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Techmeme

Moonvalley, which is developing "ethical" AI video models trained on licensed content, raised $84M led by General Catalyst, bringing its total funding to $154M (Todd Spangler/Variety)

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Crypto asset manager Grayscale confidentially files draft IPO paperwork with the US SEC, offering few details; the DCG subsidiary manages $30B+ in BTC and ETH (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

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CSET researchers: China's SMEE has only a 4% market share in older-generation chip lithography, far below ASML and Nikon, a "chokepoint" for China's chip plans (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)

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Discord launches Orbs, a virtual reward system that incentivizes users to interact with ads by completing Quests to earn digital items, after a seven-week beta (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)

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Tesla is set to face a Florida federal jury to defend allegations that Autopilot was at fault in a fatal 2019 crash, as it tests autonomous robotaxis in Austin (Trisha Thadani/Washington Post)

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An Indicator analysis of 85 AI "nudify" websites: they average 18.5M monthly visitors, may make up to $36M annually combined, and rely on Big Tech's services (Matt Burgess/Wired)

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Interviews with 12+ drone and military experts: the US lags China and Russia in manufacturing drones and training soldiers to use them and defend against them (Farah Stockman/New York Times)

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Malaysia says individuals and companies must now get a permit 30+ days before exporting AI chips, signaling it's clamping down on exports to places like China (Bloomberg)

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An interview with Google President of Android Ecosystem Sameer Samat, who says Google is "going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform" (Lance Ulanoff/TechRadar)

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Republican House leaders expect to pass the GENIUS Act this week, sending Congress' first crypto legislation to the president, and vote on two more crypto bills (Yash Roy/Bloomberg)

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Jensen Huang says China's military will avoid using Nvidia's AI chips, citing the risks associated with US export restrictions limiting the chips "at any time" (Ian King/Bloomberg)

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China approves Synopsys' $35B acquisition of simulation software company Ansys, after the US lifted restrictions on chip design software sales to China (Reuters)

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An Internet Matters survey of 1,000 UK kids aged 9 to 17 finds 67% say they use AI chatbots regularly; of that group, 35% say it feels like talking to a friend (Noor Al-Sibai/Futurism)

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Bitcoin reached a new all-time high at $122,000+ on July 14, up about 30% since December 2024, after more than doubling in value in 2024; ether hit $3,000+ (Bloomberg)

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A look at WindBorne, which uses weather balloons and AI to improve forecasting, as potential budget cuts to NOAA threaten its access to public weather data (Tim Fernholz/New York Times)

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Nielsen: Netflix's share of the most-watched shows dropped from 80%+ in 2021 to ~50% now; Amazon, Apple, HBO, Hulu, and Paramount+ have shows in 2025's Top 10 (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

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A look at how Big Tech is faring in the Trump administration in terms of their executives' ties with Trump, contracts, antitrust cases, tariffs, and more (Wall Street Journal)

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Satellite imagery and eyewitness testimony reveal that online scam centers are proliferating rapidly in Myanmar despite a large-scale crackdown in February 2025 (Nikkei Asia)

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YouTube and Netflix are increasingly locked in a battle over TV in the US; Nielsen says YouTube was 12.5% of all TV viewing time in May, above Netflix's 7.5% (John Koblin/New York Times)

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With Tim Cook likely to lead Apple through this decade, a look at Apple's executive succession challenges as many of Cook's direct reports near retirement age (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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Portola, which develops the Tolan app featuring AI companions, raised a $20M Series A led by Khosla Ventures; the app has 3M+ downloads and 100K+ paid users (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)

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A look at Xiaomi AI Glasses, launched in China on June 26 with a starting price of ~$278, featuring a 12MP ultra-wide camera and powered by Qualcomm's AR1 chip (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

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Analysis: there is little evidence that UAE-based Aqua 1 Foundation, the largest investor in Trump's World Liberty Financial after buying $100M tokens, exists (Jacob Silverman/The Nation)

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Honor Education, an e-learning service for individuals and enterprises founded by former Dean of Apple University Joel Podolny, raised a $38M Series A (Derek Newton/Forbes)

