Daily TEA – Perp Kings, Fake Trailers & TikTok Gifts
LLMs, TikTok Shop, Hyperliquid, YouTube AI, China chips
Hello, dear TEA-mates—here’s what you need to know today.
1.🎁 TikTok Shop Rolls Out Personalized Digital Gift Cards
TikTok Shop has launched digital gift cards in the U.S., letting users load between $10 and $500 to help friends and family buy from millions of products on the app, with funds credited directly to a recipient’s TikTok Balance once redeemed. The holiday-timed rollout positions TikTok Shop to compete more directly with Amazon and eBay, building on its recent push into luxury retail and its $500 million-plus U.S. sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The cards can be customized with animated designs for occasions like birthdays and weddings, and TikTok plans to add video-message personalization and “interactive unboxing” features by early 2026, although details remain limited. The gift cards are currently only available for purchase in the U.S., and TikTok’s broader commerce ambitions still face uncertainty as the company confronts a possible U.S. ban if it cannot complete a sale of its American operations by the January 23, 2026 deadline set by President Trump. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: The way TikTok uses AI to personalize gift cards, capture unboxing reactions, and enable seamless thank-you notes is spot-on — and it doubles as indirect consumer-to-consumer marketing.
2.📈 Hyperliquid Crowned 2025 Project of the Year
Decrypt has named Hyperliquid its 2025 “Project of the Year,” highlighting the decentralized exchange’s role in popularizing perpetual futures and easy-to-access leveraged trading on volatile crypto assets. Built without venture capital and run by an 11-person team, Hyperliquid has processed over $2.73 trillion in perp volume and $110.65 billion in spot volume this year, generating an estimated $1.22 billion in annualized revenue that is shared with users. The platform, which runs on its own layer-1 blockchain, offers gasless, on-chain transactions, account abstraction, and leverage up to 40x, helping fuel a broader shift from centralized exchanges to perp DEXs as traders take advantage of “regulatory arbitrage.” While supporters say Hyperliquid expands access to advanced financial tools and levels the playing field, critics warn that the combination of high leverage, speculative tokens and retail-driven “financial nihilism” can lead to massive liquidations and systemic risk. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: Hyperliquid really is the king of perp DEXs — an 11-person team generating over $1.22 billion in annual recurring revenue makes it a clear contender for 2025’s project of the year.
3.🎬 YouTube Axes AI Fake-Trailer Channels With Millions of Views
YouTube has shut down two major channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, for using AI-generated and spliced footage to create fake movie trailers that misled viewers while racking up over a billion views combined. The platforms, based in India and Georgia, had previously had ads suspended after an earlier investigation into fake trailers, then regained monetization by labeling uploads as “fan,” “parody,” or “concept” trailers before later dropping those caveats. YouTube said the terminations were due to violations of its spam and misleading-metadata policies after the channels reverted to practices that confused audiences and exploited the recommendation algorithm. A prior investigation also showed several Hollywood studios quietly claimed ad revenue on some of these AI-heavy videos instead of moving swiftly to protect their copyrights, even as Disney has now sent Google a cease-and-desist over alleged large-scale AI training infringement. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: YouTube’s crackdown only reinforces why decentralized social media matters — Big Tech holds so much power that, as “The Last Economy” warns, we risk becoming digital colonized subjects whose thoughts, sights, and sounds are shaped by a few dominant platforms.
4.🧪 China’s Reverse-Engineered EUV Prototype Narrows the Chip Gap
China is reported to have built a prototype extreme ultraviolet (EUV) chipmaking machine that can generate EUV light, a core component of the most advanced semiconductor fabrication tools previously monopolized by Dutch firm ASML. The prototype, developed in a secretive Shenzhen facility by ex-ASML engineers who allegedly reverse-engineered ASML machines using older components, has not yet produced working chips, with China’s government targeting 2028 and outside experts suggesting 2030 as a more realistic timeline. Analysts note that while the machine is described as crude compared to ASML’s systems and China likely remains years behind in reliable, high-volume production, the breakthrough significantly narrows what was once thought to be a decade-plus technology gap. The effort comes against a backdrop of U.S.-led export controls that have blocked EUV sales to China and spurred stricter screening of sensitive knowledge workers in the Netherlands, even as China aims to push the U.S. “100%” out of its chip supply chains. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: What’s framed as “reverse engineering” often looks like theft in disguise — and it’s crucial to separate the Chinese Communist Party from Chinese people, who cannot and should not be equated with the CCP.
5.🧠 Karpathy’s 2025: RLVR, Ghost Minds and Vibe Coding
Andrej Karpathy’s 2025 LLM year-in-review highlights Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a new core stage in the training stack, where models optimize against objective tasks like math and code puzzles to develop longer “reasoning” traces and achieve major capability gains without drastic size increases. He argues that RLVR and adjacent techniques create highly “jagged” intelligence, or “ghost” minds that spike on verifiable benchmarks but remain brittle in the wild, eroding his trust in traditional benchmarks even as labs increasingly “train on the test set.” Karpathy also points to Cursor and Claude Code as defining a new LLM app and agent layer, champions “vibe coding” as a way for both non-programmers and experts to build software by describing intentions in natural language, and sees Google’s Nano Banana as an early glimpse of an LLM GUI era where models communicate through richer visual and interactive outputs instead of plain chat. Overall, he concludes that 2025 showed LLMs to be simultaneously far smarter and far dumber than expected, extremely useful yet still far from their full potential, with rapid progress and substantial work ahead existing in tension. (Read More)
🫖 TEA For Thought: Looking back, it’s hard to grasp how far LLMs have come — in the AI era, one year feels like a decade, and it’s thrilling to imagine what the next year will bring.
Prompt Tip of the Day: Ask Me Questions First
“Before you start, ask me up to 7 targeted questions that would materially improve the answer. If any info is missing and you must proceed, state your assumptions clearly.”
TEAHEE Moment
Stay sharp, stay informed. See you tomorrow.
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