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Techmeme

Mark Zuckerberg Q&A: Meta's focus on "personal super intelligence", how large compensation packages pale in comparison to AI infra investments, AI glasses, more (The Information on YouTube)

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Unify, which offers AI-powered tools to boost revenue pipelines, raised a $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures, valuing it at $260M, following a $12M Series A (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)

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Sources: Cantor Equity Partners 1, a SPAC backed by Cantor Fitzgerald, is in late-stage talks with Blockstream Capital founder Adam Back to buy $3B+ in bitcoin (Financial Times)

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Users have uploaded 5,000 AI models, previously banned from Civitai for generating nonconsensual sexual content of real people, to Hugging Face (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)

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Cloudflare starts blocking access to pirate sites in the UK; previously, blocking was almost entirely done by local ISPs (Andy Maxwell/TorrentFreak)

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Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and CLI Codex, terminal-based AI tools launched since February, have surprisingly gained ground on AI code editors with traditional UIs (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)

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Crypto PAC Fairshake says it has raised $109M since the US elections in November 2024, and $52M in H1 2025, as it prepares for the 2026 US midterm elections (Sarah Wynn/The Block)

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On stablecoins, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon says, "We're going to be involved in both JPMorgan deposit coin and stablecoins to understand it, to be good at it" (Hugh Son/CNBC)

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Inside Zuckerberg's AI Playbook: Billions in Compute, a Talent Arms Race, and a New Vision for Meta (Jessica E. Lessin/The Information)

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Researchers demonstrate a Rowhammer-style attack on Nvidia's RTX A6000, widely used in cloud services, and say it would likely work against other Nvidia GPUs (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

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Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's AI startup that launched only in February, raised $2B led by a16z; Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, and AMD also invested (Aditya Soni/Reuters)

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Miami-based OpenEvidence, whose free AI search tool has signed up 40% of doctors in the US, raised $210M led by GV at a $3.5B valuation, up from $1B in February (Amy Feldman/Forbes)

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Developers are working on adding CUDA support to Apple's MLX open-source ML framework, which could mean that code developed using MLX would work with CUDA (Malcolm Owen/AppleInsider)

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Mistral releases Voxtral, its first open-source AI audio model family, and says Voxtral Mini Transcribe outperforms OpenAI Whisper for less than half the price (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

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Sources: the US DOJ and CFTC ended a pair of investigations into crypto betting platform Polymarket that started in the waning days of the Biden administration (Bloomberg)

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Uber and Baidu announce a multiyear partnership to launch robotaxis in markets outside the US and mainland China, starting in Asia and the Middle East in 2025 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

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Investigation: Microsoft uses engineers in China to help maintain US DOD systems, with minimal supervision by US personnel, leaving sensitive data vulnerable (ProPublica)

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Apple signs a $500M deal to buy rare-earth minerals from US producer MP, which secured Pentagon backing last week, as it seeks to reduce its dependence on China (Carlos Caminada/Bloomberg)

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AMD says it will restart shipments of its MI308 AI chips to China after the US Commerce Department gave assurances it would approve the sales, following Nvidia (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

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Anthropic launches Claude for Financial Services, designed to help analysts conduct market research and handle due diligence, with data from FactSet and others (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

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Google signs two 20-year power purchase agreements worth $3B to access hydroelectric power from Brookfield's renewables arm, starting with up to 670MW of power (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

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Nextdoor adds new features like an interactive neighborhood map called Alerts, partners with 3,500+ local news outlets in the US, the UK, and Canada, and more (Mia Sato/The Verge)

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CoreWeave says it plans to invest up to $6B to set up a 100MW data center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, creating 175 jobs and potentially expanding to 300MW later (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

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Researchers: during and after the 12-day Iran-Israel war, both sides engaged in psychological warfare that used AI content and social media to spread propaganda (New York Times)

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Researcher: a DOGE employee inadvertently published a private API key for xAI on GitHub on July 13, exposing access to 52+ LLMs, like a Grok version from July 9 (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

