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Industry watchdog says small businesses worldwide are being extorted by fraudsters who post or threaten to post fake one-star reviews on Google Maps (Stuart A. Thompson/New York Times)

US salaries for key stablecoin roles are rising as a skills shortage meets a potentially immense market opportunity, putting upward pressure on pay (Bloomberg)

Hike, which was valued at $1.4B in 2016 and has since pivoted from a messaging app to a real-money gaming app, shuts down following India's ban on such apps (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Penske Media sues Google, says ~20% of Google search results linking to its sites now include AI Overviews, and affiliate link revenue fell 33%+ since late 2024 (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

Lila Sciences, which uses AI to develop novel drugs and materials, raised $235M at a ~$1.23B valuation, after coming out of stealth in March with a $200M seed (Brian Kahn/Bloomberg)

JD.com: sales of the iPhone 17 series in the first minute after pre-orders opened in China surpassed the first-day pre-order volume of 2024's iPhone 16 series (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

OpenAI projects that it will reduce the revenue share it pays to Microsoft from 20% this year to ~8% by 2030, potentially retaining over $50B more in revenue (The Information)

Mira Murati's TML launches a research blog called Connectionism, and shares its work on resolving nondeterminism and achieving reproducible results from LLMs (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

What to expect from the Meta Connect 2025 keynote on September 17 at 5pm PT: "Hypernova" smart glasses with a display, Meta AI and Llama updates, and more (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Sources: Anthropic scrapped plans to hire a Republican for its top policy role, instead choosing an Obama alumn as it adopts a cooler stance towards Trump (Sylvia Varnham O'Regan/The Information)

China launches probes into alleged US discrimination against Chinese chip companies and suspected dumping of US analog chips used in devices like Wi-Fi routers (Ryan Woo/Reuters)

California passes SB 53, which requires AI companies to disclose their safety testing regimes; Newsom vetoed a similar though more expansive measure last year (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico)

California Assembly passes a bill that requires device makers and app stores to verify user ages; Google and Meta support the bill, while the MPA opposes it (Tyler Katzenberger/Politico)

Filing: Samsung agreed to settle a patent lawsuit over wireless tech with Headwater Research following a $279M jury verdict against Samsung earlier in 2025 (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

IBM is holding its own in the quantum computing race against Google, Microsoft, and others, as they tackle enormous scientific and engineering challenges (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

A profile of Figure CEO Mike Cagney, now a billionaire after Figure's post-IPO surge; he resigned as SoFi's CEO in 2017 after several workplace controversies (Bloomberg)

How Kalshi is shaking up US sports betting, as its board member and CFTC Chair nominee Brian Quintenz takes a permissive stance on sports prediction markets (Financial Times)

Researchers say videos of Charlie Kirk's shooting fall into a policy gap on social media platforms, between allowable "graphic content" and "glorified violence" (Lauren Goode/Wired)

Source: Nvidia is scaling back DGX Cloud to primarily internal R&D use; DGX Cloud was initially envisioned to compete with major cloud providers like AWS (Anissa Gardizy/The Information)

Downloads of Jack Dorsey-backed Bluetooth P2P messaging app Bitchat spiked to 48K+ in Nepal during recent protests, according to Bitchat developer "callebtc" (Javier Bastardo/Forbes)

Internal email: xAI lays off hundreds of data annotation team staffers, following a strategic shift to prioritize specialist AI tutors over generalist roles (Grace Kay/Business Insider)

Lendbuzz, which uses AI to underwrite auto loans, files for a US IPO and reports H1 2025 revenue up 38% YoY to $172.9M and net income up 98.2% YoY to $11.1M (Arasu Kannagi Basil/Reuters)

Shares of transit software company Via closed at $49.51 in their NYSE debut, above the $46 IPO price, giving Via a market cap of ~$3.9B, after raising $492.9M (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised a $50M Series A led by GFT Ventures (Amit Chowdhry/Pulse 2.0)

