Techmeme

• Sam Altman says AI could end up controlled by a few powerful players, partly because AI fears could push people to trade "a lot of liberty for safety" (Truman Dickerson/Business Insider) Techmeme — Aug 23, 23:01 PM
• Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" by moving into communities without first gaining support, signaling growing Republican backlash (Axios) Techmeme — Aug 23, 21:10 PM
• Sources: Hugging Face has been exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to gauge bidders' interest (Katie Roof/Business Insider) Techmeme — Aug 23, 19:20 PM
• Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (George Hammond/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 23, 17:45 PM
• Alibaba plans to raise ~$10B in a follow-on share offering to fund AI investments; sources: it plans to offer 710M shares at a 3.6% discount to Friday's close (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 23, 15:50 PM
• Sources: foldable iPhone feels durable, fits well in a pocket, has useful iPad-like app layouts, excels as a camera viewfinder but lacks telephoto and Face ID (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 23, 14:45 PM
• The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 23, 12:05 PM
• A profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over US state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta and oversaw the Musk v. Altman trial (Jeffrey Kopp/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 23, 08:05 AM
• The popularity of risky leveraged chip ETFs in South Korea prompted regulators to cap individual exposure and mandate a weeklong investor education course (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 23, 05:30 AM
• Sources: Flipkart Minutes, the quick commerce service of Walmart's Flipkart, is now delivering 1.1M-1.2M orders per day, up from ~390K-400K in November 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 23, 05:20 AM
• Semiconductor cram schools are flourishing in Seoul as applications to Samsung and SK Hynix surge, fuelled by record earnings and eye-catching worker bonuses (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 23, 05:15 AM
• Sources: Nvidia plans to use its $6B deal with Poolside to build an open-weight AI model to compete with Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 23, 03:30 AM
• Sources: Iran-linked hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, coinciding with a wave of Iran-affiliated attacks on US water utilities (Telegraph) Techmeme — Aug 23, 03:20 AM
• Sources and documents detail how Tether's plan to build two bitcoin mining sites in Uruguay fell apart amid a dispute with state utility UTE over power supply (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 23, 00:00 AM
• AI agents' growing capabilities are driving productivity FOMO among some startup founders, who feel compelled to work long hours managing and guiding the agents (Katherine Bindley/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 22, 22:00 PM
• London-based Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni and with $50M in seed funding, says its new Faraday agent beats GPT-5.5 at reproducing research paper findings (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 22, 20:00 PM
• Sources: Nvidia informed some of its biggest customers of price hikes of 15%+ on its systems, including Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell, starting in early 2027 (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 22, 19:00 PM
• Apparel retailers like Zalando, Zara, and ASOS are betting on AI virtual fitting rooms to create a better online shopping experience and cut costly returns (Sonja Wind/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 22, 18:45 PM
• A look at the narrowing US-China AI gap, as a spate of compelling, low-cost releases makes Chinese AI models increasingly attractive to businesses (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 22, 16:40 PM
• Carrier Pidge hit 75K users and Roost 650K downloads, as slow messaging apps delivering texts at pigeon speeds attract users tired of constant notifications (Emmett Lindner/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 22, 16:40 PM
• Ox Alpha, a "stealth model" from an unknown AI lab with a 1M-token multimodal context and capacity for 100T tokens/day, goes viral after launching on OpenRouter (Rohail Saleem/Wccftech) Techmeme — Aug 22, 14:35 PM
• Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have made Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, a data center hub, with ~100 data centers built or under construction (Zeyi Yang/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 22, 13:50 PM
• Inside the World Robot Conference in Beijing, drawing over 300 exhibitors; Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said the industry's "ChatGPT moment" has yet to come (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 22, 10:30 AM
• With each successive era of AI, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model (SemiAnalysis) Techmeme — Aug 22, 06:30 AM
• Rundoo, a provider of AI-powered business operations software for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) Techmeme — Aug 22, 06:00 AM
• OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures (Hayden Field/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 22, 05:25 AM
• Following abandoned IPO attempts in NYC and London, Shein is struggling to grow as it nears a Hong Kong listing at a fraction of its peak valuation of $100B (Sui-Lee Wee/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 22, 05:00 AM
• How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 22, 02:10 AM
• Sources: Anthropic's bankers said the company could raise $100B+ in its IPO, which could value it at $2T, in recent discussions with potential investors (New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 22, 00:36 AM
• Amazon raises prices for its Echo smart speakers, Fire TV line, Kindle devices, and eero mesh networking systems to offset increases in memory and storage costs (Sebastian Herrera/Fortune) Techmeme — Aug 22, 00:15 AM
• Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit) Techmeme — Aug 21, 23:55 PM
• OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico) Techmeme — Aug 21, 23:10 PM
• Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) Techmeme — Aug 21, 22:45 PM
• Nvidia makes a minority investment in Cloverleaf, which works with utilities and energy providers to secure infrastructure for data center sites (Rashika Singh/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 22:35 PM
• OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months, to $4/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 22:15 PM
• Sources: Devoted Health, which uses AI to help coordinate medical care for those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, is raising new funding at a $25B valuation (Katie Roof/Business Insider) Techmeme — Aug 21, 21:35 PM
• Nvidia says its general-purpose coding agent system AVO scored 100% across all 25 environments in the ARC-AGI-3 public set, completing all 183 levels (Terry Chen/NVIDIA Technical Blog) Techmeme — Aug 21, 20:50 PM
• Anthropic hires Amir Salek, who ran Google's TPU business until 2022, to join its compute team as part of a push to develop its own chips (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 21, 20:25 PM
• DHH launches Omacom Foundation, a non-profit supporting his Omarchy Linux distro, with $8M in funding from Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, others (Omarchy News) Techmeme — Aug 21, 20:10 PM
• Source: OpenAI's VP of sales in the Americas, Kaylin Voss, resigned a week after Denise Dresser left, prompting others on the sales team to consider resigning (Laura Bratton/The Information) Techmeme — Aug 21, 19:45 PM
• The US DOJ and TikTok reach a $400M settlement to resolve allegations TikTok violated COPPA; the DOJ filed the lawsuit in 2024 (Ashley Gold/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 21, 19:40 PM
• Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 21, 19:06 PM
• Anthropic says Mythos 5 is now in public beta in Claude Security for Enterprise users, and it is working with providers to embed Mythos 5 in defensive tools (Claude) Techmeme — Aug 21, 18:35 PM
• Sources: London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale is seeking to raise as much as $3B in its US IPO, which could take place as soon as September (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 21, 17:25 PM
• Sources: the US Department of Energy is investigating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the US (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 21, 16:55 PM
• Walmart, which has long resisted contactless Tap to Pay payments, says its stores will get the tech, which supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, by the end of 2026 (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 21, 16:20 PM
• Filings: Apple paid Ireland $17B in taxes in 2025, 40% of its $43B in global corporate income tax total, after an EU court ordered it to pay €13B in back taxes (Jamie John/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 21, 15:55 PM
• Uber is set to be fined €825M by the Dutch data watchdog over its use of automated systems to deactivate driver accounts, in the second largest fine under GDPR (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 21, 15:20 PM
• Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $250M extension, at a $2.3B valuation, to its March $170M Series A; source: Nvidia invested $25M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 21, 15:00 PM
• Kakao plans to spin off its chat app-based platform business into a company tentatively named KakaoAI and relist it on the Korea Exchange on January 27, 2027 (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 13:50 PM
• Filings: The Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted China-based chipmaker YMTC's application to list its shares on the STAR Market; YMTC seeks to raise ~$4.9B (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 13:10 PM
• DeepSeek unveils an experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model, saying it nears the performance of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on multimodal agentic tests (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 21, 13:00 PM
• Patreon announces new and overhauled features, including recommendation algorithm changes aimed at making it easier for smaller creators to get discovered (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 21, 12:35 PM
• A look at London cab drivers' concerns and pushback against robotaxis, as Waymo and Wayve race to make London their European launch pad for driverless services (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 21, 12:00 PM
• CBRE: NYC becomes the top tech talent market for the first time with ~394K jobs, beating the Bay Area's ~375K, amid SF job cuts and finance sector tech hiring (Diana Olick/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 21, 11:15 AM
• Samsung unveils a $65.1B-$79.5B shareholder return package for 2026, combining dividends and share buybacks, calling it "the largest ever by a Korean company" (Jenny Lee/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 21, 10:40 AM
• Sources: Nvidia is in early talks with South Korean AI chip maker Rebellions for a potential deal, including a partnership, an investment, or an acquisition (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 21, 10:25 AM
• China grants Geely a two-year permit for the country's first private satellite IoT trial, letting Geely offer connectivity to sectors like transport and energy (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) Techmeme — Aug 21, 10:01 AM
• How the memory boom is reshaping Micron's hometown of Boise, Idaho, with new millionaires, job growth, rising housing costs, and uneven wealth distribution (CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 21, 08:55 AM
• How crypto, AI, and online betting companies emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 US midterm races, as corporate spending reaches a record $517M (Dawn Kopecki/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 06:10 AM
• Brazil announces ~$444.2M in AI investments split between US and Chinese companies, including ~$250.3M for a supercomputing project with Huawei and iFlytek (Marcela Ayres/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 03:35 AM
