The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Amazon shutters its AGI Lab as part of layoffs in its AGI unit earlier this week; the lab's former head David Luan left in February (The Information) [49d]
• Sources: AI robotics startup Genesis AI is in talks to raise around $500M in a new funding round at a $3B pre-money valuation (Bloomberg) [49d]
• AMD is working with Cerebras to combine AMD Helios and Cerebras wafer-scale chips for an AI inference solution to make workloads faster; CBRS closed up 4.86% (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [49d]
• Nvidia signs a $1.5B accord with Amkor, involving a prepayment by Nvidia to help bolster Amkor's chip packaging facility in Arizona; AMKR jumps 16%+ after hours (Bloomberg) [49d]
• Sierra acquires Takeoff, which develops "long-horizon" agents, for an undisclosed sum; founded in 2025, Takeoff neared $10M in annualized revenue in early July (The Information) [49d]
• Sources: Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter in a deal potentially worth around $10B; PitchBook: OpenRouter was valued at $1.3B in May (Wall Street Journal) [49d]
• SAP reports Q2 cloud revenue up 22% YoY to €6.28B, vs. €6.26B est., total revenue up 9.4% to €9.88B, and lowers its 2026 non-IFRS operating profit guidance (Grace Yoon/Wall Street Journal) [49d]
• The Pentagon signs an up-to-10-year contract with Oracle worth up to $7B to consolidate department's on-premises software licenses into a single contract (Mike Stone/Reuters) [49d]
• Oracle wins a 10-year software contract with the Pentagon worth up to $7B; the contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [49d]
• Trump says 200 additional stakeholders, including major utilities, joined a voluntary pledge to protect consumers from high energy bills from AI data centers (Josh Boak/Associated Press) [49d]
• Filing: the value of Alphabet's investments in unidentified private companies was ~$124.3B as of June 30, source says driven primarily by its Anthropic stake (Davey Alba/Bloomberg) [49d]
• Intel reports Q2 revenue up 25% YoY to $16.1B, vs. $14.42B est., its fastest sales growth in ~15 years on "unprecedented" demand; INTC jumps 10%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [49d]
• Tesla stock closed down 14.52% and Alphabet closed down 6.89% after they signaled increased AI spending, amid worries about the mounting costs of the AI boom (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [49d]
• Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [49d]
• Microsoft replaces OpenAI's image-generating models with its MAI models in its products; Mustafa Suleyman says MAI models are ~85% cheaper to run in PowerPoint (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [49d]
• Patreon lays off 20% of its employees, or 93 people, citing a "painful" restructuring due to "profound" changes in the creator economy (Corbin Bolies/Variety) [49d]
• Anthropic makes its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and says voice mode can now tap into some connected apps like Gmail, Slack, and Notion (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [50d]
• Foundation Future Industries, backed by Eric Trump, partners with AMD to develop autonomous humanoid robots using the AMD Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series chips (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters) [50d]
• AegisAI, which uses AI agents to detect AI-driven spear-phishing attacks, raised a $36M Series A led by Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $49M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [50d]
• AMD unveils the Venice-X CPU, with 1152 MB of 3D V-Cache, 96 cores, and up to 5.15 GHz clock speeds, available in H2 2027 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [50d]
• OpenAI expands ChatGPT Health, which helps users with health-related queries and connects to services like Apple Health, to all logged-in US users over 18 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [50d]
• Primate Labs releases Geekbench 7, featuring larger, more demanding datasets for CPUs and GPUs, along with new video and audio encoding/decoding tests, and more (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [50d]
• Runway launches Runway Media Router, which it says is the first built specifically for generative media, as it expands from AI video to AI infrastructure (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [50d]
• The US Department of Commerce's BIS is formally investigating whether Chinese companies like Moonshot are accessing advanced US AI chips to train their models (Leo Schwartz/The Information) [50d]
• GitHub plans a two-tier bug bounty system, cutting rewards for public reports and boosting payouts for an invite-only group, amid an AI-powered submission surge (Carly Page/The Register) [50d]
• Adam Mosseri says Instagram will take down "pickup line" and other videos shot on Meta glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public places (Katie Notopoulos/Business Insider) [50d]
