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Techmeme

AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal using inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

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Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google, demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it deleted five apps (Matt Burgess/Wired)

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Sources: Apple has sent personal legal warnings to ~40 former employees who now work at OpenAI, directing them to preserve documents and meet with its lawyers (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

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At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters)

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The Alphabet Workers Union sends a layoff protections petition with 4,500+ signatures to Sundar Pichai, calling for guaranteed severance, buyouts, and more (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian)

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Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Dave Brown, the outgoing SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on Meta's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: Tata plans India's first large-scale chip fab in Dholera, Gujarat, mostly using 90nm nodes, a far humbler start than the 28nm node it touted earlier (Bloomberg)

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In an internal meeting, Satya Nadella criticized Claude Fable 5 for being "editorially controlled", saying its refusal to do "any random thing" makes no sense (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Source: Demis Hassabis plans to hold meetings with US policymakers in Washington next week about his proposed US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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Court doc: a US federal jury says Japanese chipmaker Kioxia owes Viasat $229M for infringing Viasat's flash-memory patent that helps devices use less energy (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

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Source: Microsoft plans to release an AI security tool this month that uses models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and itself, as a cost-effective alternative to Mythos (Aaron Holmes/The Information)

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Kalshi launches a biotech pilot, starting with 13 biotech contracts offering wagers on the outcomes of late-stage clinical drug trials and regulatory decisions (Madison Muller/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Coatue is leading a $3B investment in Databricks that values the data analytics software company at $188B, a 40% increase from its December valuation (Wall Street Journal)

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US stocks of chip, memory, and storage makers fell sharply on Thursday; SNDK closed down 12.63%, STX 10%, Western Digital 9.15%, Intel 5.84%, and Micron 5.65% (George Steer/Financial Times)

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Memo: MLB bans the use of league-provided dugout iPads to access GenAI for in-game strategy calls; sources say at least a third of teams used AI this way (Eno Sarris/The Athletic)

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Filing: South Korean authorities conducted an on-site search of Chinese chipmaker Montage's offices in connection with potential competition law violations (Nikita Maria Jino/Reuters)

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Sources: Dassault Systèmes is in talks to buy drug trial software maker ArisGlobal from Nordic Capital for about $2B, extending its push into life sciences (Financial Times)

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The EU accepts X's plan to meet DSA transparency obligations and give researchers access to data, giving X six months to implement it, following a €120M fine (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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Source: UK robotics startup Humanoid raised $150M in the first tranche of a Series A at a $1.2B pre-money valuation and seeks another $80M-$100M by September (Rocket Drew/The Information)

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Source: PayPal's board sees Stripe and PE firm Advent International's $53B takeover bid as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles (Reuters)

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A NY school district is piloting Realbotix's humanoid robot teacher to help STEM students; Realbotix rebranded after acquiring sex doll company RealDoll in 2024 (Chase DiBenedetto/Mashable)

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US Homeland Security says it seized 30K+ SIM cards in June and July in a nationwide operation it claims dismantled infrastructure used in telephone fraud (Lorelei Smillie/Bloomberg)

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Netflix says roughly 300 titles used generative AI this year, mostly in post-production, "to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost" (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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An NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

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Netflix reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $12.56B, vs. $12.59B est., and says it will give fewer engagement updates starting in 2027; NFLX drops 8%+ after hours (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC)

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Kimi-K3 is now #1 on the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, surpassing Claude Fable 5; the model scored 88.3 on Terminal Bench 2.1, only below GPT-5.6 Sol's 88.8 (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

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DoorDash launches a limited beta of DoorDash CLI, which lets users place orders via an AI agent, available by waitlist to macOS developers in the US and Canada (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Google updates its AI video editor Vids with Gemini Omni and a feature that lets users create custom digital avatars using a selfie and voice recording (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter AI model that it says rivals Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, and plans to release model weights by July 27 (Kimi)

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After reports of GPT-5.6 deleting files, OpenAI says the issue most often occurs in full-access mode without sandboxing and it is working to mitigate the risk (Tibo/@thsottiaux)

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Crypto.com raised $400M from Citadel Securities in its first institutional funding round, valuing the Singapore-based crypto exchange at $20B (CoinDesk)

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Sources: Google is months behind schedule on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro as it tries to improve its capabilities, particularly in coding; GOOG closes down 4.43% (Bloomberg)

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Beehiiv launches Community, which lets subscribers chat with each other, adds programmatic ads and an AI tool that helps creators manage their audiences (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Meta's Oversight Board says top AI models may be restricting free expression in its first evaluation of LLMs, as it seeks to expand its influence beyond Meta (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

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Google says users in the US can now link to and interact with some apps in AI Mode, including Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

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Roblox unveils Build, which lets users create basic games through text prompts directly within its mobile app, powered by Roblox's models and open-source models (Jay Peters/The Verge)

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Fora, which connects travel agents with travelers and offers agents AI tools, raised a $60M Series D at a $1B valuation led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

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Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and rolls out an update giving every notebook a secure cloud computer, letting it write and execute code natively (Josh Woodward/Google)

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San Diego-based Self Inspection, which uses AI to assess body damage on a car with as little tech as a smartphone camera, raised $10M led by Sheryl Sandberg (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)

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Filing: a Chinese luggage maker says a fund in which it invested deployed ~$420M for an indirect 0.8265% stake in DeepSeek, implying DeepSeek is valued at ~$52B (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Visa debuts the Visa Stablecoin Platform, an internal system to help its network of ~15K financial institutions and 200M+ merchants more easily use stablecoins (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)

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OnePlus confirms it will no longer operate in North America or Europe but will keep operating in China, while Realme, another Oppo sub-brand, will exit China (CNET)

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China, Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, and 22 other countries sign an agreement to create the World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai (Reuters)

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A hacker claims to have accessed Suno's user info and source code, showing how it scraped music; Suno says no sensitive info was compromised in a November hack (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

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Runta, which provides isolated sandboxes and guardrails for AI agents to prevent operational risks, raised a $20M seed led by a16z at a $100M+ valuation (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Sources: Moonshot plans to launch Kimi K3, China's largest model to date with 2T-3T parameters, in the coming days; it's expected to outperform Claude Opus 4.8 (Financial Times)

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Sources: Apple is preparing new iPads, including an iPad mini with an OLED screen by October and refreshed entry-level iPads and iPad Airs for 2027 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Sable, which is building an AI agent named Aiden that lives on a company's website to run live product demos and more, raised $45M from Sequoia and 8VC (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

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