• Source: AI training data startup Micro1's gross annual run rate grew from $100M to $500M in the past eight months, putting net annual run rate at $150M-$200M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 21, 02:25 AM
• Nevada approves permits letting Tesla deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis in the Las Vegas area over the next year, while Waymo and Uber are each allowed up to 1,000 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 21, 01:30 AM
• A NJ teenager drops her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap over alleged social media addiction, without any payment; TikTok previously settled her claims (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 01:00 AM
• A US judge tosses part of the conviction of ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding, who was found guilty of stealing AI trade secrets to benefit two Chinese companies (Tom Hals/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 21, 00:05 AM
• OpenAI rolls out an Apple Messages plugin for ChatGPT on macOS, letting ChatGPT read, search, and analyze chats, prepare and send messages, and more (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) Techmeme — Aug 20, 22:51 PM
• Super Micro says its independent probe found no evidence its CEO or senior management knew of an alleged scheme to smuggle $2.5B worth of Nvidia chips to China (Amanda Gerut/Fortune) Techmeme — Aug 20, 22:21 PM
• Email: Apple Music tells industry partners that songs tagged as "materially generated using AI" by content providers will be visibly labeled on the service (Kristin Robinson/Billboard) Techmeme — Aug 20, 21:45 PM
• GitHub says its 7+ hour August 17 outage was caused by a capacity failure when peak traffic overwhelmed an infrastructure component in a Central US data center (Vlad Fedorov/The GitHub Blog) Techmeme — Aug 20, 20:55 PM
• Sources: Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to raise $60B+ in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 20:40 PM
• Google rolls out an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal) Techmeme — Aug 20, 20:30 PM
• San Mateo-based Twin1 AI, which creates professional digital twins that integrate with tools like Slack, launches from stealth with a $20M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 20, 20:10 PM
• Sources: Poolside struck a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation; 109 staffers get Nvidia job offers (Newcomer) Techmeme — Aug 20, 19:36 PM
• Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter) Techmeme — Aug 20, 19:05 PM
• Meta rolls out Pocket, an experimental vibe-coding app that lets users create and share small games, in the US, after launching it in Brazil last month (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 20, 18:35 PM
• Sources: Anthropic expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting IPO, as it prepares to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of August (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 18:25 PM
• Source: Anthropic plans a safety system this year requiring enterprises to retain data for 30 days, with an option to do so on their own cloud infrastructure (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 18:10 PM
• Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years (Google) Techmeme — Aug 20, 17:25 PM
• Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules (Qianer Liu/The Information) Techmeme — Aug 20, 17:20 PM
• Astromech, which uses genomic data to build predictive AI models of biological change, raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, bringing its total funding to $60M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) Techmeme — Aug 20, 17:15 PM
• Ramp launches Router, an AI model routing service it has been using over the past three years, in the US; the service is free to use for the rest of 2026 (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 20, 17:10 PM
• Two US senators demand answers from TikTok about a "depraved" test that withheld a safety feature from 10% of US users, including a teenager who died by suicide (Olivia Carville/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 17:00 PM
• The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 20, 16:10 PM
• Filing: in 2025, TikTok posted its first net profit of $702.5M in Europe, Africa, and Latin America on $9.1B in revenue, up 45.7% YoY (Iain Martin/Forbes) Techmeme — Aug 20, 15:15 PM
• A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants sought assurances that their info would be removed (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 20, 14:55 PM
• Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from companies like Nvidia (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 14:35 PM
• Circana: US video game hardware spending fell 29% YoY in July to $282M, the lowest since COVID; unit shipments fell 39% as average console prices hit $542 (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 13:25 PM
• Anthropic-backed enterprise AI venture Ode is acquiring four-year-old AI consultancy Casper for an undisclosed fee; Ode has 100+ staff after buying Fractional (Julia Hornstein/The Information) Techmeme — Aug 20, 13:15 PM
• Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on inside US military information, attracting copycat bets and making $8M overall, with a 97.2% average win rate (Douglas Gillison/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 20, 12:50 PM
• GTA 6 leaker CyberLeek releases more footage, including a video of a character spelling "leek" with bullet holes in a wall, suggesting direct access to the game (Robert Purchese/Eurogamer.net) Techmeme — Aug 20, 12:35 PM
• Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 20, 12:20 PM
• Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year on Azure to consume trillions of AI tokens weekly, becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 11:40 AM
• Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 20, 11:30 AM
• Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 20, 11:15 AM
• PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 20, 11:00 AM
• Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 10:45 AM
