DeepSeek returns 🐋, Apple AI chief quits 📱, Neuralink upgrades 🧠

DeepSeek has unveiled two new models. The startup claims DeepSeek-V3.2 matches the performance of OpenAI's GPT-5 across multiple reasoning benchmarks ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-12-02 Goodbye, low test coverage and slow QA cycles (Sponsor) Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage (and staying there) is hard and pricey for any team. QA Wolf's AI-native solution provides high-volume, high-speed test coverage for web and mobile apps, reducing your organization's QA cycle to minutes.  They can get you: 80% automated E2E test coverage in weeks—not years Unlimited parallel test runs 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation Zero flakes, guaranteed The benefit? No more manual E2E testing. No more slow QA cycles. No more bugs reaching production. With QA Wolf, Drata's team of engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles. Schedule a demo to learn more 📱 Big Tech & Startups Apple to Revamp AI Team After Announcing Top Executive's Departure (2 minute read) Apple's senior vice president in charge of AI strategy has stepped down. His duties will be split among other senior vice presidents responsible for software engineering, services, and operations. Amar Subramanya, who was involved with developing Google's Gemini chatbot, will join Apple as vice president of AI. The reorganization signals a new era for Apple's AI work, which has so far failed to keep up with the industry. DeepSeek Debuts New AI Models to Rival Google and OpenAI (3 minute read) DeepSeek has unveiled two new models. The startup claims DeepSeek-V3.2 matches the performance of OpenAI's GPT-5 across multiple reasoning benchmarks. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is designed for mathematical computations and matches the performance of Google's Gemini-3 Pro. It also performed at gold medal levels on the International Math Olympiad. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology Samsung reveals Galaxy Z TriFold, confirms US launch in early 2026 (2 minute read) The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold is set to launch in the US early next year. Its inner display measures 10 inches across. The phone's specs are overall pretty similar to the Galaxy Z Fold 7, though the battery is quite a bit bigger at 5,600 mAh. The device will come only in 'Crafted Black'. It only measures 3.9mm at its thinnest unfolded point. When folded up, the device measures 12.9mm thick, which is markedly thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold 5, which was only released two years ago. Neuralink's first patient could receive an upgrade (2 minute read) Neuralink is considering an upgrade for its first human patient. Since receiving the implant, the patient has been able to play games, attend classes, and work. He is currently studying neuroscience and maintaining good grades, something that would be impossible without Neuralink. An upgrade would allow him to perform even more sophisticated tasks using only his mind. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Datadog research: 59% of IAM users have access keys older than one year (Sponsor) Long-lived credentials remain the most common cause of publicly documented cloud breaches — yet organizations are struggling to eliminate them. Datadog's State of Cloud Security 2025 report analyzes security posture data from thousands of organizations using AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Get the data on credential risks, IMDSv2 adoption, overprivileged workloads, and more. Read the full report Punycode: My New Favorite Algorithm (45 minute read) Punycode is a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII. It's deceptively simple on the surface, but there's real sophistication in how it manages the problems inherent in encoding arbitrary Unicode within DNS' ASCII-only infrastructure. The algorithm uses adaptive bias adjustment, variable-length encoding, and delta compression to achieve extremely dense results. This article looks at how to encode arbitrary Unicode within DNS's ASCII-only infrastructure. It provides a step-through visualizer at the end that lets readers watch the algorithm encode domains from various scripts. Treat test code like production code (4 minute read) The same coding standards applied to production code should also be applied to test code. Test code needs to be readable, well-factored, and reviewed, just like production code. Good code makes it easier for people working on the code to read, understand, and update. Applying coding standards and design principles to test code makes maintainability easier. 🎁 Miscellaneous College Students Flock to a New Major: AI (4 minute read) Interest in understanding, using, and learning how to build AI technologies is soaring. Schools are racing to meet rising student and industry demand. Dozens of universities and colleges in the US have announced new AI departments, majors, minors, courses, interdisciplinary concentrations, and other programs. Students hope that the AI branding will open up more job opportunities. Instagram mandates total return to office for employees in 2026 (2 minute read) Instagram employees will be required to return to the office beginning February 2. Employees will still be able to work remotely when needed, but they have been asked to use their best judgment on when to take advantage of that flexibility. Other planned changes intended to make Instagram more nimble and creative next year include the scaling back of recurring meetings and a faster process for unblocking and decision-making. While executives insist that in-person work has important benefits, employees often disagree. ⚡ Quick Links Free Ebook: OpenTelemetry for Dummies (Sponsor) Mountains of telemetry but still can't find the root cause? This Dummies Guide covers OTel SDKs, Collectors, and instrumentation techniques that you can use in production. Get your free copy (Dash0 Special Edition) AWS announces preview of AWS Interconnect - multicloud (1 minute read) AWS Interconnect - multicloud provides simple, resilient, and high-speed private connections to other cloud service providers. OpenAI Takes Stake in Thrive Holdings, a Buyer of Services Firms (3 minute read) Thrive Holdings was created to buy up and consolidate providers like accounting firms. Shopify Breaks Down on Busy Cyber Monday (3 minute read) Shopify experienced an outage on Cyber Monday that interrupted operations for some merchants. Google unkills JPEG XL? (5 minute read) The Chromium team has reversed the Obsolete tag for JPEG XL as it has decided to support the format in Blink, the engine behind Chrome. Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI (20 minute read) The heroes of the AI story over the last three years have been OpenAI and Nvidia, but Google is now striking back. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. 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