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Techmeme

Sources: Google's AI shakeup is a seismic shift in the works for months and cements Sergey Brin's influence, after execs became frustrated with Demis Hassabis (Financial Times)

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Sources: up to five people tied to US Cyber Command died by suicide from early June to early July 2026, prompting it to flag a potential suicide cluster (Bloomberg)

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Filing: ex-a16z partner Bryan Kim is forming venture firm Mido Capital; sources: he plans to raise ~$100M for a fund backing early-stage AI and other startups (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (Financial Times)

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Sources: an addendum to the bipartisan Clarity Act would force President Trump to divest from crypto businesses, letting him defer paying taxes on the gains (Bloomberg)

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Sydney-based AI data center company Firmus raised $2B in funding from Coatue, Nvidia, and others at a $10.5B post-money valuation, up from $5.5B in April (Nichiket Sunil/Reuters)

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Naïve, which provides infrastructure for AI agents to handle most business operations, raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus, bringing its total funding to $32M (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)

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Sources: Alibaba plans to ask heavy commercial users of its next Qwen open model for a share of revenue; Moonshot's Kimi K3 requires up to a 30% revenue share (Reuters)

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Security researchers claim that Kimi K3 went outside of its sandbox during defensive cybersecurity tests, but did not hack anything after accessing the internet (Will Knight/Wired)

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Q&A with Replit CEO Amjad Masad on why "vibe coding" is never about coding, the SaaSpocalypse, the "self-driving company", a CEO is a glorified router, and more (Casey Newton/Platformer)

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A profile of DDN, a managed data storage company whose annual revenue is expected to grow from $300M pre-AI boom to $1B by year's end, fueled by AI partnerships (Iain Martin/Forbes)

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New Mexico trial: a judge orders Meta to pay $567M and make changes for underage users after finding its platforms helped create a public nuisance harming teens (KOB 4)

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Alphabet raises $25B in an investment-grade bond sale; sources say it attracted ~$115B of peak demand and that Alphabet plans to issue US debt twice per year (Bloomberg)

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Atlassian reports Q4 revenue up 28% YoY to $1.77B, vs. $1.66B est., cloud revenue up 31% to $1.2B, forecasts Q1 revenue above est.; TEAM jumps 31%+ after hours (Arunesh Sinha/Reuters)

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Twilio reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to $1.5B, above $1.43B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates; TWLO jumps 16%+ after hours (Reinhardt Krause/Investor's Business ...)

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Sources: Canva cut its revenue growth forecast as popular new AI features drove up costs, forced it to slow their rollout, and more Canva users moved to ChatGPT (The Information)

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Cloudflare reports Q2 revenue up 36% YoY to $696.1M, above $665M est., and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates; NET jumps 17%+ after hours (Angela Palumbo/Barron's Online)

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Instacart reports Q2 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.04B, GTV up 14% to $10.35B, above est., forecasts Q3 GTV and core profit above est.; CART jumps 8%+ after hours (Koyena Das/Reuters)

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Roku reports Q2 revenue up 22% YoY to $1.35B vs. $1.3B est., net income of $164.2M, ad revenue up 25% to $673M, and subscription revenue up 26% to $548M (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Lyft reports Q2 revenue up 16% YoY to $1.84B, vs. $1.81B est., rides up 12% to 262.4M, and expects Q3 gross bookings growth to slow to 15%-19% (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

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Airbnb reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $3.6B, Nights and Seats Booked up 10% to 148.3M, above est., lifts 2026 revenue forecast; ABNB jumps 10%+ after hours (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum (Tobias Mann/The Register)

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Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality, likely costing $300+ (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Gravity, which places text-based ads within AI chatbots, raised a $30.5M Series A co-led by Lightspeed and Committed, taking its total funding to $38.5M (Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider)

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Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell training datasets to US AI labs and the government are also selling them to Chinese labs (Anna Tong/Forbes)

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Figma CEO Dylan Field forfeits ~$46M in stock awards to revive investor confidence amid AI disruption fears; FIG is down ~77% from its peak more than a year ago (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

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Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans (Carl Zimmer/New York Times)

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Sources: Panthalassa, which aims to power data centers in the ocean using energy generated by waves, is raising $225M at a ~$2B valuation, up from $1B in May (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

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Sources: Nscale told potential backers it generated $100M+ in Q2 revenue, up from ~$37M in Q1, and has ~$51B in contracts, ahead of a possible September US IPO (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

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Suno says it will adopt new audio watermarking tech, fingerprinting tech, transparency tools, and a new download policy to limit the spread of spammy AI music (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

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Google and data: hackers used phone calls, phishing websites, and "meticulous" tactics to target dozens of US PE firms and other businesses over the past month (Reuters)

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OpenAI updates the default model for free users to GPT-5.6 Luna, adds unlimited text chats for free users, rolls out an improved GPT-5.6 Sol version, and more (Herb Scribner/Axios)

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OpenAI debuts Agent Plugins, an open standard for bundling skills and MCP servers, and says Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and Vercel are on its steering committee (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

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Western Digital falls 10%+ after issuing guidance that didn't quite match those of Seagate; Q4 revenue rose 44% YoY to $3.75B, above a $3.7B estimate (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online)

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Google DeepMind says its WeatherNext model can accurately predict a storm's track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data, and open sources the model (Victoria Turk/Wired)

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Sources: Nvidia is considering lower-memory versions of its Rubin Ultra GPU due to potential issues securing enough HBM, and has tested at least three versions (The Information)

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Sources: Stripe recently entered exclusive talks to buy OpenRouter in a cash-and-stock deal that would value the startup for close to $10B (The Information)

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Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO may weaken the UK tech scene, marking an end for Hassabis' effort to keep his native UK as an AI stronghold (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

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Datadog drops 15%+ after forecasting weaker full-year sales due to reduced usage from its largest client, a leading AI company; Q2 revenue rises 36% to $1.12B (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

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WindBorne, which deploys weather balloons to collect data for its AI weather forecasting models, raised a $37M Series B at a $250M post-money valuation (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

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SpaceX and Tesla plan to initially invest $16.8B to build Terafab in Grimes County, Texas; combined demand from SpaceX and Tesla is forecast to top 1 TW (Reuters)

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Sources: DeepSeek has resumed its funding round, seeking $8B at a $74B valuation, after pausing talks following the leak of Liang Wenfeng's remarks to investors (Bloomberg)

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Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 scores 54 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, putting Meta next to SpaceXAI in a tie for third place amongst US labs (Artificial Analysis)

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Filing: DeepSeek has invested ~$20.8M in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai IPO and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

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Ooredoo, Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat launch Zankore, Indonesia's first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform; Ooredoo, which owns a 49% stake, commits $800M (Melissa Hancock/Fortune)

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Chainalysis: violent crypto attacks stole $30M+ in H1 2026, on track to exceed 2025's $58M total; France is the primary hotspot with 30 publicly known cases (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

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Google is expanding its Gemini-powered Ask Maps feature in English to 130+ countries and adds agentic food ordering, hotel booking, and attraction searching (Jada Jones/ZDNET)

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Rockstar says it will show an "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI on August 27, premiering on Netflix at 3pm ET before streaming on YouTube at 9pm ET (Andrew Webster/The Verge)

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Lumilens, which is building data center optical-interconnection tech to replace wires with light, raised $700M at a $5.5B valuation, for $900M in total funding (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

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Filing: Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics prices its Shanghai IPO at ~$22/share, aiming to sell 40.4M shares to raise $904M; Unitree shipped 5,500+ robots in 2025 (Bloomberg)

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