• Stripe's OpenRouter deal, its largest-ever acquisition, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and gives it a foothold in the token market (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 20, 10:30 AM
• Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$40B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.6B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 10:20 AM
• Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 20, 10:15 AM
• South Korea media: SK Hynix and its union reach a tentative deal on a 6.3% wage hike and paying out 60% of profit-sharing bonuses in shares and 40% in cash (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 10:10 AM
• Uber, Verne, and Pony.ai launch autonomous rides in Zagreb, making the Croatian capital the first European city where users can book such rides via Uber's app (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 20, 09:55 AM
• London-based Callosum, whose software matches AI tasks with different models and chips, raised a $100M seed from Atomico, UK Sovereign AI Fund, and others (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 06:50 AM
• Virginia's Loudoun County hosts more than 250 data centers generating huge tax revenues, as it moves to slow construction in response to pushback from residents (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 20, 06:35 AM
• A look at Backstory, an experimental AI image authentication tool from Google DeepMind, offered for testing to journalists, researchers, and other fact checkers (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab) Techmeme — Aug 20, 06:20 AM
• China's humanoid robot makers derive much of their revenue from government-backed training centers that sell training data back to them, raising demand concerns (William Langley/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 20, 05:35 AM
• Sources: China is restricting or delaying exports to Taiwan of germanium- and quartz-based materials used in fiber optics, photonics, and chip manufacturing (Nikkei Asia) Techmeme — Aug 20, 05:20 AM
• How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military (Michael Martina/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 20, 04:40 AM
• Pornhub says the UK's new internet age checks have boosted non-compliant porn sites, which occupied seven of the top 10 search results for "free porn" in June (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 20, 04:35 AM
• The EU appears to be shifting from outsized regulatory fines against Big Tech to technical DMA orders that force compliance, such as sharing search data (Jacob Parry/Politico) Techmeme — Aug 20, 03:35 AM
• Hyperliquid Strategies shares jumped 31% after Trump said CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring crypto platform Hyperliquid onshore in a compliant manner (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 20, 03:10 AM
• The US Army is phasing out its drone assault battalion, as part of a "back-to-basics" approach; it was created in January to learn from the conflict in Ukraine (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 20, 02:15 AM
• Samsung announces a virtual Galaxy event for August 27 at 8am ET, where the Galaxy S26 FE is expected (Alan Friedman/PhoneArena) Techmeme — Aug 20, 01:15 AM
• German insurance giant Munich Re agrees to acquire cyber insurance provider At-Bay for $575M; At-Bay has raised $276M and was last valued at $1.35B in 2021 (Meir Orbach/CTech) Techmeme — Aug 20, 00:40 AM
• Trump urges Congress to pass the Clarity Act at a White House event with execs including the CEOs of Coinbase and Robinhood; the bill has stalled in the Senate (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 23:05 PM
• Sources: YouTube is offering top creators millions to post videos exclusively on YouTube for a period and will penalize those that post to Netflix concurrently (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 22:10 PM
• Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar testifies that Mark Zuckerberg prioritized growth and engagement over child safety on Facebook and Instagram (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 19, 22:00 PM
• Google announces new study tools, including a student hub, notebooks, and interactive 3D visualizations in Gemini, plus student offers for Google AI plans (Amanda Caswell/Tom's Guide) Techmeme — Aug 19, 21:00 PM
• Letter: Stripe told investors January 1 marked the "beginning of the singularity", a major inflection point in long-term trends, and H1 revenue rose 41% YoY (Axios) Techmeme — Aug 19, 19:50 PM
• Sources: SpaceX approached AI coding startup Cognition about a potential acquisition; deal talks are inactive, but the companies are discussing working together (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 19:45 PM
• Sources: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees at an all-hands that OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027", or sooner if "our business continues to inflect" (CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 19, 19:34 PM
• Sources: AI chip startup Fractile is in talks to raise ~$600M at a $6.5B pre-money valuation, up from ~$1B in May, and has an initial ~$250M deal with Anthropic (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 19:00 PM
• Source: Nvidia has discussed an investment in Mercor as part of a round valuing the startup at $20B; Nvidia paid Mercor tens of millions of dollars last quarter (The Information) Techmeme — Aug 19, 18:45 PM
• Stripe agrees to buy New York-based OpenRouter; a source says Stripe is paying $7.5B, with $1.5B going to the startup's founders and $6B to investors (Erin Griffith/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 19, 18:00 PM
• The FTC says businesses must disclose when they use personalized pricing and it will "deploy enforcement resources" against companies that do not disclose it (Dave Michaels/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 19, 17:45 PM
• Stripe agrees to buy New York-based OpenRouter for an undisclosed amount; Stripe had reportedly agreed to pay more than $7B for OpenRouter (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 17:27 PM
