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Techmeme

Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Muse Spark 1.1 costs $1.25 per 1M input tokens and $4.25 per 1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says coding and agentic tasks were key focuses (Ina Fried/Axios)

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Meta launches a Meta Model API, whose pricing Zuckerberg says will be "aggressive and attractive" at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI and Anthropic models (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a "step-change" from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)

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European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

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Anthropic launches a "reflection" dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users to track Claude usage patterns over 1-, 3-, 6-, or 12-month intervals (Anthropic)

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Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is "profitable every month" (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Micron raises its US capex commitment to $250B through 2035, adding $50B for facilities in NY, ID, VA, and elsewhere, and invests $500M in GlobalWafers (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Ollama, which helps developers run open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Venture, following a $15M Series A led by Benchmark (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

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PrismML says it ran a 27B-parameter Qwen 3.6 model on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior on-device model; sources: Apple held talks with PrismML about it (Aaron Tilley/The Information)

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Internal memo: Meta plans to begin production of its in-house AI chip, codenamed Iris, in September, and aims to boost its computing power to 14GW in 2027 (Reuters)

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India scraps import duties on some parts used to make devices like phones until March 31, 2029, removing 7.5% and 5% levies, which might help Apple and Xiaomi (Nikunj Ohri/Reuters)

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Apple supplier Luxshare fell in its Hong Kong trading debut, closing down 1.6%, after raising ~$3.1B in the city's biggest listing in 2026 so far (Bloomberg)

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Enterprise AI agent startup Lyzr is raising a $100M Series B at a ~$500M valuation, up from $250M in a Series A in 2026, and says agents wrote investment memos (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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Internal DOJ memo: attorneys on crypto cases should expect less cooperation from Binance, which is adding asset freeze requirements; Binance denies any changes (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

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US cybersecurity and data resilience company Rubrik plans to invest $500M+ in the UK over the next five years and establish its European headquarters in London (Paul Sandle/Reuters)

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Interpol and law enforcement agencies arrest 5,811 suspects and seize $293M in an operation combating social engineering scams and fraud across 97 countries (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

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Leaked renders via Android Headlines show the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Watch 9, and Watch Ultra 2; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is likely the new wide foldable (Lawrence Bonk/Engadget)

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Sources: Sonos' layoffs include some top design and product executives, like VP of Design Dana Krieger; CEO Tom Conrad says the changes reduce management layers (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

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The AI data center boom has led to surging demand for power transformers, with average lead times for orders, once measured in months, now stretching into years (Financial Times)

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A Brown University professor suspected his class used AI to cheat after a take-home midterm averaged 96%, prompting an in-person final, which averaged 48.6% (Emma Whitford/Inside Higher Ed)

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Companies are mobilizing internal groups of "AI champions" to drive adoption; BCG says 74% of front-line employees now use AI regularly, up from 51% in 2025 (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

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Shanghai-based GPU maker Iluvatar CoreX raised ~$902M in a Hong Kong share sale; the company's stock has soared 257% since its January IPO, which raised ~$473M (Bloomberg)

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Filings: Grubhub parent Wonder is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a $9B valuation; a source says founder Marc Lore indicated he will contribute $200M (The Information)

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Cognition releases SWE-1.7, trained from Kimi K2.7 and available in Devin at 1,000 tokens/second, claiming it nears frontier-level intelligence at a lower cost (Cognition)

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Block agrees to pay $45M and offer live customer support for Cash App to settle claims by 46 US states that the company failed to protect users from fraud (Daniel Wiessner/Reuters)

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Sources: Reno-based AI chip startup Positron is in talks to raise ~$750M in two phases, at valuations of $3.5B in the first tranche and ~$5B in the second (Bloomberg)

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The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years (Boone Ashworth/Wired)

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OpenAI says it found widespread task issues in SWE-Bench Pro, estimates ~30% of tasks are broken, and retracts its earlier recommendation to adopt the benchmark (OpenAI)

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Meta announces its first data center in Canada, a 1GW facility in Alberta that will cost the company about $9B and take two to three years to construct (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

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Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, in Cursor, and from the SpaceXAI console, but not in the EU; it costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens (Axios)

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SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first model built in partnership with Cursor, designed to "handle difficult, long-running" legal, finance, and coding tasks (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)

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OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning they can listen and speak at the same time (OpenAI)

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Prime Intellect, which helps companies build their own AI agents by offering computing power and specialized tools, raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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Arkenstone Defense, which is building software to handle back-office work for defense tech startups, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed led by J2 Ventures (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense)

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China's Nexchip Semiconductor says it aims to raise around $890.37M in its Hong Kong share sale by offering 216.2M shares at ~$4.12/share, the top of its range (Rajasik Mukherjee/Reuters)

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Israeli startup Alta, which develops an AI agent platform for marketing, sales, and business development teams, raised a $25M Series A led by IN Venture (Meir Orbach/CTech)

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GM-backed Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta saw a muted trading debut in its Hong Kong IPO, up 2.8% to value the company at ~$9B, after raising $751M (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: China plans to let some of its biggest AI companies buy a small number of Nvidia's H200 chips to offset a domestic computing shortage in recent months (Qianer Liu/The Information)

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Mistral launches Robostral Navigate, a hardware-agnostic robotics navigation model trained via simulation that uses a single camera and basic language prompts (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

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Crypto VC firm Paradigm raised $1.2B, its fourth fund, to invest in areas outside of crypto, like AI and robotics; Paradigm had $11.9B in AUM at the end of 2025 (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

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Nvidia lost ~$1T in market value in less than two months, dropping 16% from its May all-time-high, trading at 18x forward earnings, its lowest level since 2019 (Bloomberg)

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The OpenAI Deployment Company agrees to acquire Northslope, an applied AI company founded by ex-Palantir employees, its second acquisition after buying Tomoro (Madison Mills/Axios)

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Kaon AI, which builds personalized story worlds using its AI-based FlowGPT and Emochi tools, raised $60M from B Capital and others, and says Emochi has 2M DAUs (Corbin Bolies/Variety)

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Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke's Entire launches a decentralized Git network to handle high coding agent traffic, with servers in the US, the EU, and Australia (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET)

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SK Hynix's IPO prospectus analysis, as it seeks to raise ~$28B on the Nasdaq: highly leveraged to HBM, deep and broad China ties, and health and safety concerns (Tim Culpan/Culpium)

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Internal documents: Amazon is working on an Alexa project, codenamed Moonraker, to handle more complex, multistep tasks, projecting $100M+ in GPU costs in 2026 (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)

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DuckDuckGo updates its browser for iOS, Windows, and macOS to block most video ads by default, including those on YouTube, based on uBlockOrigin's filter lists (Anna Washenko/Engadget)

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Sources: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is raising $10B at a $130B pre-money valuation, its first outside funding round, including $4B from Coatue and $2B from Bezos (New York Times)

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