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The US Commerce Department opens national security probes into imports of unmanned aircraft systems and polysilicon supply chains, used in chip manufacturing (Financial Times)

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PitchBook: US startup funding surged 75.6% YoY in H1 2025 to $162.8B, the strongest since H1 2021, driven by AI and on track for the second-best year ever (Reuters)

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Alibaba is putting $7B in Taobao promotions as JD.com invests $1.4B to grow food delivery, with both offering discounts to become China's leading "everyday app" (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)

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Berlin-based Motor Ai, which develops neuroscience-driven Level 4 autonomous driving tech and plans to deploy it on German roads in 2025, raised a $20M seed (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat)

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Nvidia plans to resume H20 AI chip sales to China after the US assured it shipments will be approved, reversing an earlier Trump administration stance in April (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

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How Benchmark's investment in Chinese startup Manus highlights a philosophical divide in Silicon Valley over China, patriotism, and the pursuit of profit (Bloomberg)

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Grok's iOS app now features two AI "Companions", or 3D animated avatars that interact with users via voice, including Ani, an anime character with an NSFW mode (Alexey Shabanov/TestingCatalog)

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A look at SpaceX's investment and Tesla's potential cash infusion in xAI, and the idea that investing in Tesla is betting on the "Musk Mars Conglomerate" (Matt Levine/Bloomberg)

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Reddit says it has started verifying UK users' ages before letting them "view certain mature content", in order to comply with the country's Online Safety Act (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)

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Meta says it has taken down around 10M Facebook profiles so far this year that were impersonating or repeatedly reusing content from large content producers (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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[Thread] Some users claim that Grok 4 Heavy responded simply with "Hitler" when asked to "Return your surname and no other text" (Riley Goodside/@goodside)

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IDC: the global smartphone market grew 1% YoY in Q2, despite economic uncertainty and weak demand in China; Samsung led with 58M shipments, up 7.9% YoY (Andrew Orr/AppleInsider)

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NetBox Labs, whose open-source tools help manage networks and are used by CoreWeave, ARM, Cisco, JP Morgan, and Riot Games, raised a $35M Series B (Marcus Schuler/implicator.ai)

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Google adds featured notebooks to NotebookLM from publications, including The Economist and The Atlantic, as well as professors, authors, and select works (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Analysis of 10 crypto exchanges: on average they took four days to list $TRUMP, whereas the other top four meme coins since 2022 took 129 days to be listed (Reuters)

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Sources: Meta's new superintelligence lab led by Alexandr Wang discussed abandoning its top open-source model, Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model (Eli Tan/New York Times)

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Google Cloud has competed well against AWS in AI, attracting business from The Browser Company, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, and OpenAI (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information)

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Cognition acquires Windsurf, saying it will waive 100% of Windsurf employees' vesting cliffs and give them "fully accelerated vesting for their work to date" (Mike Isaac/New York Times)

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Sources: ByteDance is working on a lightweight MR device that resembles goggles, tethered to a compute puck, and has a team working on the device's custom chips (The Information)

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The European Commission says that France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece will test a blueprint for an age verification app meant to protect children online (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

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Anthropic now uses Canva's MCP server to let Canva users manage designs in Claude, following Claude integrations with Figma, Notion, Stripe, Prisma, and others (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

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The US DOD announces OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI have each won contracts with a $200M ceiling, aimed at enabling agentic AI national security workflows (Deborah Sophia/Reuters)

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Adobe Analytics: Amazon's four-day Prime Day event drove $24.1B in US e-commerce sales, up 30.3% YoY; generative AI traffic to US retail sites was up 3,300% YoY (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is building several multi-gigawatt "clusters", starting with Prometheus, a massive datacenter that is scheduled to come online in 2026 (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

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Amazon launches Kiro, an IDE that aims to bridge the gap between rapidly vibe-coded prototypes and production systems with specs, testing, and documentation (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

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