Tech Brew Ride Home - TikTok Sold (Again) (?)

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Has TikTok finally been sold, episode number 47… The Pennsylvania supreme court says police don’t need a warrant to read your search history. YouTube terminates some big accounts over AI usage. A new League of Legends is coming. And in the longreads, and in the show, a look at how Zuck’s big bet on AI is coming along. Scoop: TikTok signs deal for U.S. unit after yearslong saga (Axios) TikTok U.S. Deal to Close Next Month: Oracle and Silver Lake Confirmed in Buyer Consortium (The Hollywood Reporter) Pa. high court rules that police can access Google searches without a warrant (The Record) Meta Is Developing a New AI Image and Video Model Code-Named ‘Mango’ (WSJ) YouTube Shuts Down Channels Using AI To Create Fake Movie Trailers Watched By Millions (Deadline) Riot Has a Secret Plan to Remake Its ‘League of Legends’ Game (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s turbulent bet on AI (FT) Economics of Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers (Andrew McCalip) Feeding the Machine (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Riot Home for Friday, December 19th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Has TikTok finally been sold? Episode number 47. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court says police don't need a warrant to read your search history. YouTube terminates some big accounts over AI usage. A new League of Legends is coming, and in the long reads and in the show, a look at how Zuck's big bet on AI is coming along. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your CRM system has, has become crazy with bots and agents. At the TechBrew Right Home, we love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or launch ransomware.

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To learn more, head to mimoto.com.a.i slash ride home. That's mimoto.com.com slash ride home. Yeah, did you ever notice the whole TikTok thing was never done? I mean, I've reported to you that it was done, basically because we were told it was done, but did you ever notice that TikTok never officially, officially changed hands? Well, your guess is as good as mine as to if this really is the end now, but Axios has seen an internal memo suggesting TikTok has signed a deal to sell its U.S. unit. Oracle, Silver Lake, and M.GX will collectively own around 45% of the TikTok U.S. entity, and ByteDance will retain around 20%. Quote, the agreement is set to close on January 22nd, per an internal memo sent by CEO Showchu. Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based

MGX will collectively own 45% of the entity, which will be called TikTok-USDS Joint Venture LLC. Nearly one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing bite-dance investors, and nearly 20% will be retained by ByDance itself. The U.S. joint venture will be responsible for U.S. data protection, algorithm, security, content moderation, and software assurance per the memo. It will be responsible for retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation. A trusted security partner will be responsible for auditing and validating compliance

with the agreed-upon national security terms, and Oracle will be the trusted security partner upon completion of the transaction, the memo notes. Upon the closing, the U.S. joint venture, quote, will operate as an independent entity with authority over U.S. data protection, algorithm, security, content moderation, and software assurance, while TikTok global's U.S. entities will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and markets, it adds. The deal values TikTok U.S. at around $14 billion, a source confirmed to Axios, end quote. More from the Hollywood reporter.

Chew confirmed that the deal has officially been. signed Thursday laying out some terms of the deal, including retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure content feed is free from outside manipulation, Oracle overseeing data protection, and specifying that ultimate decision-making authority for reviewing and approving all content moderation and related policies within the United States. Oracle and Silver Lake, of course, are no strangers to the entertainment business. Oracle founder Larry Ellison backed his son David Ellison's effort to acquire Paramount and is also involved in his attempt to secure Warner Brothers Discovery,

with his Oracle stake backstopping the deal. Silver Lake, meanwhile, owns WME and also has control of TKO Group Holdings and partnered with Saudi Arabia's public investment fund to buy video game giant electronic arts in September, end quote. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court just ruled that police can get Google search data without a warrant. An expert warns that may encourage warrantless searches nationwide, quoting the record. In its opinion, the court said that Internet users make searching searches have no reasonable right to privacy because, quote, it is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect and then sell user data,

end quote. The case only creates legal precedent in Pennsylvania, but an expert predicted that the ruling will lead more police departments to feel confident about warrantless searches for internet queries. If a rather progressive state like Pennsylvania gives the green light to warrantless collection of your search queries, I think it's fair to say that it is going to open up its use across the nation, said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, and the author of the forthcoming book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You. Police in the case before the court had hit a dead end in their probe of a rape as a last attempt to find the rapist. They asked Google to produce a list showing anyone who had searched

