Techmeme RSS Feed

Accel raised $3.5B in funds for early-stage investments, including a $1.35B global expansion fund for larger early-stage rounds and rapid follow-on investments (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

22h

Researchers find that feeding a frontier model's encrypted reasoning traces to a weaker model from the same provider can make it output the traces in plaintext (Will Knight/Wired)

22h

Sources: former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil is aiming to raise $150M for a new AI science startup, seeking a valuation of at least $750M (Business Insider)

23h

CoreWeave reports Q2 revenue up 112% YoY to $2.58B, vs. $2.56B est., and a $104B revenue backlog, with 1.5 GW of contracted power; CRWV jumps 9%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

23h

Super Micro reports Q4 revenue up 93% YoY to $11.1B, vs. $11.3B est., and forecasts Q1 and FY 2027 revenue above estimates; SMCI jumps 9%+ after hours (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

23h

Filings show Uber divested from long-time partner Serve Robotics in Q2, as the companies clash over how to deploy delivery robots; Serve has a DoorDash deal (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

23h

Similarweb: Bluesky's mobile MAUs fell 27% YoY to 10.4M in June and DAUs fell 26% to 3M in July; X's mobile MAUs fell 3% to 302M and DAUs fell 7% to 123.7M (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal agree to sell payments company Moneris to PE firm Francisco Partners for CA$2B in cash, splitting proceeds equally (Bloomberg)

Sources: David Sacks' Craft Ventures is targeting around $1B for a new fund, its first since Sacks stepped down as the White House AI and crypto czar (The Information)

SpaceXAI rolls out Grok Bot AI agent app in beta on Mac, iOS, Windows, and Linux, initially for SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Premium users (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Sources: Nvidia is developing a Nemotron 4 model with 1T+ parameters, up from Nemotron 3 Ultra's 550B parameters but smaller than leading Chinese open models (The Information)

Sundar Pichai says Gemini has hit 1B+ MAUs, the company's fastest-growing product ever and its 14th product to hit the 1B-user mark (Sundar Pichai/@sundarpichai)

Brad Lightcap, who most recently led OpenAI's special projects division and formerly was its COO, says he is leaving the startup "to start something new" (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

Flight tracking platform FlightAware sues Kalshi in New York, alleging Kalshi is using its data without permission to let users bet on flight cancellations (Jack Morphet/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for and were aware for seven months of using "cookie stuffing" to claim affiliate commissions (Bloomberg)

eToro agrees to acquire US-focused online brokerage TradeZero for up to $231M in cash and stock; TradeZero had ~$80M in revenue over the 12 months ended June 30 (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Source: Trajectory, founded by ex-DeepMind, Apple, OpenAI, and Meta staffers to build continual learning models, raised $40M led by Sequoia at a $300M valuation (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

River Markets, which gives professional traders a single place to trade across multiple prediction markets, raised an $8.5M seed led by Haun Ventures (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)

Manus says it will "soon return to operating as an independent company", implying it is close to reversing its acquisition by Meta, after China's order in April (Jing Yang/The Information)

TSMC and Sony plan to form Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, a $4.69B joint venture in Japan to make next-gen smartphone image sensors from 2029 (Reuters)

Nvidia releases Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open 30B-parameter MoE model, and NeMo Switchyard, an open-source model routing library for AI agents (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Spotify plans to roll out AI Persona labeling in mid-September for profiles that do "not represent a real person" and says it will use human review and AI tools (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Bumble rolls out a global update that lets any user send an opening message after they match, marking a major reversal from its signature women-go-first model (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg)

Apple's iOS 27 beta 5 contains references to six unreleased iPhones: iPhone Ultra, iPhone Air 2, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone 18, and iPhone 18e (Filipe Esposito/Macworld)

IBM and Together AI sign a $240M, multiyear deal to build an AI inference cluster on IBM Cloud, using Nvidia's HGX B300 systems, to support open-source models (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters)

Big Tech's AI boom echoes the 1870s railroad buildout, and Nvidia shifting risk to institutional capital may expose investors if AI revenues fail to materialize (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

An NYC bill, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calls for Amazon, FedEx, and others to directly employ thousands of delivery workers; the bill could pass this fall (Bloomberg)

xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin's River AI raised $1B led by General Catalyst to build home or small business computer servers capable of running AI locally (Cade Metz/New York Times)

How India's IT services sector, which employs 6M people, contributes ~7% of GDP, and generates $300B+ annually, is shedding jobs as AI automates formulaic tasks (Financial Times)

OpenAI is hiring a power-trading lead to execute commodity hedging across its data center power portfolio, as tech companies seek a steady supply of electricity (Julian Hast/Bloomberg)

How a wave of disinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram contributed to a surge of migrants from Morocco to Spain's Ceuta enclave (New York Times)

A look at London-based AI startup Cosine, which is building a frontier model with UK government backing, as some question if it has the talent and resources (Financial Times)

Intel raised $20B in an upsized share sale, up from the $15B it was targeting on Monday; sources say the sale drew $100B+ in demand; INTC is up 145%+ YTD (Bloomberg)

A look at Western Australian police's first live facial recognition trial, which has scanned 130,000+ people since June, raising accuracy and privacy concerns (ABC)

PatronView's owner details a year of fighting scrapers: 214:1 bot-to-human page loads, 35,000 Claude crawls per referred user, and Amazon's bot referred none (Nick Gray/PatronView)

Singapore raises its 2026 GDP growth forecast to 4.5%-5.5% from 2%-4%, citing stronger-than-expected global AI investment and improved external demand (Bloomberg)

Anthropic says new Claude models will embed watermarks in generated text and C2PA metadata in files to comply with the EU AI Act, and it will update past models (Thomas Claburn/The Register)

Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO ever, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: investor interest in Situational Awareness surged after it nearly blew up on leveraged positions; the fund says it's not accepting new capital for now (Matt Levine/Bloomberg)

Sources: Anthropic agreed to a 20-year compute deal worth $9.1B with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of capacity at Riot's Rockdale, Texas campus; RIOT jumps ~25% (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

How a clause in Elon Musk's Tesla pay package, worth up to ~$1T, could provide him a shortcut around lofty performance targets if Tesla merged with SpaceX (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple remains on track to launch a glass-centric design overhaul of the iPhone Pro line in 2027, countering rumors that led Jefferies to downgrade AAPL (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Trump Media reports a Q2 net loss of $238.1M, up from a net loss of $20M in Q2 2025, and says 10+ clients are paying up to $100K per month for its Truth API (Steve Kopack/NBC News)

SpaceX's earnings show X's Q2 ad revenue at $367M, down from Twitter's $1.08B in Q2 2022; Elon Musk said he would take X's annual ad revenue to $12B in 2027 (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)

Source: OpenAI's AI Ethics Lead Chloé Bakalar departs after less than a year, following exits by the head of safety systems and an ex-head of mission alignment (Financial Times)

Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing permanent at $2/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens, canceling a planned September 1 increase (Claude/@claudeai)

With his long essay, Zuckerberg returns to his "open" AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open models narrow the performance gap at a much lower cost (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Sources: OpenAI bought back ~$7B in shares from current and former employees in a tender offer valuing it at $852B, unchanged from its most recent funding round (Bloomberg)

Source: Applied Compute, which helps companies customize models with their data, is in talks to raise "hundreds of millions" led by Elad Gil at a ~$3B valuation (The Information)

Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M (Alicia Clanton/Bloomberg)