• Meta launches a Mac app for Meta AI and says Meta AI can now work directly with Instagram and Facebook accounts, Meta ad campaigns, and Google Workspace (Emma Roth/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 19, 17:25 PM
• OpenAI is testing Private Safety Processing, a new technique to identify misuse patterns while preserving zero data retention protections, with early customers (Ina Fried/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 19, 17:20 PM
• The US CFTC bans Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang from trading for five years, as part of a settlement over their roles at FTX (Nicola M White/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:40 PM
• Nielsen rolls out changes to make its ratings more accurate, including using data from smartwatch-like devices worn by its panelists without requiring logins (Loree Seitz/The Wrap) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:35 PM
• Google Pixel 11 review: great design, nice camera features, and shares many features of the Pro phone but the hardware is unchanged and very expensive at $899 (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:25 PM
• Google Pixel 11 Pro review: Magic Capture and the voice-to-text Rambler features are very useful but subpar gaming performance and HiLight is useless (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:20 PM
• Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold review: tougher body with IP68 rating and a decent triple rear camera but an iterative hardware upgrade with design that feels dated (Dominic Preston/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:15 PM
• Google Pixel Watch 5 review: Improved GPS is good, gesture controls are great, but the new health features haven't rolled out yet and it is $50 more expensive (Victoria Song/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:10 PM
• Memo: GOP asks AI companies to stem the backlash against data centers, saying the issue could kill the party's chances of holding a vital Senate seat in Ohio (Alex Isenstadt/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 19, 16:00 PM
• Rivian spinout Also, which is developing autonomous driving tech, raised a $150M Series D led by Prysm Capital, after announcing a $200M round in March 2026 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 19, 15:55 PM
• Network Bio, which is developing an AI foundation model from datasets of patient tissue and blood samples created by pooling access to biobanks, raised $50M (Brian Gormley/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 19, 15:45 PM
• Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal's fintech startup Navi raised $100M from Prosus, its first institutional capital raise, sources say at a ~$1.3B valuation (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 19, 15:30 PM
• Amazon makes its AI-powered Alexa+ free on all compatible Fire TV devices in the US, automatically upgrading users even if they don't subscribe to Prime (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 19, 15:25 PM
• Sources: Veeda, which is developing world models and is led by ex-Nvidia VP of AI Research Sanja Fidler, raised a $90M+ seed and is backed by Khosla and Radical (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic) Techmeme — Aug 19, 15:20 PM
• Sources: Nvidia is working as a matchmaker to connect companies holding its GPUs with Nordic data center operators that have available capacity to deploy them (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 19, 14:45 PM
• A hacker known as Cyberleek leaks two GTA VI gameplay clips and the full map in protest of Rockstar Games' digital-only release; Rockstar issues DMCA takedowns (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware) Techmeme — Aug 19, 14:15 PM
• Marvell and Google expand their chip development deal, with Marvell granting Google a warrant to buy up to 58M+ shares at $206.58 each, totaling up to $12.2B (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 13:10 PM
• Cybersecurity data company Prevalent AI raised $22M from Integrity Growth Partners, marking the nine-year-old startup's first-ever outside capital raise (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) Techmeme — Aug 19, 13:05 PM
• Amazon appears to have leaked Jason Statham's new film Mutiny, streaming it in full on Prime Video in the US, two days before it was supposed to hit theaters (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 19, 12:45 PM
• Reconstructed code from Flock's login pages shows a new AI-powered system, called OS Investigate, that integrates license plate scans, case files, and more (Wired) Techmeme — Aug 19, 12:25 PM
• UK-based automotive dealership software maker Pinewood agrees to a £545M cash takeover by US private equity firm Ridgeview, after an Apax takeover fell through (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 19, 11:25 AM
• Amazon plans to expand Prime Air drone deliveries to cities in at least five more US states in the coming months, including suburban Chicago and Atlanta (Matt Day/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 11:15 AM
• OpenAI expands its ad pilot program across 31 European markets, including Germany, France, Spain, and Italy; the pilot launched in the US, the UK, and others (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek) Techmeme — Aug 19, 11:00 AM
• SMR startup Oklo is currently building its reactor in Idaho, a step towards supplying Meta with power; there are an estimated 22 active US reactor projects (Jennifer Hiller/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 19, 10:45 AM
• Kuaishou reports Q2 revenue flat at ~$5.2B, meeting est., net income down 36% YoY to ~$467M, the biggest drop since 2021, and Kling AI sales up 200% (Rachel Yeo/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 10:30 AM
• Google Cloud is deploying context-creating AI agents within its tools to automate tasks handled by forward-deployed engineers; Google is hiring hundreds of FDEs (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information) Techmeme — Aug 19, 10:15 AM
• WiseTech says Australian antitrust authorities raided its office, seeking documents and data as part of an alleged competition law breach probe; WTC falls 8%+ (Angus Whitley/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 10:05 AM
