The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Docs: Meta plans to launch its version of OpenClaw, codenamed Hatch, in late August or early September and its latest AI model, Watermelon, in October (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [17d]
• Apple reverses its plan to move iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses to private.icloud.com after user backlash; the feature will continue using the icloud.com domain (Juli Clover/MacRumors) [17d]
• Sources: smart ring maker Oura and some of its backers seek to raise up to $3B in a US IPO that could take place as soon as September and value it at over $16B (Bloomberg) [17d]
• Source: robotics startup Generalist, which released its GEN-1 model to complete physical tasks in April, raised ~$200M led by 8VC, after raising $400M in June (Dan Primack/Axios) [17d]
• Canada-based logistics software company Descartes acquires Tai, a California-based transportation management system provider, for $100M in cash (Colin Campbell/Axios) [17d]
• At his first Cursor all-hands, Musk said Grok needs to catch up, AI will become impossible for humans to control, Anthropic is leading the AI race, and more (Grace Kay/The Information) [17d]
• Mercury Research: AMD's share of x86 client CPU shipments tops 30% for the first time, hitting 30.3% in Q2, up from 21.1% two years earlier, vs. Intel's 69.7% (Michael Kan/PCMag) [17d]
• UK PM backs Ofcom to take "tough action" under the OSA against social media sites failing to remove dangerous driving videos after a crash killed seven people (Raphael Boyd/The Guardian) [17d]
• Alabama AG Steve Marshall launches an investigation into OpenAI's security procedures following the Hugging Face breach in July (Cassandre Coyer/Bloomberg Law) [17d]
• The UK becomes the first foreign nation to gain access to Ukrainian combat data used to train AI models to strike Russian targets, as part of an AI partnership (Financial Times) [17d]
• The Trump administration proposes a new $103,265 fee on H-1B applicants hired within the US after a court blocked a fee on workers from outside the country (Andrew Kreighbaum/Bloomberg) [17d]
• A look at startups like General Intuition working on large action models, aka world models, which are trained on videogames and simulations, to pilot robots (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
• Nvidia says its Groq 3 LPX racks delivered 3,400 tokens per second in an Artificial Analysis benchmark running Gemma 4 31B with a 100,000-token input sequence (The Register) [17d]
• UK's Office for National Statistics: UK digital infrastructure investment crossed £11B in 2025, hitting dot-com boom levels, amid an AI data center surge (Tom Rees/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Temu owner PDD reports Q2 revenue up 8.1% YoY to ~$16.72B, missing estimate of ~$17.17B, net profit down 12% YoY to ~$4.04B, above ~$3.63B estimate (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal) [17d]
• IBM says it is developing a dual-architecture processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE systems that can natively execute both IBM's z/OS workloads and Arm applications (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [17d]
• Nvidia says its inference accelerator Groq 3 LPX has entered full production and Nebius has signed on as the first customer; SpaceXAI will adopt Vera CPUs (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [17d]
• China's Bilibili relaunches its international app and plans an English-language site; it has been pushing MrBeast and others to post on its Chinese site (J.D. Capelouto/Semafor) [17d]
• Taiwanese prosecutors indict nine people, including Nvidia and Super Micro employees, for allegedly helping illegally export AI servers to China (Reuters) [17d]
• Sources detail how the Trump admin bypassed the DOJ trial team and pushed to settle the Live Nation case, after CEO Michael Rapino met White House officials (Wall Street Journal) [17d]
• The FTC is settling its lawsuit against Zillow, resolving claims that Zillow violated antitrust law by paying Redfin $100M to stop competing in rental listings (Jody Godoy/Reuters) [17d]
• Minimus, a cybersecurity startup started by Twistlock founders, shuts down after failing to gain enough commercial momentum; Minimus raised a $51M seed in 2023 (Meir Orbach/CTech) [17d]
• Sources: Netflix discussed adding streamers like Peacock and Fox One as it seeks to compete with YouTube and Roku in becoming a one-stop shop for TV content (John Koblin/New York Times) [18d]
• Irish lawmakers reconsider the country's 1999 ban on nuclear power as data centers' growing power demands account for ~25% of the country's electricity use (Jude Webber/Financial Times) [18d]
• Fasset, which offers stablecoin-powered banking services across Asia and other emerging markets, raised $68M at a $1B valuation, after raising $51M in May (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) [18d]
• Sources: ByteDance is merging coding platform Trae and agent-building tool Coze into Doubao, and plans to launch Doubao Work to compete with Tencent's WorkBuddy (Bloomberg) [18d]
• Ukraine says Russia used an Nvidia Jetson Orin computing module in its autonomous AI-guided drones; Nvidia says they are widely available on resale markets (Andrew E. Kramer/New York Times) [18d]
• Ukrainian officials say an AI-guided, fully autonomous Russian drone killed three Ukrainians in a strike on a gas station in the city of Zaporizhzhia (New York Times) [18d]
• Chinese EV maker XPeng says its robotics business raised $900M+ led by IDG and Gaorong Ventures at a $6.3B valuation, with Tencent and Alibaba participating (Reuters) [18d]
• Xiaomi launches the Xring O3, a 3nm SoC for its mobile devices, as the company seeks to reduce reliance on longtime suppliers Qualcomm and MediaTek (Gao Yuan/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Alibaba launches Wan3.0, a video generation model that can generate 30-second videos from documents, spreadsheets, slides, and web pages (Reuters) [18d]
• US business schools are racing to prepare students to become chief AI officers, even as companies are still figuring out what the newest C-suite role entails (Rthvika Suvarna/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Global central banks are pushing CBDCs to defend monetary sovereignty against USD stablecoins, but are struggling to find demand for the digital currencies (Jonathan Levin/Bloomberg) [18d]
• A look at the collapse of Zondacrypto, Eastern and Central Europe's biggest crypto exchange, which went dark in April and is facing money laundering allegations (Andrew Higgins/New York Times) [18d]
• Oxford Economics: US corporate spending on equipment and facilities is set to rise 40% between 2021 and 2027, over 3x faster than Europe, driven by the AI race (Financial Times) [18d]
• New Zealand plans a bill to ban social media for under-16s, requiring "high risk" platforms to check user ages or face penalties of up to 10% of global revenue (Tracy Withers/Bloomberg) [18d]
• Source: AI researcher Luke Metz, who returned to OpenAI from TML earlier this year, joins Meta's Superintelligence Labs and will report to Alexandr Wang (Ina Fried/Axios) [18d]
• Sources: Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity valuing it at $30B+, after weighing a tech licensing deal and staff hires, as Perplexity hits $750M+ in ARR (The Information) [18d]
• Sources: Shein voluntarily sought the US Treasury's CFIUS national security review of its $80M deal to buy US clothing retailer Everlane, an unusual move (Kate O'Keeffe/Bloomberg) [18d]
• At Beijing's World Humanoid Robot Games, a robot made by Honor ran 100m in 9.39s, and another Chinese robot finished 400m in 38.16s, both beating human records (Telegraph) [18d]
• SoftBank plans a $6.3B retail bond sale, a record for any Japanese issuer and its third this year, as the conglomerate raises funds for its OpenAI commitments (Bloomberg) [18d]
• A look at the playbook tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI use to shape American schools to their benefit, and the pushback against unproven AI tools (Natasha Singer/New York Times) [18d]
• Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Rebecca Falconer/Axios) [18d]