The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

YouTube rolls out changes to Shorts, including adding a setting to double playback speed, eliminating the "dislike" button, and more (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) [16d]
Doc: the DOD has quietly revised its doctrine on how the US military picks its targets, envisioning "systems where AI initiates actions with human monitoring" (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg) [16d]
NHTSA proposes eliminating the mandate for manual brake pedals in "vehicles designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [16d]
Apple says it removed VK's apps from the App Store to comply with sanctions; VK says they were removed without warning and it has never been under US sanctions (Reuters) [16d]
Patronus AI, which builds simulated digital environments for evaluating AI agents, raised a $50M Series B led by Greenfield, bringing its total funding to $70M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [16d]
Om Malik, a longtime technology writer, founder of Gigaom, and a partner at True Ventures, died on Wednesday at 59 (Om Malik/On my Om) [16d]
Source: Google is asking publishers that test new AI features in Google News to grant it broad rights to their content, including to potentially train AI models (Ann Gehan/The Information) [16d]
Chipmaker Onsemi agrees to buy Synaptics in a nearly $7B all-stock deal expected to close in the middle of 2027; ON drops 9%+ and SYNA jumps 11%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [16d]
Source: Muon Space, which operates satellite networks for climate and national security monitoring, is raising $250M; it has raised ~$181M since its 2021 launch (Alan Neuhauser/Axios) [16d]
Sources: OpenAI leans toward holding off its IPO until 2027 after warnings that Sam Altman's desired $1T valuation may not be met in current market conditions (New York Times) [16d]
Sources: Sam Altman told staff the US government asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT 5.6 over security concerns, approving "access customer by customer" (The Information) [16d]
Apple stock closed down 6.15% on Thursday after the company raised some product prices, its worst fall since April 2025 (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC) [16d]
Story Protocol, a blockchain-based IP ownership network that raised $140M, rebrands as Data Foundation to build an on-chain registry for AI training data (Olivier Acuna/CoinDesk) [16d]
The US awarded $250M under the CHIPS program to a startup co-founded by billionaire Robert Friedland to develop silicon-carbide chips and pulsed-power tech (James Attwood/Bloomberg) [16d]
Microsoft quietly extends the Extended Security Updates program for Windows 10 consumers by a year, letting eligible users get updates through October 12, 2027 (Zac Bowden/Windows Central) [16d]
Netris, which helps neoclouds automate network configuration to bring their data centers online faster, raised a $15M Series A from a16z (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [17d]
Sources: Kraken is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in DeFi protocol Aave at a $385M valuation, investing 35,000 ETH in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens (Will Canny/CoinDesk) [17d]
Notion plans to shut down its Gmail client Notion Mail on September 22 and go "all in" on AI agents to run inboxes, saying 50%+ of users do not open the inbox (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [17d]
Microsoft says the price of Xbox consoles will increase on August 1 by $100 for 512GB models and $150 for 1TB models, the third price increase since 2025 (Kenneth Shepard/Kotaku) [17d]
Google launches a Google Finance app for Android, with market data, financial news, and an AI-powered "Key Moments" feature, and plans an iOS version this year (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [17d]
Nebulock, which helps security teams proactively find and remediate threats across a company's security stack, raised a $25M Series A led by FirstMark (Chris Metinko/Axios) [17d]
Sources: Bumble explores a sale amid slowing growth in the online dating sector; its shares fell 48% over the past 12 months, giving it a market cap of $388M (Milana Vinn/Reuters) [17d]
Sources: Apple plans to skip higher-end M6 chips and launch its next Pro and Max chips in 2027 as part of the M7 lineup, to boost on-device AI capabilities (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [17d]
Memo: Meta Superintelligence Labs is hiring three founders and other team members behind AI security startup Virtue AI; two founders report to Nat Friedman (Madison Mills/Axios) [17d]
General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning via gameplay footage, raised $320M led by Khosla at a $2.3B valuation, for $454M in total funding (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [17d]
Anthropic hires French telecom group Orange's Chief AI Officer Steve Jarrett to help Anthropic "better understand and adapt" its products to Europe and Africa (Gianluca Lo Nostro/Reuters) [17d]
Sources and a draft document: the US proposes that the EU sign on to an AI partnership to help secure chip supply chains; the one-page statement had few details (Alberto Nardelli/Bloomberg) [17d]
Sony's Bungie says it is laying off a "significant number of employees", including "most of the Destiny team"; Bungie has an estimated headcount of 800 (Ethan Gach/Kotaku) [17d]
Sources: Google expands the scope of its months-old AI coding strike team to "midtraining" to better compete with Anthropic, after key executive departures (Erin Woo/The Information) [17d]
