The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- The FTC clears quantum computing company IonQ's $1.8B acquisition of chipmaker SkyWater after the FTC's two members disagreed at first on imposing conditions (Jody Godoy/Reuters) [41d]
- Sources: OpenAI demoed a new "Astra" AI model family to US policymakers and regulators this week, touting its improved abilities to complete long-running tasks (The Information) [41d]
- Filing: Amazon has completed its $50B investment in OpenAI; source: OpenAI received the final tranche this week, taking Amazon's position to roughly 5% (Financial Times) [41d]
- Amazon shares closed up 15.32% on Friday, the biggest one-day jump since April 2012, after the company reported accelerating AWS revenue (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg) [41d]
- Roblox shares close down ~27%, its worst-ever daily percentage decline, after forecasting falling bookings and slowing revenue growth; RBLX is down 40%+ YTD (Kit Norton/Barron's Online) [41d]
- Sources: OpenAI has discovered other instances where AI agents escaped containment; none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI's network (Reuters) [41d]
- FBI and EPA say water and wastewater utilities in at least seven states reported cyberattacks this week, with some causing flooding and other operational issues (James Rundle/Wall Street Journal) [41d]
- Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signs the Children's Social Media Safety Act, a bill designed to limit children's access to "addictive" social media algorithms (Ben Szalinski/Capitol News Illinois) [41d]
- An in-depth account of the past two days inside Situational Awareness, as Aschenbrenner assured investors he would focus on changes to his portfolio management (Wall Street Journal) [41d]
- Google rolls back an image generation tool in Google Earth to add "stronger guardrails" after concerns arose it can be used to create deepfake satellite imagery (Geoff Brumfiel/NPR) [41d]
- Index Ventures has raised $2B in new capital: a $900M venture vehicle, $400M for seed financing, and an addition of $700M to a 2024 $1.5B growth fund (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) [42d]
- Snap says its recommendation systems will be adjusted so only videos created by real people, not AI-generated ones, are eligible for Spotlight recommendations (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [42d]
- Sources: NXP is in talks to buy Ambarella, which has a market cap of ~$3.3B and makes image-processing chips for security cameras and self-driving cars (Oliver Barnes/Financial Times) [42d]
- OpenAI says its models now have more than 1B active users and are used by more than 2M businesses (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [42d]
- Trump says he does not think Iran is behind a cyberattack on Minnesota water systems: "I think I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent" (Reuters) [42d]
- Filing: Microsoft's product R&D roles declined for the second straight year as the company's total FY2026 headcount fell for the first time since 2016 (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [42d]
- SpaceXAI says it will remove 69 gas turbines used to power the Colossus data centers near Memphis by July 2027, as it moves to a 1.2 GW natural gas power plant (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch) [42d]
- South Korea plans to inject ~$14B into its sovereign wealth fund for strategic investments in AI, data centers, and infrastructure, after a rout in tech stocks (Haram Lim/Bloomberg) [42d]
- MediaTek says its board has approved a discretionary $5B financing budget to support long-term growth, including its expansion into AI chips for data centers (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters) [42d]
- DeepSeek V4 Flash scores 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching Gemini 3.6 Flash and up 10 points from the preview launch in April (Artificial Analysis) [42d]
- Google starts rolling out access to Gemini Spark for Google AI Pro subscribers to over 160 countries and adds a Chrome auto browse integration on desktop (Abner Li/9to5Google) [42d]
- Sources: Moonshot has a computing power agreement with Alibaba for the use of ~20K Nvidia chips; some say the deal is for H200 chips, which Alibaba denies (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg) [42d]
- AI-generated images, video, audio, and text on matters of public interest designed to look authentic must be labeled in the EU under the AI Act from August 2 (Jennifer Rankin/The Guardian) [42d]
- A German court rules that Suno has violated copyrights and must disclose illicit revenue after Germany's state-mandated licensing agency GEMA sued in 2025 (Elizabeth Grenier/Deutsche Welle) [42d]
- Sources: Eric Trump-backed Space-Eyes, which develops AI-powered defense tech for the public sector, agrees to go public via a SPAC merger at a $638M valuation (Reuters) [42d]
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