• Sources: Samsung raises prices for advanced 4nm and 5nm chipmaking services by up to 15% for new orders in July, driven by AI demand and TSMC's tight capacity (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 19, 09:55 AM
• Filing: SK Hynix plans a ~$29B share buyback, repurchasing and canceling up to 24M treasury shares, in a bid to calm worries about the durability of AI spending (Denny Thomas/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 09:45 AM
• US tech companies are offering community investments, guaranteed jobs, and hosting open houses to address concerns and win public support for AI data centers (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 19, 08:15 AM
• AI evaluation lab Irregular's report on its role in hacking incidents involving OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models faces criticism over unanswered questions (Alexander Martin/The Record) Techmeme — Aug 19, 07:55 AM
• Nvidia, with quarterly free cash flow up 18x over the past three years to $48.5B, is using its balance sheet and credit rating to build an AI capital moat (Ari Levy/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 19, 06:35 AM
• Block releases Berd, a desktop app it built to give its employees a single environment for working with AI agents across different models, under Apache 2.0 (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) Techmeme — Aug 19, 05:15 AM
• FDM CCS Insight: ~134M travel eSIMs will be used in 2026, up from 101.8M in 2025, challenging established carriers that generate 3%-5% of revenue from roaming (Kieran Smith/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 19, 05:10 AM
• Z.ai prices GLM-5.3 API access at $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, unchanged from GLM-5.2 (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) Techmeme — Aug 19, 04:45 AM
• Austin-based Smack Technologies, which is developing AI decision-making tools for the US military, raised a $61M Series B led by Costanoa and First In (Mike Stone/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 19, 04:15 AM
• OpenAI says the changes to its model training will increase compute overhead by 20% of observed inference workload; the increase will not be handed to customers (Thomas Claburn/The Register) Techmeme — Aug 19, 03:30 AM
• Sources: Beijing allowed ByteDance and Tencent to each receive about 10,000 Nvidia H200 chips at their mainland China facilities in recent weeks (Zijing Wu/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 19, 03:15 AM
• Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree's stock surged 629% in early trading in its Shanghai debut on Wednesday, after raising ~$904M in its IPO (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 02:25 AM
• Sources: Temporal is in talks for a fresh funding round that would give the open-source orchestration platform developer a ~$500M raise at a $12B+ valuation (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 19, 02:00 AM
• Rillet, which is developing an AI-native accounting platform, raised a $100M Series C at a $1B valuation led by Iconiq, bringing its total funding to $200M+ (Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune) Techmeme — Aug 19, 01:20 AM
• Cerebras unveils CS-4, a server rack powered by three WSE-3 Turbo chips and built around its new Nexus architecture, with first shipments starting this quarter (Max A. Cherney/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 19, 00:30 AM
• Survey: 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about increased AI use in daily life, up from 37% in 2021, including 55% of those under 30 (Pew Research Center) Techmeme — Aug 19, 00:05 AM
• Anthropic details two experiments showing how Claude can accelerate protein design and analytical chemistry, and says it plans an access program for scientists (Anthropic) Techmeme — Aug 18, 23:15 PM
• Sources: OpenAI's Q2 revenue grew 18% QoQ to $6.7B, but its operating margin sank further; Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6B in the same period (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 18, 22:50 PM
• Z.ai's GLM-5.3 with max reasoning scores 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, on par with Kimi K3 but below Opus 5 at 63 and Fable 5 at 62 (@artificialanlys) Techmeme — Aug 18, 22:35 PM
• Internal memo: ICE bars its employees from wearing Meta's AI glasses, saying they "could unintentionally capture, record, or transmit sensitive information" (New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 18, 21:50 PM
• Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signs an executive order imposing new requirements on data center projects, including getting approval from local officials (Allan Smith/NBC News) Techmeme — Aug 18, 21:40 PM
• In opening arguments, US state AGs said Meta intentionally sought to addict children to Facebook and Instagram in pursuit of profit; Meta rejected the claims (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 18, 21:20 PM
• Sam Altman says OpenAI's decision to pace its AI development was caused by a collection of research observations showing "various degrees of misalignment" (Alex Heath/Time) Techmeme — Aug 18, 21:00 PM
• Sources: Anthropic has been preparing to give its co-founders shares with extra voting power to help insulate them from outside pressure, ahead of a planned IPO (The Information) Techmeme — Aug 18, 20:40 PM
• The US SEC proposes exempting certain digital asset offerings from securities registration statements, with exemptions for offerings up to $5M and $75M (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 20:20 PM
• VC funding in physical AI companies totaled $47.4B across 521 deals in H1, up 80% from H1 2025, and more than the $41.9B invested from 2022 to 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) Techmeme — Aug 18, 19:00 PM
• OpenAI says it has made several changes to its safety practices following the Hugging Face breach and has paused two weeks of deployment-focused RL training (Ina Fried/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 18, 18:10 PM
• Comcast is rolling out Wi-Fi motion sensing to its Xfinity gateways, a free opt-in feature that allows its routers to detect movement at home (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 18, 17:40 PM
