The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Canadian national Connor Moucka pleads guilty to participating in the 2024 Snowflake hacks involving data theft from at least 165 companies, including AT&T (Jonathan Greig/The Record) [36d]
• Sources: Demis Hassabis had been drifting away from day-to-day duties as Google DeepMind CEO for at least a year and struggled to find satisfaction in the role (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [36d]
• Figma reports Q2 revenue up 48% YoY to $370.1M, vs. $351.6M est., and lifts annual revenue forecast but keeps profit outlook intact; FIG drops 15%+ after hours (Deborah Mary Sophia/Reuters) [36d]
• Source: Muse Spark 1.1 model breached a company's systems during cybersecurity testing; Meta says evaluation partner Irregular caused a sandbox misconfiguration (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [36d]
• Sandisk reports Q4 revenue up 372% YoY to $8.97B, vs. $8.48B est., and forecasts Q1 revenue below estimates; SNDK drops 5%+ after hours (Britney Nguyen/MarketWatch) [36d]
• Duolingo reports Q2 revenue up 18% YoY to $298.5M, paid subscribers up 17% to 12.7M, below est., forecasts Q3 revenue below est.; DUOL drops 11%+ after hours (Akash Sriram/Reuters) [36d]
• DoorDash reports Q2 marketplace gross order value up 36% YoY to $33.08B, vs. $32.08B est., and forecasts Q3 marketplace GOV and adjusted EBITDA above estimates (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters) [36d]
• Binance affiliates are suing RedotPay's founders for allegedly diverting 470K+ users to a competing product in a "fraudulent scheme", claiming $472.8M in losses (Bloomberg) [36d]
• Salesforce appoints Miguel Milano, its chief revenue officer, as COO; Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington will keep her title (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [36d]
• Nikita Bier says he will step back from leading product for X and continue as an adviser (Nikita Bier/@nikitabier) [36d]
• eBay reports Q2 revenue up 15% YoY to $3.13B, vs. $3.02B est., GMV up 15% to $22.4B, and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates (Reuters) [36d]
• Etsy says it will cut ~220 employees, or ~12% of its workforce, mostly in product and engineering, and reports Q2 revenue up 6% YoY to $668.3M, vs. $649.1M est. (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [36d]
• Meta is offering a cheaper Muse Spark 1.2 "contributor" tier priced at $0.10/1M input and $0.20/1M output tokens in exchange for using user prompts for training (Wall Street Journal) [36d]
• Filing: Microsoft recorded $24.1B in revenue from OpenAI during the year ended in June, suggesting OpenAI accounted for more than half of Microsoft's AI sales (Bloomberg) [36d]
• Meta releases Muse Code in beta, a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding-focused model priced at $1.25/1M input and $4.25/1M output tokens (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [36d]
• Source: Yunfeng Capital, a PE firm co-founded by Jack Ma, invested ~$30M in AI insurance tech startup Corgi, leading a round that reportedly valued Corgi at $4B (Business Insider) [36d]
• Mysk: Apple's Private Relay tool can leak users' IP addresses due to issues in Apple's WebKit browser engine, also affecting OnionBrowser, a Tor browser for iOS (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [36d]
• Reddit expands its test of Rules Hub, a suite of tools that rely on LLMs to help moderators manage their communities, and plans a full launch later this year (Jay Peters/The Verge) [37d]
• Hark, founded by Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, previews Handoff, a computer use agent it says outperforms GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.8, and plans for a summer release (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [37d]
• Google says Chief AI Architect and Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will be taking over most of Demis Hassabis's responsibilities (Bloomberg) [37d]
• Discovery Loop, co-founded by Jeff Dean, is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others; Google also has a stake in the company (Cade Metz/New York Times) [37d]
• Jeff Dean and three other Google execs are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, which will seek AI-powered breakthroughs in drug discovery, chip design, and more (Steven Levy/Wired) [37d]
• Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman and chief scientist for Alphabet (Ina Fried/Axios) [37d]
• Elon Musk says SpaceX has decided to "build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture" (Shubhangi Goel/Business Insider) [37d]
• Amazon's Zoox will start charging for rides in Las Vegas starting August 10, launching its commercial operations after offering free rides since last year (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [37d]
• Faye, which offers travel insurance services and uses AI to help resolve claims, raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
• Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper (New York Times) [37d]
• Sources: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at an all-hands last month that the company will not use model distillation to accelerate capabilities (The Information) [37d]
• How Pringles maker Kellanova is using AI and a partnership with Siemens to improve production of the chip in Europe, including making digital twins of its dough (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• Anthropic confirms it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, co-designing hardware and models and using a "multi-chip approach" (Tom Carter/Business Insider) [37d]
• Sources: Google is in talks with AI coding agent startup Mechanize on a possible deal, potentially worth $1.5B+, to hire some of its talent and license its tech (Business Insider) [37d]
• FanDuel parent Flutter says CEO Peter Jackson is stepping down, replaced by President Dan Taylor, and reports a lower profit outlook as its US business falters (Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal rejects Google's bid to block a class action alleging it overcharged businesses for search ads and abused its dominance (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Google says it will begin removing Google Assistant from Android and Wear OS devices on September 4, replaced by Gemini; Assistant remains on connected cars (Abner Li/9to5Google) [37d]