Sail, whose software optimizes how AI models run on existing chips, emerges from stealth with $80M in seed and Series A led by Kleiner at a $450M valuation (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune) [17d]
Apple says "the rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage"; the MacBook Neo rises to $699 from $599 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [17d]
Apple raises Mac prices by 15% to 20% and iPad prices by 15% to 25%, saying it has "never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly" (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
Australian payments startup Airwallex raised $320M led by Lee Fixel's Addition at an $11B valuation, and is incubating blockchain payments startup Metal (Jeff Kauflin/Forbes) [17d]
Scaled Cognition, a reliability-focused lab that develops the Agentic Pretrained Transformer model, raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla at a $750M valuation (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
Exponential View: global AI sales, excluding China, hit $25B in Q1, exceeding an estimated $21B in data center and chip depreciation costs; margins remain thin (Jacob Reid/Bloomberg) [17d]
OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and others launch Raise Us, a new non-profit led by ex-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to help US workers adapt to AI (Lydia DePillis/New York Times) [17d]
Preliminary findings: the EU says Azure and AWS are "the largest and second largest" cloud services in the EU, as the bloc weighs up tougher DMA oversight (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg) [17d]
How risk modelers like Fathom and Verisk are using AI and diffusion models to bypass the limits of physics-based "cat" models to predict natural disasters (Financial Times) [17d]
IBM details a 0.7nm chip manufacturing process that utilizes a "nanostack" 3D transistor architecture, which it says can maintain chip innovation for 10 years (Don Clark/New York Times) [17d]
A profile of incoming WhatsApp CEO Kunal Shah, who studied philosophy in Mumbai, advised Sequoia India, and joins a growing pool of Indian-born tech executives (Financial Times) [17d]
Alibaba falls ~5% in Hong Kong after Anthropic accused it of "illicitly" accessing its AI models, taking its YTD fall to 33%; Xiaomi and Baidu fell 3%+ (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg) [17d]
Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50%+ of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [17d]
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says the company is designing data center chips specifically for Chinese customers that are in compliance with US export controls (Yifan Yu/Nikkei Asia) [17d]
Mirendil, founded by former Anthropic researchers and seeking to build self-improving AI for open-source developers, raised a $200M seed at a $1B valuation (Tina Li/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
Coval, which develops simulation and evaluation tech for testing, launching, and monitoring AI voice and chat agents, raised a $28M Series A led by Norwest (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [17d]
As China's working-age population shrinks, a consensus is emerging that it must deploy embodied AI robots into as many tasks as possible, as soon as possible (Financial Times) [17d]
How a $45M donation to a group supporting Trump brought Larry Ellison deeper into Trump's circle, helped Oracle's business, and his son's acquisition of WBD (Wall Street Journal) [17d]
Assort Health, which develops AI voice agents for health care to handle scheduling and more, raised a $120M Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.2B valuation (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare) [17d]
Paris-based Tsuga, whose observability software runs in customers' own clouds to help them skip per-byte ingestion costs, raised a $35M Series A led by Singular (Ana Maria Constantin/The Next Web) [17d]
TRM Labs: Iran-linked wallets, including those tied to Iran's central bank, have moved over $3.84B in transactions through the crypto exchange CoinEx since 2019 (Wall Street Journal) [17d]
NAND flash maker Kioxia, Japan's most valuable company since June 12, plans to offer US depositary shares in spring 2027 amid AI-driven demand for memory chips (Bloomberg) [17d]
Sources: Meta is accelerating plans to use LLMs to review content and ads, replacing ~50% of human review requests in 2026 and aiming for 90% by year-end (Financial Times) [17d]
New Zealand-based Partly, which develops an AI model for the auto parts industry, raised a $50M Series B led by DST at a $500M valuation, as it enters the US (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [17d]
The Netherlands is lobbying the US not to expand chip equipment export controls that would constrain ASML's ability to sell immersion DUV machines to China (Bloomberg) [17d]
Facebook brings back Facebook Creator Studio as a stand-alone app with built-in AI chatbot to help creators grow their audiences through personalized guidance (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [17d]
Digital advocacy firms like CiviClick and Influent appear to use AI to generate mass public comments on local energy projects, mostly favoring fossil fuel use (Bloomberg) [17d]
An Amazon seller reveals how middlemen on chat apps offer access to Amazon employees who allegedly grant favors, like reinstating suspended accounts, for a fee (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg) [17d]
Hang Ten Systems, led by former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, launches with a $32M seed led by Mayfield to help enterprises use AI to run software at a lower cost (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [17d]