for the victim's address in the week before the rape and home invasion occurred. Google found a hit and told police that someone at an IEP address tied to the home of the defendant in the case, John Edward Kurtz, had looked up the victim's address a few hours before the crime took place. The court noted that Google's privacy policy is explicit about the fact that it will share search histories with third parties. In the case before us, Google went beyond subtle indicators. The opinion says Google expressly informed its users that one should not expect any privacy when using its services. The court also said that internet users have the ability to not expose

their data by using different methods for finding information. The data trail created by using the internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cell phone is, according to the opinion. Ferguson said the decision is an important development on a hotly contested and developing legal question. Allowing police to access Google searches without a warrant creates a, quote, chilling environment, he said, pointing out that many people ask Google questions they wouldn't even ask their spouses. The danger of a reverse keyword search is that it allows the police to rummage through the digital questions and queries, and thus by inference, are minds. Ferguson said, a list of your questions to Google.

is a direct link to your thinking, and we usually try to prevent the government from having access to that information, end quote. Sources tell the journal that Meta is developing a new image and video-focused AI model codenamed Mango, expected to be released in the first half of 2026, along with its new LLM dubbed avocado. Quote, Meta's chief AI officer Alexander Wang talked about the artificial intelligence models in an internal company Q&A on Thursday with Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, according to people who heard the remarks. Wang also said one of the focuses for the new text model codenamed

Avocado is making it better at coding and that the company is in the early stages of exploring developing so-called world models, AI that learns about its environment by taking in visual information. Image generation has proven a vital front in the war between the big AI model companies. In September, Meta launched an AI video generator called Vibes that was made in collaboration with a startup called Mid-Journey. Less than a week after Meta released Vibes, OpenAI released an AI video generator app of its own called SORA. The introduction earlier this year of Google's Nano Banana, image-making tool

jump-started adoption of Gemini, boosting monthly users from 450 million in July to more than 650 million as of late October, end quote. YouTube has terminated the accounts of Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers. The platform earlier suspended the channel's ads. Quoting deadline,

Screen Culture and KH Studio were approached for comment. They are based in India and Georgia, respectively. Earlier this year, YouTube suspended ads on Screen Culture and KH Studio following a deadline investigation into fake movie trailers, plaguing the platform since the rise of generative AI. The channels later returned to monetization when they started adding fan trailer, parody, and concept trailer to their video titles. But those caveats disappeared in recent months, prompting concern in the fan-made trailer community. YouTube's position is that the channel's decision to revert to their previous behavior violated its spam and misleading metadata policies, this resulted in their termination. The monster was defeated, one YouTuber told deadline following the enforcement action. Deadlines investigation revealed that screen culture spliced together official footage with AI images to create franchise trailers that duped many YouTube viewers. Screen Culture founder Nick Hill P. Chahari said his team of a dozen editors exploited YouTube's algorithm by being early with fake trailers and consistently iterating with videos. For example, screen culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for the Fantastic

Four First Steps by March, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO's new Harry Potter series and Netflix's Wednesday. Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on those videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Brothers, Discovery, and Sony secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction. The studios declined to comment, end quote. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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according to five current and former employees. It is planned for release in 2027. The game's visual aesthetic, including characters, the user interface and battle arenas will be reimagined, so League of Legends can appeal to more new players. Developers are also reworking the technical underpinning so it's easier to push out updates. Riot recently added new keyboard controls that may prove easier for newbies. Internally, a reorganization of employees has also been announced, the people said, who asked not to be identified because the information hadn't been made public.

After Bloomberg reported Thursday on the company's plans, Riot posted a video confirming that a big update is in the works. It referenced changes to the video game launcher and gameplay. We're overhauling the new player experience so that once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into league, said League of Legends executive producer Paul Belizea. Released in 2009, League of Legends remains one of the top video game titles in the world. In the game, five-person teams of fantastical characters called champions, fight to win over objectives such as destroying enemy towers and neutralizing monsters. The game also has spawned international e-sports competitions. League of Legends is free to play, Riot, owned by Chimps. Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings earns money selling digital accessories. While League of Legends

has fared better than some competitors in the slow-growing video game business, its player base has dropped off according to the people Bloomberg News spoke with. Valerant, another Riot title, makes more money. In years past, Riot has tried to diversify its business investing in new titles and even a $250 million Netflix TV series called Arcane that was set in the League of Legends universe. The company cut 530 jobs last year and pulled back on. some projects. Chief Executive Officer Dylan Jadaja said in a blog post at the time that Riot had too many things underway and needed a sharper focus, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. The F.T. has some gossipy behind the scenes, details of Mark Zuckerberg's all-in-bet

