The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Z.ai releases GLM-5.3's weights under a new license requiring companies with $10B+ in revenue over 12 months to pass Z.ai's security review to host the model (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [13d]
Shares of French quantum computing company Pasqal closed up 95% in their Nasdaq debut on Friday following a merger with a SPAC (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg) [13d]
An appeals court rules states can regulate prediction markets, finding Kalshi's sports event contracts are bets, not swaps, and subject to state gambling laws (Lauren McCarthy/New York Times) [13d]
A deep dive into Grok Bot, including its architecture, use cases, and alternatives, as xAI adds shareable bot templates and online purchases through Stripe Link (Flavio Copes) [13d]
Meta intensifies its pressure campaign on TikTok and YouTube, running full-page ads in US newspapers demanding they adopt comparable teen safety protections (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg) [13d]
Modders get an experimental version of Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering library running in over a dozen games after it leaked in NBA 2K27's early access build (VideoCardz.com) [13d]
Owner, which makes AI agents that manage restaurants' websites, marketing, and other functions, raised a $240M Series D at a $2.3B valuation (Joe Guszkowski/Restaurant Business) [13d]
Sources: AI cloud computing provider Lambda raised ~$1B of private short-dated debt to finance the purchase of Nvidia GPUs, which will be leased by Microsoft (Emily Graffeo/Bloomberg) [13d]
Exponential growth across 2 dimensions, users and tokens per user, makes this AI era different from earlier buildouts, and allows AI labs' compute math to work (Fin/@fi56622380) [13d]
FIling: Lone Palm Labs, the startup behind friend-focused photo sharing app Retro, raised a $21M Series A from Thrive Capital and others (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider) [13d]
Sources: the US is drafting a rule to close an export controls loophole that lets Chinese companies access AI chips via data centers in countries like Thailand (The Information) [13d]
a16z creates a $1.1B Machine Age fund focusing on hardware to "open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [13d]
Stock trading app Ajaib raised a $270M Series C from SBI Holdings, the largest round since 2022 in Indonesia, where startups raised just ~$340M last year (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg) [13d]
How Meta founded FAIR in 2013, fell behind as it was distracted by the metaverse, and is spending an unprecedented amount of money trying to catch up (Harry McCracken/Fast Company) [13d]
Apple TV raises prices in the US, with the monthly price up by $2 to $14.99, its fourth increase in four years; the individual Apple One tier rises $2 to $21.95 (Todd Spangler/Variety) [13d]
Sources: Meta is testing robots from ABB and others to handle data center tasks such as swapping cables and resetting servers as it seeks to lower labor costs (Paresh Dave/Wired) [13d]
Meta's India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan is joining OpenAI to oversee consumer growth and enterprise adoption across SE Asia and Australia (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [13d]
A look at Beijing's AGI Bar, the unofficial clubhouse for China's AI industry where entrepreneurs trade gossip, recruit talent, and court investors over beers (Bloomberg) [13d]
Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT reports H1 revenue of ~$22.4B, more than double its 2025 sales, and ~$11.5B in profit, compared to a loss a year earlier (Bloomberg) [14d]
South Korea unveils a project with KT, SK Telecom, and Kakao to provide premium AI tools to the public for free, a move that treats AI like a public utility (Jiyoung Sohn/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Bluesky launches a feature to let users hide their posts from non-followers in its Discover feed; other AT Proto apps can choose whether to respect the opt-out (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [14d]
Sources: Shein pivoted to a Hong Kong IPO and sought to build Chinese government ties, after its New York and London bids failed to secure Beijing's approval (Reuters) [14d]
Tencent releases Hy4 Preview, a 770B-parameter foundational model with a 1M context window that it says outperforms Z.AI and Moonshot models in internal tests (Bloomberg) [14d]
The UK Treasury gives the Bank of England a new legal objective to support payment systems and digital money innovation, seeking to keep London competitive (Financial Times) [14d]
Sources: some tech companies are courting Democrats and hiring advisers to prepare for potential investigations if Republicans lose control of the House (Wall Street Journal) [14d]
BitGo agrees to buy NYDIG's institutional trading business and related assets, expanding BitGo's derivatives offerings; ~30 NYDIG employees are joining BitGo (Tanaya Macheel/CNBC) [14d]
Sources: federal authorities prepare to charge a US serviceman and a KPMG employee with insider trading on prediction markets, as part of a new batch of cases (Dave Michaels/Wall Street Journal) [14d]
Sources: Advent and Stripe are no longer pursuing a deal to acquire PayPal; the group offered to pay $60.50/share in July, valuing PayPal at $53B (Bloomberg) [14d]
A US judge blocks the Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic, ruling that its designation as a supply-chain risk was "illegal and baseless" (Jack Queen/Reuters) [14d]
CISA says that cyberattacks on critical US infrastructure targeted 100+ internet-exposed water and wastewater systems in July, largely attacking PLCs (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [14d]
Workday reports Q2 revenue up 12.8% YoY to $2.65B vs. $2.63B est., and total subscription revenue backlog up 8% YoY to $27.4B, vs. $28.6B est. (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [14d]