Copenhagen-based Teton.ai, which offers an AI companion to help nurses monitor patients and improve workflows, raised a $20M Series A led by Plural (Anthony Vecchione/Mobi Health News)

Beijing-based AIsphere, the startup behind the AI video generator PixVerse, raised a $60M Series B led by Alibaba, and says PixVerse has 100M+ users globally (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

Atolio, which is making a private AI-powered search tool for enterprises, raised a $24M Series A led by Translink Capital (FinSMEs)

Penguin Ai, which offers AI-powered tools for administrative tasks to healthcare payers and providers, raised $29.7M, including a $25M Series A led by Greycroft (Jessica Hagen/Mobi Health News)

OpenAI unveils Grove, a five-week mentorship program for nascent tech entrepreneurs, hosted in its San Francisco HQ, with ~15 participants in its first cohort (Jaures Yip/CNBC)

France-based Scintil Photonics, which is developing integrated photonic system-on-chips for AI infrastructure, raised a $58M Series B led by Yotta and NGP (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Sources: Robby Walker, one of Apple's most senior AI executives who was in charge of Siri until earlier this year, is leaving the company next month (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Opendoor's new chairman Keith Rabois says "I don't know what most" of its 1,400 employees do and the company doesn't need "more than 200 of them" (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Gemini closed up 14.3% at $32 per share in its Nasdaq debut, giving it a ~$3.8B market cap, after the Winklevoss twins' crypto exchange raised $425M in its IPO (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC)

Mastodon plans to roll out quote posts next week, with safety features that give users several ways to control how their posts can be quoted, to avoid "dunking" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Polymarket considers an offer valuing it at ~$9B, up from $1B in the summer; Kalshi is close to raising money at a $5B valuation, up from $2B in June (The Information)

On Techmeme's 20th birthday, its founder explains what's behind the site's consistency, debunks some supposed media trends, and outlines future directions (Gabe Rivera/Techmeme News)

SITE NEWS: Explaining, at some length, Techmeme's 20 years of consistency

Micro1, a Scale AI competitor that lets AI companies find contractors for data labeling and training, raised a $35M Series A led by 01A at a $500M valuation (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

Sources: Tencent recruited prominent AI researcher Yao Shunyu from OpenAI; a source and Chinese media say Tencent offered him a CN¥100M+, or ~$66M, pay package (Pei Li/Bloomberg)

Sources: Alibaba and Baidu have begun using their own chips, like the Zhenwu and the Kunlun P800, to train their AI models, partly replacing Nvidia's AI chips (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Tether launches the US-regulated USAT stablecoin and names Bo Hines, the former Executive Director of the White House Crypto Council, as CEO of its new US unit (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Some 20-somethings flocking to SF to build trillion-dollar AI startups say no to booze, sleep, and fun as they strive to be, or appear to be, the most obsessed (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: the US FTC is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers by not properly disclosing the terms and pricing for ads on their websites (Bloomberg)

Sources: India's Billionbrains Garage, the parent of investment app Groww, plans to file for a Mumbai IPO next week, seeking $650M to $800M at an ~$8B valuation (Rajesh Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Crypto trading volume at Bitstamp, which Robinhood acquired in 2024, grew 21% MoM in August to $14.4B, surpassing Robinhood's, which fell 18% MoM to $13.7B (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph)

SK Hynix announces that it has completed development of HBM4, the next generation of high-bandwidth memory crucial for AI work; stock jumps 7% to a record high (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Apple delays iPhone Air preorders in China, likely over eSIM regulatory issues, and replaces the launch schedule with "release information to be updated later" (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)

At the Semicon trade show in Taipei, Taiwan promotes diplomatic relations and its chipmaking tech to let "the free world create trusted non-red supply chains" (Ben Blanchard/Reuters)

The EU ends an antitrust probe against Microsoft with no fine and accepts its concessions, including offering Office without Teams in Europe for seven years (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Over 100K Nepali citizens regularly met on Discord to nominate an interim leader, after protests sparked by a social media ban led to the government's collapse (Pranav Baskar/New York Times)