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Techmeme

Despite the "DeepMind mafia" pulling billions into London AI startups, none of Demis Hassabis' former lieutenants is building a homegrown UK frontier AI model (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)

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Shares of Japanese NAND flash maker Kioxia slid 12% on Friday after a report that OpenAI was considering delaying its IPO sparked a selloff in AI-related shares (Sam Nussey/Reuters)

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Sources: SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell told investors during an IPO roadshow SpaceX may launch a Starlink mobile product and build its own terrestrial US network (Financial Times)

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Swiss watchmaker Swatch seeks $170M from Samsung in a London trial over 26 digital watch face apps that allegedly cloned luxury brand designs, including Omega (Alistair Gray/Financial Times)

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OpenAI says 97.9% of its employees are now using Codex, up from ~40% in August 2025; non-developer usage of Codex has risen 137x for individual users (Thomas Claburn/The Register)

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Warp, a startup using AI to automate payroll compliance and employee management, raised a $60M Series B led by Battery, bringing its total funding to $85M (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

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Utah-based ecommerce tech company Redo raised an $81M Series B at a $1.25B valuation led by Smash Capital, with participation from Pelion and Cervin (David Politis/Utah Money Watch)

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SoftBank shares fell 12% after reports that OpenAI may delay its IPO until 2027; expectations of a windfall from OpenAI's debut helped support Softbank's stock (Aya Wagatsuma/Bloomberg)

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California launches a tool to serve as an "early warning system" for widespread AI-driven job loss, linking AI exposure with unemployment insurance claims (Jo Constantz/Bloomberg)

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Upside, which provides social workers with AI-powered housing insights, raised a $20M Series A led by Aquiline with Flare Capital, 645, and others participating (Cailey Gleeson/Fierce Healthcare)

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How the US AI build-out is pushing up prices for electricity, software, and more; in a survey, 81% of economists say it will add to inflation over the next year (Justin Lahart/Wall Street Journal)

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Elastic announces a ~7% reduction in its workforce, and says "advances in AI and automation are letting us operate with leaner teams"; ESTC closed down 8.70% (Richard Speed/The Register)

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YouTube rolls out changes to Shorts, including adding a setting to double playback speed, eliminating the "dislike" button, and more (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch)

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Doc: the DOD has quietly revised its doctrine on how the US military picks its targets, envisioning "systems where AI initiates actions with human monitoring" (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)

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NHTSA proposes eliminating the mandate for manual brake pedals in "vehicles designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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Apple says it removed VK's apps from the App Store to comply with sanctions; VK says they were removed without warning and it has never been under US sanctions (Reuters)

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Patronus AI, which builds simulated digital environments for evaluating AI agents, raised a $50M Series B led by Greenfield, bringing its total funding to $70M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

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Om Malik, a longtime technology writer, founder of Gigaom, and a partner at True Ventures, died on Wednesday at 59 (Om Malik/On my Om)

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Source: Google is asking publishers that test new AI features in Google News to grant it broad rights to their content, including to potentially train AI models (Ann Gehan/The Information)

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Chipmaker Onsemi agrees to buy Synaptics in a nearly $7B all-stock deal expected to close in the middle of 2027; ON drops 9%+ and SYNA jumps 11%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Source: Muon Space, which operates satellite networks for climate and national security monitoring, is raising $250M; it has raised ~$181M since its 2021 launch (Alan Neuhauser/Axios)

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Sources: OpenAI leans toward holding off its IPO until 2027 after warnings that Sam Altman's desired $1T valuation may not be met in current market conditions (New York Times)

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Sources: Sam Altman told staff the US government asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns, approving "access customer by customer" (The Information)

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Apple stock closed down 6.15% on Thursday after the company raised some product prices, its worst fall since April 2025 (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

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Story Protocol, a blockchain-based IP ownership network that raised $140M, rebrands as Data Foundation to build an on-chain registry for AI training data (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk)

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The US awards $250M in CHIPS funds to a startup co-founded by billionaire mining magnate Robert Friedland to develop silicon-carbide chips and pulsed-power tech (James Attwood/Bloomberg)

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Microsoft quietly extends the Extended Security Updates program for Windows 10 consumers by a year, letting eligible users get updates through October 12, 2027 (Zac Bowden/Windows Central)

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Netris, which helps neoclouds automate network configuration to bring their data centers online faster, raised a $15M Series A from a16z (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Kraken is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in DeFi protocol Aave at a $385M valuation, investing 35,000 ETH in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens (Will Canny/CoinDesk)

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Notion plans to shut down its Gmail client Notion Mail on September 22 and go "all in" on AI agents to run inboxes, saying 50%+ of users do not open the inbox (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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Microsoft says the price of Xbox consoles will increase on August 1 by $100 for 512GB models and $150 for 1TB models, the third price increase since 2025 (Kenneth Shepard/Kotaku)

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Google launches a Google Finance app for Android, with market data, financial news, and an AI-powered "Key Moments" feature, and plans an iOS version this year (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Nebulock, which helps security teams proactively find and remediate threats across a company's security stack, raised a $25M Series A led by FirstMark (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Sources: Bumble explores a sale amid slowing growth in the online dating sector; its shares fell 48% over the past 12 months, giving it a market cap of $388M (Milana Vinn/Reuters)

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Sources: Apple plans to skip higher-end M6 chips and launch its next Pro and Max chips in 2027 as part of the M7 lineup, to boost on-device AI capabilities (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Memo: Meta Superintelligence Labs is hiring three founders and other team members behind AI security startup Virtue AI; two founders report to Nat Friedman (Madison Mills/Axios)

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General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning via gameplay footage, raised $320M led by Khosla at a $2.3B valuation, for $454M in total funding (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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Anthropic hires French telecom group Orange's Chief AI Officer Steve Jarrett to help Anthropic "better understand and adapt" its products to Europe and Africa (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters)

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Sources and a draft document: the US proposes that the EU sign on to an AI partnership to help secure chip supply chains; the one-page statement had few details (Alberto Nardelli/Bloomberg)

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Sony's Bungie says it is laying off a "significant number of employees", including "most of the Destiny team"; Bungie has an estimated headcount of 800 (Ethan Gach/Kotaku)

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Sources: Google expands the scope of its months-old AI coding strike team to "midtraining" to try to catch up with Anthropic, after major executive departures (Erin Woo/The Information)

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Sail, whose software optimizes how AI models run on existing chips, emerges from stealth with $80M in seed and Series A led by Kleiner at a $450M valuation (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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Apple says "the rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage"; the MacBook Neo rises from $599 to $699 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Apple raises Mac, iPad, and other product prices by 15%-25%, saying it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly"; iPhone is unchanged (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

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Australian payments startup Airwallex raised $320M led by Lee Fixel's Addition at an $11B valuation, and is incubating blockchain payments startup Metal (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes)

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Scaled Cognition, a reliability-focused lab that develops the Agentic Pretrained Transformer model, raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla at a $750M valuation (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)

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Exponential View: global AI sales, excluding China, hit $25B in Q1, exceeding an estimated $21B in data center and chip depreciation costs; margins remain thin (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg)

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OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)

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Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are "the largest and second largest" cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

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How risk modelers like Fathom and Verisk are using AI and diffusion models to bypass the limits of physics-based "cat" models to predict natural disasters (Financial Times)

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