The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- Source: UK robotics startup Humanoid raised $150M in the first tranche of a Series A at a $1.2B pre-money valuation and seeks another $80M-$100M by September (Rocket Drew/The Information) [56d]
- Source: PayPal's board sees Stripe and PE firm Advent International's $53B takeover bid as undervaluing the company and facing regulatory and financing hurdles (Reuters) [56d]
- A New York State school district is piloting a humanoid robot teacher by the company Realbotix to help students with summer school classes (Chase DiBenedetto/Mashable) [57d]
- US Homeland Security says it seized 30k+ SIM cards in June and July in a nationwide operation it claims dismantled infrastructure used in telephone fraud (Lorelei Smillie/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Netflix says roughly 300 titles used generative AI this year, mostly in post-production, "to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost" (Emma Roth/The Verge) [57d]
- An NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times) [57d]
- Netflix reports Q2 revenue up 13% YoY to $12.56B, vs. $12.59B est., and says it will give fewer engagement updates starting in 2027; NFLX drops 7%+ after hours (Lillian Rizzo/CNBC) [57d]
- Kimi-K3 is now #1 on the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, surpassing Claude Fable 5; the model scored 88.3 on Terminal Bench 2.1, only below GPT-5.6 Sol's 88.8 (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [57d]
- DoorDash launches a limited beta of DoorDash CLI, which lets users place orders via an AI agent, available by waitlist to macOS developers in the US and Canada (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [57d]
- Google updates its AI video editor Vids with Gemini Omni and a feature that lets users create custom digital avatars using a selfie and voice recording (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [57d]
- Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter AI model that it says rivals Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, and plans to release model weights by July 27 (Kimi) [57d]
- After reports of GPT-5.6 deleting files, OpenAI says the issue most often occurs in full-access mode without sandboxing and it is working to mitigate the risk (Tibo/@thsottiaux) [57d]
- Crypto.com raised $400M from Citadel Securities in its first institutional funding round, valuing the Singapore-based crypto exchange at $20B (CoinDesk) [57d]
- Sources: Google is months behind schedule on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro because the company has been trying to improve its capabilities, particularly in coding (Bloomberg) [57d]
- Beehiiv launches Community, which lets subscribers chat with each other, adds programmatic ads and an AI tool that helps creators manage their audiences (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [57d]
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