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NYC-based Vellum, which develops enterprise development tools for building, testing, and deploying AI-powered apps, raised a $20M Series A led by Leaders Fund (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

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Parspec, whose AI-powered workflow tool automates procurement processes in the construction supply chain, raised a $20M Series A led by Threshold Ventures (Judy Rider/Crunchbase News)

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Insiders describe Linda Yaccarino's tumultuous partnership with Elon Musk and say the two failed to gel as Musk's blunt style clashed with Yaccarino's polish (Financial Times)

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Berlin-based CarOnSale, a B2B marketplace for used car trading across Europe offering vehicle inspections and more, raised a €70M Series C led by Northzone (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups)

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Samsung agrees to acquire Seattle-based Xealth, which helps healthcare providers manage digital health tools and has raised over $50M, for an undisclosed sum (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

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Analysis of 1.76M Community Notes received by X from January 2021 to March 2025: 90%+ of submitted notes are never published, with many notes "stuck in limbo" (DDIA)

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With Trump set to speak at an energy and AI summit at Carnegie Mellon, a look at plans to turn some shuttered mill sites in Pittsburgh into AI data centers (Kris Maher/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: SpaceX has agreed to invest $2B in xAI, as part of xAI's $5B equity fundraise announced by Morgan Stanley last month (Wall Street Journal)

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A look at US-backed NVD, as its parent org NIST scrambles to hire contractors to help clear a backlog of 25K+ vulnerabilities, ~10x the previous high in 2017 (Matthew King/MIT Technology Review)

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OpenAI's failed Windsurf deal signals broader M&A challenges for OpenAI until it renegotiates its deal with Microsoft (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

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Tesla rolls out Grok to some vehicles with an AMD infotainment chip; Grok comes pre-installed on new vehicles and cannot issue commands to the vehicle itself (Simon Alvarez/Teslarati)

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Moonshot's Kimi K2 uses a 1T-parameter MoE architecture with 32B active parameters and outperforms models like GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V3 on key benchmarks (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)

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xAI apologizes for Grok's "horrific behavior" when it wrote antisemitic posts on July 8, and blames "an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

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Pump.fun raised $500M via a sale of PUMP tokens, which sold out in 12 minutes; it offered 12.5% of its total token supply at a fully diluted valuation of $4B (Zack Abrams/The Block)

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Belkin's move to brick Wemo devices highlights how little accountability IoT companies face when abandoning connected products customers paid for (Scharon Harding/Ars Technica)

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Stanford study: LLMs struggle to respond appropriately to questions about delusions, suicide, and OCD, but AI could play valuable supportive roles to therapists (Benj Edwards/Ars Technica)

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Studios like Do Big are buying Roblox games for $1M+ in a thriving secondary market; Naavik: seven of the 15 highest-earning games in June have been acquired (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

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A look at Meta's revamped GenAI strategy, as Mark Zuckerberg poaches top AI talent for the Superintelligence team with a typical offer of $200M over four years (SemiAnalysis)

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A New Hampshire court rejected TikTok's request to dismiss the state AG's suit accusing the company of using manipulative design features aimed at kids (Zach Vallese/CNBC)

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Analysis: YC picked just four Indian startups in 2024 vs. 66 in 2021, amid a growing trend of startups shifting their parent entities to India for domestic IPOs (The Economic Times)

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Nvidia's rise after ChatGPT's release is reminiscent of dot-com era titans like Cisco and Juniper; Cisco's share price grew over 1000x between 1990 and 2000 (Tripp Mickle/New York Times)

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PitchBook: 27 VC-backed companies went public in the US in the first half of 2025, the smallest number in at least 10 years, raising a total of $44.4B (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg)

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Sources: Google is paying $2.4B for a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf tech and hire some of its employees, but won't be taking a stake in the company (Bloomberg)

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Sam Altman announces another delay for OpenAI's open-weight model, for further safety testing; the model was slated to be released next week (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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T-Mobile has received FCC and DOJ approval for its $4.4B acquisition of US Cellular, after agreeing to phase out DEI programs to comply with FCC policy (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)

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Meta has completed a deal to acquire AI voice technology startup PlayAI, and the "entire PlayAI team" is set to join Meta next week, per an internal memo (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

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