The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: Reno-based AI chip startup Positron is in talks to raise ~$750M in two phases, at valuations of $3.5B in the first tranche and ~$5B in the second (Bloomberg) [3d]
• The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years (Boone Ashworth/Wired) [3d]
• OpenAI says it found widespread task issues in SWE-Bench Pro, estimates ~30% of tasks are broken, and retracts its earlier recommendation to adopt the benchmark (OpenAI) [3d]
• Meta announces its first data center in Canada, a 1GW facility in Alberta that will cost the company about $9B and take two to three years to construct (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [3d]
• Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, in Cursor, and from the SpaceXAI console, but not in the EU; it costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens (Axios) [3d]
• SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its first model built in partnership with Cursor, designed to "handle difficult, long-running" legal, finance, and coding tasks (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg) [3d]
• OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View) [3d]
• OpenAI launches GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning they can listen and speak at the same time (OpenAI) [3d]
• Prime Intellect, which helps companies build their own AI agents by offering computing power and specialized tools, raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [3d]
• Arkenstone Defense, which is building software to handle back-office work for defense tech startups, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed led by J2 Ventures (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense) [3d]
• China's Nexchip Semiconductor says it aims to raise around $890.37M in its Hong Kong share sale by offering 216.2M shares at ~$4.12 per share (Rajasik Mukherjee/Reuters) [3d]
• Israeli startup Alta, which develops an AI agent platform for marketing, sales, and business development teams, raised a $25M Series A led by IN Venture (Meir Orbach/CTech) [3d]
• Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta saw a muted trading debut in its Hong Kong IPO, valuing the company at ~$9B, after raising $751M (Jiahui Huang/Wall Street Journal) [3d]
• Sources: China plans to let some of the country's major AI companies buy a small number of Nvidia's H200 chips to alleviate a domestic computing shortage (Qianer Liu/The Information) [3d]
• Mistral launches Robostral Navigate, a hardware-agnostic robotics navigation model trained via simulation that utilizes a single camera and language prompts (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) [3d]
• Crypto VC firm Paradigm raised $1.2B, its third fund, to invest in areas outside of crypto, including AI and robotics; Paradigm had $11.9B in AUM in 2025 (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg) [3d]
• Nvidia lost $1T in market value over the past two months, dropping 16% from its May all-time-high, trading at 18x forward earnings, its lowest level since 2019 (Bloomberg) [3d]
• The OpenAI Deployment Company agrees to acquire Northslope, an applied AI company founded by ex-Palantir employees, its second acquisition after buying Tomoro (Madison Mills/Axios) [3d]
• Kaon AI, which builds personalized story worlds using its AI-based FlowGPT and Emochi tools, raised $60M from B Capital and others, and says Emochi has 2M DAUs (Corbin Bolies/Variety) [3d]
• Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke's Entire launches a decentralized Git network to handle high coding agent traffic, with servers in the US, the EU, and Australia (Radhika Rajkumar/ZDNET) [3d]
• SK Hynix's IPO prospectus analysis, as it seeks to raise ~$28B on the Nasdaq: highly leveraged to HBM, extensive ties to China, and health and safety issues (Tim Culpan/Culpium) [3d]
• Internal documents: Amazon is working on an Alexa project, codenamed Moonraker, to handle more complex, multistep tasks, projecting $100M+ in GPU costs in 2026 (Eugene Kim/Business Insider) [3d]
• DuckDuckGo updates its browser for iOS, Windows, and macOS to block video ads by default, particularly those on YouTube, based on uBlockOrigin's filter lists (Anna Washenko/Engadget) [3d]
• Sources: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is raising $10B at a $130B pre-money valuation, its first outside funding round, with $4B from Coatue and $2B from Bezos (New York Times) [3d]
• Filing: Chinese AI model maker Z.ai is seeking to raise ~$4B from the sale of 19.8M shares at ~$202 to ~$216 each, after its stock jumped 1,500% since January (Bloomberg) [3d]