• Sources: Anthropic's revolving credit facility is set to surpass its roughly $10B target as banks compete for roles on the company's upcoming IPO (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 17:10 PM
• The EU says it "welcomes Apple's changes" and they follow a "close dialogue"; IAP fees are 26%, alt payment processing fees are 20%, and link-out fees are 15% (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 16:35 PM
• Apple unveils new EU business terms from October 1, resolving disputes with the EU, including a new Core Technology Commission and App Store commission tiers (Apple) Techmeme — Aug 18, 16:10 PM
• Harvey announces Harvey Tenet, its first in-house, proprietary model for legal work, trained on mock disputes and case files using a version of Kimi K3 (Melia Robinson/Business Insider) Techmeme — Aug 18, 16:05 PM
• Francisco Partners plans to take patient engagement software company Weave Communications private for ~$650M; Weave went public at a ~$1.5B valuation in 2021 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 18, 15:25 PM
• Meta ran ads for a nudify app featuring a porn video with a deepfake closely resembling a prominent US politician; Apple removed the app from the App Store (Wired) Techmeme — Aug 18, 15:20 PM
• Palona, which uses AI agents to automate real-time workflows in brick-and-mortar businesses, raised a $20M Series A, following a $10M seed in 2025 (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) Techmeme — Aug 18, 15:05 PM
• Google quietly rolled out a new program to let verified political campaigns more easily bypass Gmail's spam filter, after years of complaints from the GOP (Shane Goldmacher/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 18, 14:40 PM
• Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B+ valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 18, 14:25 PM
• As sweeping US crypto legislation stalls, the SEC and CFTC are moving to establish rules; the SEC is set to exempt certain token offerings from securities laws (Hannah Lang/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 18, 13:15 PM
• Q&A with Proton CEO Andy Yen on Proton's story, dislodging "a hundred million people" from Google, AI backlash, privacy, US politics, EU Chat Control, and more (Andy Greenberg/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 18, 13:00 PM
• Klarna says CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström plan to step down in early 2027, and lowers its full-year GMV guidance; KLAR falls 19%+ pre-market (Connor Hart/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 18, 12:45 PM
• How a bipartisan coalition of US states fought to present a united case against Meta; Judge Rogers established a hybrid structure for the multi-week trial (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 18, 11:56 AM
• Dutch company Fairphone launches its $650 flagship repairable Fairphone (Gen 6+) in the US and plans to keep launching new phone generations every two years (Julian Chokkattu/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 18, 11:41 AM
• Xiaomi reports Q2 revenue down 6.1% YoY to ~$16.2B and net income down 21% to ~$1.4B, above est., amid a persistent memory shortage and weaker smartphone demand (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 11:15 AM
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Teens, a new mode that limits high-risk chats around self-harm, eating disorders, and other topics, adds studying tools, and more (Cecilia Kang/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 18, 11:06 AM
• Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M+ downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models (Juro Osawa/The Information) Techmeme — Aug 18, 11:01 AM
• Reddit launches an early experiment to convert select text posts and comments into short videos with AI voiceovers, rolling out on the web, iOS, and Android (Jay Peters/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 18, 10:45 AM
• Alibaba's Alipay launches a new "all-in-one" platform for businesses to use AI agents to automate tasks; Alibaba's stock jumps 5%+ and is up 40%+ since June (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 10:35 AM
• AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 18, 10:26 AM
• Sources: China orders some state-linked entities to uninstall a government-tailored version of Windows 10, ahead of its February 2027 retirement timeline (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 10:15 AM
• Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts (Madeleine Cuff/New Scientist) Techmeme — Aug 18, 10:00 AM
• Baidu reports Q2 revenue down 2% YoY to ~$4.62B, below ~$4.69B est. and its fifth straight quarterly decline, and net income of ~$341M, as it lags AI rivals (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 18, 09:50 AM
• Apple's macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC has references to unreleased products: a Home Hub, home accessories, new Beats, AirPods Pro 4, Apple Intelligence in China, and more (Juli Clover/MacRumors) Techmeme — Aug 18, 09:42 AM
• In filings, Apple acknowledges App Store regulatory changes are weighing on its $100B+ services business; US App Store spend fell 6% in Q2, per Sensor Tower (Michael Acton/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 18, 08:00 AM
• Rogue Studio, which calls itself a "playground for creative ethical mischief", launches Rogue 1.0, an AI video tool to make adult content of Hollywood quality (Jason Parham/Wired) Techmeme — Aug 18, 06:25 AM
• Sources: AI-drafted bills are swamping the US House's Legislative Counsel, which now spends more time fixing them than it would spend to draft them from scratch (Owen Dahlkamp/Politico) Techmeme — Aug 18, 05:00 AM
• Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press) Techmeme — Aug 18, 03:20 AM
• Sources: Google has told suppliers it plans to move all Pixel phone, smartwatch, and wireless earbud manufacturing out of China in 2027 amid US-China tensions (Lauly Li/Nikkei Asia) Techmeme — Aug 18, 02:50 AM
• A video found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to show a man demoing camera-equipped AirPods using Visual Intelligence (Juli Clover/MacRumors) Techmeme — Aug 18, 01:55 AM
