← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

World Foundation, the nonprofit behind the World protocol, raised $52.5M led by Pantera through a strategic sale of its WLD token with a one-year lockup (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

Facebook plans to test a full-screen "immersive video" player when users open the app, replacing the newsfeed, in select international markets this year (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)

Midjourney bought astrology app Co-Star, which uses AI to offer personalized advice, in the spring and is building its first standalone image-generation app (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

In their letter defending open-weight AI, tech companies urge lawmakers to avoid "premature restrictions" that "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas" (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Sources: Anduril is in talks with investors for a new funding round that could see it valued at around $100B; the company raised $5B at a $61B valuation in May (Reuters)

Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, a16z, and others sign a letter defending open-source AI; Jensen Huang, in his first X post, says open models strengthen cybersecurity (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

Delhi High Court rules OpenAI's use of ANI content to train ChatGPT wasn't copyright infringement as the news agency didn't show ChatGPT reproduced its reports (Munsif Vengattil/Reuters)

Meta launches Facebook Verified, a free program it says will verify that users are real humans by analyzing a facial recognition selfie and assigning badges (Mat Smith/Engadget)

India orders GitHub to remove Bitchat, the offline messaging app built by Jack Dorsey that is used by anti-government protestors amid internet blackouts (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk)

Meta launches Seller, a free standalone app version of Facebook Marketplace; Seller includes AI features that scan photos to fill out listings automatically (Eli Tan/New York Times)

Poolin, previously regarded as one of the world's largest crypto mining pool providers, files for Chapter 11 and seeks to sell its Texas mining assets for $52M (Brian Danga/The Block)

Sources: Shanghai-based GPU maker MetaX confidentially filed for a Hong Kong listing, targeting an IPO by the year-end, amid a surge of fundraising from rivals (Zoe SL Chan/South China Morning Post)

Preliminary findings: the EU Commission says TikTok's accounts for minors violate the DSA, citing features that could expose children to bullying and predators (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

The US OCC denies Wise's application to create a national trust bank, citing incompatibility with new Federal Reserve policies; Wise says it plans to reapply (Simone Lobo/Reuters)

Sources: OpenAI told Hugging Face only this week its models caused the July 11 hack; the models appear to have been active online for days before being stopped (Wall Street Journal)

A look at China's push to catch up with US AI chips; sources: its Vice Premier warned AI companies that anyone who resisted using local chips was a traitor (Wall Street Journal)

Flush with AI cash, South Korean groups are making their biggest US investment push in years, with their Q1 US foreign direct investment up 100%+ YoY to $10.2B (Financial Times)

Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua plans to step down after nearly three decades, as the company pushes into robotaxis and humanoid robots (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

Singapore-based Ropedia, which captures real-world human experience via video and converts it into model-ready multimodal datasets, raised a $22M pre-Series A (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Sources: SpaceX started turning away satellite operators seeking dedicated Falcon 9 rides beyond 2028, and stopped building some non-reusable Falcon components (Bloomberg)

Amazon tells third-party sellers to label product ads with AI-generated people to comply with a NY law requiring the disclosure of "synthetic performers" in ads (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Google says it has $811B in contracted future spending commitments as of June, up nearly $500B from March, covering chips, data centers, electricity, and more (Davey Alba/Bloomberg)

Ukraine ratchets up its attacks on warehouses of Wildberries, Russia's biggest online retailer and which employs 48,000, hitting five facilities over five days (Sam Meredith/CNBC)

Amazon closed its San Francisco-based AGI Lab as part of layoffs in its AGI unit earlier this week; the lab's former head David Luan left in February (The Information)

Sources: AI robotics startup Genesis AI is in talks to raise around $500M in a new funding round at a $3B pre-money valuation (Bloomberg)

AMD is working with Cerebras to connect AMD's server racks to Cerebras wafers, running their chips simultaneously to make workloads faster; CBRS closed up 4.86% (Phoebe Liu/The Information)

Nvidia signs a $1.5B accord with Amkor, involving a prepayment by Nvidia to help bolster Amkor's chip packaging facility in Arizona; AMKR jumps 16%+ after hours (Bloomberg)

Sierra acquires Takeoff, which develops "long-horizon" agents, for an undisclosed sum; founded in 2025, Takeoff neared $10M in annualized revenue in early July (The Information)

Sources: Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, which helps developers use AI models and could fetch ~$10B; PitchBook: OpenRouter was valued at $1.3B in May (Wall Street Journal)

SAP reports Q2 cloud revenue up 22% YoY to €6.28B, vs. €6.26B est., total revenue up 9.4% to €9.88B, and lowers its 2026 non-IFRS operating profit guidance (Grace Yoon/Wall Street Journal)

The Pentagon signs an up-to-10-year agreement with Oracle worth up to $7B to consolidate the department's on-premises software licenses into a single contract (Mike Stone/Reuters)

Oracle signs 10-year software contract with Pentagon worth up to $7 billion (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Trump says 200 additional stakeholders, including major utilities, joined a voluntary pledge to protect consumers from high energy bills from AI data centers (Josh Boak/Associated Press)

Filing: the value of Alphabet's investments in unidentified private companies was ~$124.3B as of June 30, source says driven primarily by its Anthropic stake (Davey Alba/Bloomberg)

Intel reports Q2 revenue up 25% YoY to $16.1B, vs. $14.42B est., its fastest sales growth in ~15 years on "unprecedented" demand; INTC jumps 10%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

Tesla stock closed down 14.52% and Alphabet closed down 6.89% after they signaled increased AI spending, amid worries about the mounting costs of the AI boom (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

Microsoft replaces OpenAI's image-generating models with its MAI models in its products; Mustafa Suleyman says MAI models are ~85% cheaper to run in PowerPoint (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Patreon lays off 20% of its employees, or 93 people, citing a "painful" restructuring due to "profound" changes in the creator economy (Corbin Bolies/Variety)

Anthropic makes its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and says voice mode can now tap into some connected apps like Gmail, Slack, and Notion (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Foundation Future Industries, backed by Eric Trump, partners with AMD to develop autonomous humanoid robots using the AMD Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series chips (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters)

AegisAI, which uses AI agents to detect AI-driven spear-phishing attacks, raised a $36M Series A led by Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $49M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

AMD unveils the Venice-X CPU, with 1152 MB of 3D V-Cache, 96 cores, and up to 5.15 GHz clock speeds, available in H2 2027 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)

OpenAI expands ChatGPT Health, which helps users with health-related queries and connects to services like Apple Health, to all logged-in US users over 18 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Primate Labs releases Geekbench 7, featuring larger, more demanding datasets for CPUs and GPUs, along with new video and audio encoding/decoding tests, and more (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Runway launches Runway Media Router, which it says is the first built specifically for generative media, as it expands from AI video to AI infrastructure (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

The US Department of Commerce's BIS is formally investigating whether Chinese companies like Moonshot are accessing advanced US AI chips to train their models (Leo Schwartz/The Information)

GitHub plans a two-tier bug bounty program that cuts rewards for the public and boosts payouts for invite-only researchers, amid a flood of AI-powered reports (Carly Page/The Register)

Adam Mosseri says Instagram will now take down "pickup line" and other videos shot on Meta glasses that feature harassment of other people in public places (Katie Notopoulos/Business Insider)

Sources: India has ordered telecom companies to disable mobile data services in central Delhi, amid youth protests seeking the education minister's resignation (Reuters)