• Sources: India has ordered telecom companies to disable mobile data services in central Delhi, amid youth protests seeking the education minister's resignation (Reuters) [50d]
• Microsoft is testing free, ad-supported cloud gaming for Xbox Insiders, limited to one-hour sessions for the games users already own (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [50d]
• Abstract Security, which offers an in-stream threat detection platform, raised a $25M extension to its $15M Series A, bringing its total funding to $48.5M (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [50d]
• Yelp signs a deal with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT users real-time local recommendations, and will soon let them contact local businesses for quotes via ChatGPT (Madison Mills/Axios) [50d]
• AI inference chip startup Etched raised a $300M Series C led by Sequoia, with a16z, SK Hynix, others participating, at a $10.3B valuation, up from $5B in Dec. (Julie Bort/TechCrunch) [50d]
• The European Commission approves the $55B acquisition of EA by a group of investors including Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [50d]
• IBM acquires HRL Laboratories from Boeing and General Motors, seeking to integrate HRL's electron spin quantum circuits into its quantum computers (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [50d]
• Amazon is integrating its Luna cloud gaming service into Prime Video via a new Games tab, starting with games like Hogwarts Legacy and EA Sports FC for Fire TV (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter) [50d]
• Ford says Apple's software will be available in its new EVs, helping determine autonomous driving via Apple Maps, and they are working to improve self-driving (Jack Ewing/New York Times) [50d]
• Sources: Jeff Bezos pushed Prime Video head Mike Hopkins to highlight AI in an overhaul of the service, leading to an internal effort called Project Lighthouse (Reuters) [50d]
• Filing: Alphabet holds $94.1B in SpaceX equity post-IPO; $80B are under short-term sale restrictions, while $14.1B remain long-term restricted until Q3 2027 (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg) [50d]
• A Google study of millions of de-identified Google AI interactions finds AI is helping workers, not replacing them, and AI use is "shallow" in most occupations (Justin Lahart/Wall Street Journal) [50d]
• Crypto exchange BitMEX says it will close on September 23 and tells users to withdraw assets; Trump pardoned its founders in 2025 for not implementing AML rules (Akanksha Khushi/Reuters) [50d]
• In a leaked four-hour investor talk, DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng says the main US-China gap is compute access, Nvidia's CUDA moat is disintegrating, and more (Fred Gao/Inside China) [50d]
• Bipartisan US House lawmakers introduce the AI Kill Switch Act, which would grant the DHS the authority to shut down or slow AI models that it deems dangerous (Politico) [50d]
• The Senate's Clarity Act, a crypto industry-backed bill set for a vote this summer, is mired in debate over rules to stop Trump from selling digital currencies (David Yaffe-Bellany/New York Times) [50d]
• STMicro forecasts Q3 revenue up ~16% YoY to $3.7B, below $3.79B est., and expects AI sales to pass $1B in 2026 and be "well above $2B" in 2027; STM falls 14%+ (Bloomberg) [50d]
• Mark Zuckerberg launches a media campaign positioning the company's AI development as an optimistic, pro-human alternative to its competitors' "dystopian" ideas (Sara Fischer/Axios) [50d]
• Google adds a selfie video sign-in option for account recovery, using tools like liveness detection to safeguard against deepfake attacks, rolling out globally (Reece Rogers/Wired) [50d]
• Sources detail how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and crypto adviser Bo Hines worked to shape the GENIUS Act and loosen safeguards to benefit Tether (Bloomberg) [50d]
• A study of 11,989 Polymarket users finds 61% placed fewer than 100 trades over a six-week period, with 58% making or losing less than $100 during that period (Kaitlyn Radde/Pew Research Center) [50d]
• US GAO study: Amazon workers on federal aid tripled from February 2020 to September 2025; ride-hailing and delivery apps topped employers with workers on aid (Washington Post) [50d]
• Meta's infrastructure teams have become bloated, leading to poor decisions like troubled Rivos acquisition, loss of supplier trust due to hardware pivots, more (SemiAnalysis) [50d]
• Tesla reports a negative Q2 free cash flow of $1.1B, its first in over two years, partly due to increased AI and robotic investments, amid diminishing profits (Reuters) [50d]
• Google reports Q2 free cash flow at negative $5.9B amid increased AI spending, marking its first cash burn since going public decades ago (Ryan McMorrow/Financial Times) [50d]