TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Spotify

👎 A womp womp wrapped: Spotify released its annual personalized year-in-review feature, Spotify Wrapped, today. The company leaned heavily into AI this year, but users weren't wowed by the tech and posted on social media about missing features from years past. Read more

📵 Defense drama: Multiple senators are accusing the U.S. Department of Defense of not doing enough to protect communication between military personnel, citing the department's use of unencrypted communication sources and recent cyberbreaches. Read more

🇺🇸 Musk vs. Altman: OpenAI's Sam Altman said it would be "profoundly un-American" for Elon Musk to wield his new political influence to hurt his competitors while helping his own businesses. Well, we'll have to wait and see what happens. Read more

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Getty Images

⚙️ AWS announces: Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference continued today. The tech giant announced new capabilities for its Bedrock hosting service, including caching and prompt routing. Read more about that here and more announcements from AWS re:Invent here

👂 Chilean conversational AI: Conversational AI and chatbots are quickly becoming a saturated market in the U.S. The same can't be said for Latin America — yet. Vambe is building conversational AI for the LatAm market and has already gotten to $1 million in ARR. Read more

🤑 Scrappy startups? Startup founders love to talk about their companies' humble beginnings and how scrappy they were with limited funding and salaries. Well, Kruze Consulting data on startup salaries for founders and early employees tells a slightly different story. Read more

🎙️ How to scale frontier tech: The co-founders of Bison Ventures came on the Equity podcast this week to talk about what they look for in frontier tech, potential founder red flags, and how frontier tech companies can successfully scale. Listen here

⚛️ Nuclear is the North Star: Meta is determined to tap into nuclear energy to power its data centers. While the company's original idea to build one of its own next to a plant got shot down, now it's accepting proposals from developers to build one in the U.S. Read more

🍪 Snacking up with the Kardashians: Khloé Kardashian and Kris Jenner are building a snack company. The company is called Khloud and has secured nearly $5 million in funding toward its $10 million goal. Read more

Around the web

🧮 Tim Cook talks AI: Wired has a new interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook that covers everything from Apple Intelligence to Stevie Wonder's Vision Pro demo to the fact that Cook still remembers how to do long division. Read more

🇪🇺 Defense tech overseas: The rise of defense tech startups, and VCs willing to back them, has been a noticeable trend in the U.S. over the past few years. But it isn't just a trend on this side of the pond. European investors and companies are also changing their tune on the sector. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Mercedes-Benz

🚙 They see me rolling: The pope gets a new ride! Today Mercedes-Benz announced that it had delivered a new all-electric popemobile to the Vatican that is based off its G-Class SUV. Make sure you take a peek because this car actually looks wild. Read more