• Sources: Situational Awareness offered part of its $5B Anthropic stake at a 20% discount as it scrambled for cash; word of its trouble left it "being hunted" (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 18, 00:45 AM
• David Sacks says "Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize" after Amodei shared policy ideas (David Sacks/@davidsacks) Techmeme — Aug 17, 22:25 PM
• Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, will pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from child abuse material (Samantha Cole/404 Media) Techmeme — Aug 17, 21:40 PM
• Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B (Alan Neuhauser/Axios) Techmeme — Aug 17, 21:20 PM
• Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be "astronomical" (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 17, 21:05 PM
• BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023 (Stacy Cowley/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 21:00 PM
• Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B in late 2025 (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 17, 20:00 PM
• African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) Techmeme — Aug 17, 19:05 PM
• Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 17, 17:35 PM
• Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more (Cursor) Techmeme — Aug 17, 17:30 PM
• YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos (Emma Roth/The Verge) Techmeme — Aug 17, 17:25 PM
• Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models (James Nani/Bloomberg Law) Techmeme — Aug 17, 17:20 PM
• Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations (Tobias Burns/CNBC) Techmeme — Aug 17, 17:00 PM
• Monzo chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board's decision to remove TS Anil as CEO (Simon Foy/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 15:50 PM
• A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT after finding it gave Apple's apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 17, 15:30 PM
• Microsoft says GitHub is down worldwide, with its website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services impacted; GitHub confirmed the outage at 13:40 UTC (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer) Techmeme — Aug 17, 14:55 PM
• Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI; Nvidia invests $1.5B in SB Energy (Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 17, 14:30 PM
• Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media) Techmeme — Aug 17, 14:10 PM
• ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, a retrofit autonomous control appliance that mounts on excavators (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) Techmeme — Aug 17, 14:00 PM
• Trump-backed WLF is collaborating with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of its 90 AI models are developed by Chinese entities flagged as security risks (Lawrence Delevingne/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 17, 13:50 PM
• Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029 (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 17, 13:40 PM
• Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident "a watershed moment" and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses (Greg Brockman) Techmeme — Aug 17, 13:05 PM
• OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 17, 13:00 PM
• Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) Techmeme — Aug 17, 12:55 PM
• Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively surpassing $250B YTD; Nvidia leads the sector in deal volume with a record 59 funding rounds (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News) Techmeme — Aug 17, 12:25 PM
• Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) Techmeme — Aug 17, 11:25 AM
• Sources: Meta and BlackRock's $14B El Paso data center project is not insured against total loss, exposing lenders to credit risks and big potential liabilities (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 10:45 AM
• Russian law enforcement docs: Binance provided Russia with transaction records and passport copies of IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy, leading to terrorism charges (Anton Zverev/Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 17, 10:30 AM
• An analysis of 60 of the largest planned US data centers: they could together produce 101.5M tons of CO2 per year, or ~7% of US power sector emissions in 2025 (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 10:10 AM
• Sources: Singapore-based Shein is aiming to hit a ~$25B valuation in its Hong Kong IPO, down from its $30B-$40B goal earlier in August after investor meetings (Reuters) Techmeme — Aug 17, 09:55 AM
• Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their $600B in reported capex (Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 17, 09:45 AM
• AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian) Techmeme — Aug 17, 08:35 AM
• How US industrial companies like Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are pivoting their businesses to feed a booming AI data-center market for power equipment (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 17, 07:45 AM
• Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) Techmeme — Aug 17, 05:25 AM
• AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B in January (James Fontanella-Khan/Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 05:10 AM
• Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph) Techmeme — Aug 17, 04:45 AM
• Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball) Techmeme — Aug 17, 04:00 AM
• Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stem the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models (Financial Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 02:10 AM
• A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times) Techmeme — Aug 17, 00:40 AM
• How a Claude model made a math breakthrough during its unsuccessful 54-hour attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis after a user repeatedly encouraged it (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal) Techmeme — Aug 16, 22:35 PM