to make meta an AI leader, with some saying Alexander Wang finds Zuckerberg's micro-management of AI work, quote, suffocating. Quote, Mark Zuckerberg likes to play play high-stakes poker. Other people like doing it in Vegas, he likes doing it with his company, says one former meta-executive who worked closely with him. Mark has a keen sense of when the market is changing and moving quickly to catch up. Here he is buying momentum, the person adds. I would be wary of betting against his ability to deploy his resources to be successful. Will he win? I'm not sure, but he will not lose. While some insiders have welcomed a new energy closer to Elon Musk's hardcore work ethic, cracks have begun to emerge at

an executive level. Tensions have been bubbling between Wang and Zuckerberg, according to four people familiar with the matter. Wang has told associates he finds Zuckerberg's micromanagement of the company's AI work suffocating, several of the people say. Internally, some staff question whether Wang is out of his depth, given his lack of experience managing teams in a large corporation, but also his expertise in AI data services rather than as an AI researcher pushing technical breakthroughs. Nat Friedman is also under increasing pressure from Zuckerberg to move faster on delivering AI products. Some in his team were frustrated by what they felt was the rushed release of vibes. Meta's feed of AI generated videos rolled out at a breakneck speed in order to

beat the release of OpenAI's similar SORA. Meta is in a tough spot as a newcomer. Few folks get hired into leadership, and it's such a tenure-driven place, says one former insider who left recently. When you're a friend of Zuck, you have more room for error, end quote. And this piece from Andrew McAllep throws cold water on the whole data centers in space excitement. In his quite detailed analysis, McAllup examines the feasibility of orbital data centers, challenging the aesthetic futurism of the concept with rigorous economics. While the physics of space computing is possible, the financial reality is, quote, savage in McAllop's words.

Currently building a one-gigawatt data center in orbit costs approximately $51.1 billion or $51.10 per watt over three times the $15.9 billion or $15.85 per watt required for a terrestrial equivalent. The primary engineering bottleneck is thermodynamics. Unlike Earth-based cooling, space relies solely on radiation to reject massive waste heat. This necessitates enormous solar arrays and complex thermal management to prevent GPUs from throttling. McCallup argues that success requires extreme vertical integration, positioning SpaceX as possibly the only viable contender capable of slashing launch costs. Despite daunting costs and maintenance hurdles, he suggests that irrational investment in orbital compute might actually serve as necessary scaffolding for a future space economy, however. Ultimately, while terrestrial centers remain superior for efficiency, orbital projects represent a high-risk bet, where the economics simply don't math out today. but by building it, it might come. And from the verge, quote,

Frontier Labs like Open AI and Anthropic need vast amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. This comes at a pretty penny. Billions of dollars and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up in this AI hype cycle. In September, founder Brendan Foody announced that Mercor had reached $500 million in annualized revenue, making it, quote, the fastest growing company of all time. The previous title holder was AnySphere, which makes the AI coding tool Cursor. In a sign of the Times, Cursor recently noted that its users produce the exact sort of training data labs are paying for, and the information recently reported that OpenAI and XAI are interested in buying it.

Mercor's most recent fundraising round valued the company at $10 billion. Fudy and his two co-founders are 22 years old, making them the youngest self-made billionaires. At least one of their early employees has already left to start an AI data company of her own. While discussions of AI infrastructure typically focus on the gargantuan build-out of data centers, an analogous race is happening with training data. Labs have already exhausted all the easily accessible data, adding to questions about whether early rapid progress through sheer increases and scale will continue. Meanwhile, most recent improvements have come through new training techniques

that make use of smaller datasets tailor-made by experts in particular fields, like programming and finance, and AI companies will pay premium prices for that. There are no good statistics on how much labs are spending, but rough estimates from investors and industry insiders placed to figure out over $10 billion this year and growing the vast majority coming from five or so companies. These companies have yet to find a way to make money from AI, but the people selling them training data clearly have. For now, they are some of the only AI companies turning a profit, end quote.

So I did get the audio of that top 10 tech stories of the year episode, but instead of running it as a weekend episode, I'm going to run it Christmas Day next week. So next week, I'll do three daily shows Monday through Wednesday. Then Thursday, you'll get that top 10 text stories of the year episode from The Newsworthy. And on Friday, I'm going to give you a treat from the Rad History Feed. It's the history of Toys R Us. It's actually more interesting than even I knew, the whole big box category killer model of retail. Toys R Us basically invented that. So So that's the publishing plan for next week. Talk to you on Monday. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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