2026 will see breakthroughs in continual learning and a blockbuster IPO.
2025.12.30·tanayj.com·5 min read·TLDR The LG Gallery TV is a mini-LED TV with a special screen that reduces glare and minimizes reflections for an art-like viewing experience.
2025.12.30·theverge.com·2 min read·TLDR The infrastructure buildout happening right now may be a sign that the AI chip competition may already be over. Nvidia recently requested 16-Hi HBM deliveries from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron by Q4 2026. This infrastructure layer could make AI inference effectively infinite and nearly free at the margin. The rollout of capability is arriving faster than our ability to conceptualize what to do with it.
2025.12.29·links.tldrnewsletter.com·15 min read·TLDR All of Groq's VCs, employees, founders, and the whole cap table will get paid from the recent acquisition by Nvidia. 85% of the payment will be up front, with the rest coming by the end of 2026. Nvidia will likely weaponize the patents it gained from the acquisition to create a 'scorched-earth zone' around SRAM-based inference. GroqCloud has become a shell of its former self with no IP and no technical leadership.
2025.12.29·ossa-ma.github.io·7 min read·TLDR Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by multiple factors. Each individual factor doesn't necessarily guarantee an AD diagnosis in every situation, but it increases the odds of it all else being equal. Preventing AD and reversing or stopping the disease are two separate areas of research. Attempting to modify risk factors of the disease once it has already started is unlikely to lead to a cure. Targeting the underlying dynamics of the disease is a more likely pathway to a treatment.
2025.12.29·nintil.com·14 min read·TLDR Max Space's Thunderbird is designed to host four astronauts in an expandable interior structure that can be reconfigured by the crew to support different activities. It can be used for research as well as orbital manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and other materials. The space station can be launched on a medium-lift vehicle such as the Falcon 9 rocket. The Thunderbird space station is set to launch as early as 2029.
2025.12.29·gizmodo.com·2 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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2025.12.29·advertise.tldr.tech·Sponsor·TLDR Claude Code dominated the CLI coding product experience this year. This guide shows readers the thought processes and simple things to keep in mind to get the most out of Claude Code. Learning how things work in Claude Code directly transfers to other tools, both in terms of personal usage and production-grade engineering. The post will help users keep up with coding agents in general.
2025.12.29·sankalp.bearblog.dev·55 min read·TLDR Kubernetes is often described as a container orchestration tool, but that mental model isn't always the most useful way to think about what's happening. It is more like a platform where developers declare the desired state of their infrastructure and let the system continuously work to match that intent. In that way, Kubernetes is more like a runtime for declarative infrastructure with a type system. Thinking this way results in very practical approaches to operating clusters.
2025.12.29·garnaudov.com·6 min read·TLDR 2026 will hopefully be full of surprises and developments that give us hope for healthier and more fulfilling work and lives. The AI hype cycle will die down, allowing the most meaningful innovations to become clear. This post takes a look at what we should expect in the coming year and beyond, and what the implications of that will be.
2025.12.29·implications.com·9 min read·TLDR Tech-driven efficiency improvements tend to lead to massive growth because there are more use cases for the resources than previously contemplated. AI is going to lead to a lot more knowledge work by making it cheaper, as that allows people to take on tasks previously unimaginable. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things that we don't even do today. AI will enable work that previously wouldn't have been considered, as it would have been too expensive or impractical.
2025.12.29·links.tldrnewsletter.com·7 min read·TLDR Both an escape from the commoditization of memory and the 'foundry-ization' of memory will happen within the next two years.
2025.12.29·semiconsam.com·22 min read·TLDR Miguel Carranza is the founder of RevenueCat, a service that helps developers grow and manage in-app purchases.
2025.12.29·miguelcarranza.es·16 min read·TLDR You increase your luck by making yourself more visible to the world.
2025.12.29·github.com·11 min read·TLDR Continuous Claude is a framework that saves state to a ledger, wipes context, and resumes fresh.
2025.12.29·github.com·GitHub repository·TLDR Trust becomes harder to earn when work becomes cheap.
2025.12.29·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR A look at what camera sensors see and what photo processing actually does.
2025.12.29·maurycyz.com·4 min read·TLDR Sponsored
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Google is gradually rolling out the option to change a Gmail address to a new one (up to three times) with an altered username. Users' original email address will still receive emails and work for sign-in. Users will be unable to change or delete their email within 12 months of each change. The support page detailing the update is currently only in Hindi.
2025.12.26·9to5google.com·4 min read·TLDR OpenAI has quietly rolled out a new feature that tweaks ChatGPT's layout to match the UI of the task it is supposed to execute. The new 'formatting box' mini editor toolbar pops up when users highlight text inside ChatGPT's newer rich-text areas. It shows drafts as formatted documents so users can edit them as they would in any document editor. A screenshot of the feature is available in the article.
2025.12.26·bleepingcomputer.com·2 min read·TLDR Perseverance arrived on Mars nearly five years ago. At the time, NASA had planned a mission to retrieve samples collected by the rover as soon as 2026, but now, no such mission is set to launch until the 2030s. Perseverance appears to be in good condition and should be able to operate for many years to come. The rover will continue filling sample tubes in the expectation that they will eventually come back to Earth.
2025.12.26·arstechnica.com·13 min read·TLDR