Survey: 53% of US adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone and 36% say about the right amount; 70% of ages 18 to 29 report spending too much time (Pew Research Center)

Meta released Muse Spark 1.3, a coding-focused model priced like Spark 1.2 but with substantially higher performance; its “max” version, offered to partners, scores 62 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, behind only Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens through 31 December, asserting it outperforms Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on certain benchmarks. A U.S. federal judge ruled Google need not sell its ad exchange but must make its ad-tech tools interoperable with rivals.