• Israeli startup Velocity, which helps place targeted ads on consumer and B2B AI platforms, raised a $27M seed led by NFX and Red Dot, and serves 20 clients (Chris Metinko/Axios) [3d]
• Omdia expects a 22% YoY drop in global smartphone shipments priced below $400 for 2026 amid soaring DRAM and NAND costs; Q1 memory costs were ~60% of materials (Zaker Li/Omdia) [3d]
• Sources: Chinese AI developer MiniMax is working on a 2.7T-parameter model, dubbed M3 Pro and set for release as early as Q3, and plans to open-source it (Juro Osawa/The Information) [3d]
• Apple says it reached a $30B+ deal with Broadcom to produce 15B chips on US soil in the next five years, its largest pledge as part of its $600B US investments (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal) [3d]
• South Korea's Kospi index is down 20%+ from its record high in June, falling 5%+ on Wednesday; Samsung and SK Hynix fall 5%+ amid long-term chip deal concerns (Financial Times) [3d]
• France's competition watchdog orders Meta to negotiate in good faith with news organizations over copyright payments, after two groups filed complaints in 2025 (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg) [3d]
• China's CNVD says it found "security backdoor vulnerabilities" in Claude Code that "send sensitive information" like "location and identity to remote servers" (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal) [3d]
• The EU General Court dismisses Apple's legal challenges against its designation as a DMA "gatekeeper" for its App Store and iOS; Apple filed the case in 2024 (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [3d]
• Chip startup SambaNova raised a $1B Series F led by General Atlantic at an $11B valuation and signs JPMorgan as a customer to deploy its chips for in-house AI (Bloomberg) [3d]
• US lawmakers are considering strategies to curb US companies' growing adoption of Chinese AI models, as a House committee investigation investigates the risks (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [3d]
• A look at effective altruism's fall after SBF's arrest and how the soon-to-be rich from upcoming AI IPOs give the movement a chance to return larger than ever (Andrew Fedorov/New York Magazine) [3d]
• Palantir insiders and investors fear the company's enthusiastic embrace of President Trump's policies could drive away corporate clients and engineering talent (Financial Times) [3d]
• The global AI boom has thrust CPUs back into the spotlight as Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others challenge Intel and AMD in the AI data center CPU market (Nikkei Asia) [3d]
• Oratomic, which is developing quantum computing hardware and software, raised a $300M Series A led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures (Matt Swayne/The Quantum Insider) [3d]
• A look at Chinese lidar maker Hesai, blacklisted by the US DOD in 2024, as it expands in the US; Hesai says it has ~33% of the global automotive lidar market (CNBC) [3d]
• Paris-based Skello, which provides AI-powered HR tools for frontline workforce management, raised €200M led by Bridgepoint to support its European expansion (David Cendon Garcia/EU-Startups) [3d]
• Sources: Meta is testing AI glasses that continuously record audio and take photos every few seconds, letting users query or recall what they saw or heard (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times) [3d]
• Nvidia and AI chip startup d-Matrix are combining their hardware in a new system to power AI models, the latest example of Nvidia partnering with rivals (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [3d]
• Source: the US Department of Commerce has given OpenAI the green light for a broad launch of GPT 5.6; the company expects to do a wide release this week (Axios) [4d]
• Lisbon-based Bizay, a customized products marketplace for SMBs, raised a $55M Series D led by Indico, as it aims to accelerate its US expansion (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [4d]
• Apple's interest in buying CXMT chips has thrust the Chinese memory chip maker and its relationship with Beijing into the AI supply chain spotlight (Financial Times) [4d]
• Sleep apnea device maker ResMed agrees to sell its software business MatrixCare to PE firm Frazier for $490M in cash; ResMed bought MatrixCare for $750M in 2018 (Puyaan Singh/Reuters) [4d]
• Meta announces that it will be updating its glasses with a new feature that disables the camera if someone tampers with the glasses' privacy LED light (Victoria Song/The Verge) [4d]
• Meta says Muse Image includes an invisible watermarking system called Content Seal and previews a web tool to check whether an image was generated with Meta AI (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [4d]