The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal) [55d]
Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others (Reuters) [55d]
Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC (Bloomberg) [56d]
Filings: a group of major music publishers has agreed to end a copyright infringement dispute with X over the use of their music on the social media platform (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [56d]
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high (Reuters) [56d]
Sources: Valar Atomics, which makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers, is in talks to raise $1B at a ~$5B pre-money valuation (The Information) [56d]
Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [56d]
Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem" (Robert Booth/The Guardian) [56d]
Sources: OpenRouter has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company that could value it at billions of dollars, a premium to its $1.3B valuation in May (The Information) [56d]
Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal) [56d]
Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, the first price hike for Apple Music since 2022 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [56d]
Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws (Bloomberg) [56d]
Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years (New York Times) [56d]
Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers (Gavin Baker/@gavinsbaker) [56d]
Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China as K3 is strong but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer) [56d]
ASML plans to give its ~45K employees globally a €20,000 bonus, issued as a share award vesting in 2030, joining other chip industry companies offering payouts (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [56d]
AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal using inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [56d]
Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and more (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [56d]
San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it has deleted the apps (Matt Burgess/Wired) [56d]