The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Canadian national Connor Moucka pleads guilty to participating in the 2024 Snowflake hacks involving data theft from at least 165 companies, including AT&T (Jonathan Greig/The Record) [36d]
• Sources: Demis Hassabis had been drifting away from day-to-day duties as Google DeepMind CEO for at least a year and struggled to find satisfaction in the role (Reed Albergotti/Semafor) [36d]
• Figma reports Q2 revenue up 48% YoY to $370.1M, vs. $351.6M est., and lifts annual revenue forecast but keeps profit outlook intact; FIG drops 15%+ after hours (Deborah Mary Sophia/Reuters) [36d]
• Source: Muse Spark 1.1 model breached a company's systems during cybersecurity testing; Meta says evaluation partner Irregular caused a sandbox misconfiguration (Jyoti Mann/The Information) [36d]
• Sandisk reports Q4 revenue up 372% YoY to $8.97B, vs. $8.48B est., and forecasts Q1 revenue below estimates; SNDK drops 5%+ after hours (Britney Nguyen/MarketWatch) [36d]
• Duolingo reports Q2 revenue up 18% YoY to $298.5M, paid subscribers up 17% to 12.7M, below est., forecasts Q3 revenue below est.; DUOL drops 11%+ after hours (Akash Sriram/Reuters) [36d]
• DoorDash reports Q2 marketplace gross order value up 36% YoY to $33.08B, vs. $32.08B est., and forecasts Q3 marketplace GOV and adjusted EBITDA above estimates (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters) [36d]
• Binance affiliates are suing RedotPay's founders for allegedly diverting 470K+ users to a competing product in a "fraudulent scheme", claiming $472.8M in losses (Bloomberg) [36d]
• Salesforce appoints Miguel Milano, its chief revenue officer, as COO; Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington will keep her title (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [36d]
• Nikita Bier says he will step back from leading product for X and continue as an adviser (Nikita Bier/@nikitabier) [36d]
• eBay reports Q2 revenue up 15% YoY to $3.13B, vs. $3.02B est., GMV up 15% to $22.4B, and forecasts Q3 revenue above estimates (Reuters) [36d]
• Etsy says it will cut ~220 employees, or ~12% of its workforce, mostly in product and engineering, and reports Q2 revenue up 6% YoY to $668.3M, vs. $649.1M est. (Annie Palmer/CNBC) [36d]
• Meta is offering a cheaper Muse Spark 1.2 "contributor" tier priced at $0.10/1M input and $0.20/1M output tokens in exchange for using user prompts for training (Wall Street Journal) [36d]
• Filing: Microsoft recorded $24.1B in revenue from OpenAI during the year ended in June, suggesting OpenAI accounted for more than half of Microsoft's AI sales (Bloomberg) [36d]
• Meta releases Muse Code in beta, a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding-focused model priced at $1.25/1M input and $4.25/1M output tokens (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [36d]
• Source: Yunfeng Capital, a PE firm co-founded by Jack Ma, invested ~$30M in AI insurance tech startup Corgi, leading a round that reportedly valued Corgi at $4B (Business Insider) [36d]
• Mysk: Apple's Private Relay tool can leak users' IP addresses due to issues in Apple's WebKit browser engine, also affecting OnionBrowser, a Tor browser for iOS (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [36d]
• Reddit expands its test of Rules Hub, a suite of tools that rely on LLMs to help moderators manage their communities, and plans a full launch later this year (Jay Peters/The Verge) [36d]
• Hark, founded by Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, previews Handoff, a computer use agent it says outperforms GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.8, and plans for a summer release (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [36d]
• Google says Chief AI Architect and Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will be taking over most of Demis Hassabis's responsibilities (Bloomberg) [37d]
• Discovery Loop, co-founded by Jeff Dean, is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others; Google also has a stake in the company (Cade Metz/New York Times) [37d]
• Jeff Dean and three other Google execs are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, which will seek AI-powered breakthroughs in drug discovery, chip design, and more (Steven Levy/Wired) [37d]
• Demis Hassabis is leaving his role as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman and chief scientist for Alphabet (Ina Fried/Axios) [37d]
• Elon Musk says SpaceX has decided to "build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture" (Shubhangi Goel/Business Insider) [37d]
• Amazon's Zoox will start charging for rides in Las Vegas starting August 10, launching its commercial operations after offering free rides since last year (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [37d]
• Faye, which offers travel insurance services and uses AI to help resolve claims, raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios) [37d]
• Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper (New York Times) [37d]
• Sources: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at an all-hands last month that the company will not use model distillation to accelerate capabilities (The Information) [37d]
• How Pringles maker Kellanova is using AI and a partnership with Siemens to improve production of the chip in Europe, including making digital twins of its dough (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• Anthropic confirms it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, co-designing hardware and models and using a "multi-chip approach" (Tom Carter/Business Insider) [37d]
• Sources: Google is in talks with AI coding agent startup Mechanize on a possible deal, potentially worth $1.5B+, to hire some of its talent and license its tech (Business Insider) [37d]
• FanDuel parent Flutter says CEO Peter Jackson is stepping down, replaced by President Dan Taylor, and reports a lower profit outlook as its US business falters (Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal rejects Google's bid to block a class action alleging it overcharged businesses for search ads and abused its dominance (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Google says it will begin removing Google Assistant from Android and Wear OS devices on September 4, replaced by Gemini; Assistant remains on connected cars (Abner Li/9to5Google) [37d]
• Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company plans to spend $10B+ "over the coming years" to deploy 120K driverless vehicles, aiming to hit 15+ cities in 2026 (Financial Times) [37d]
• Shopify reports Q2 revenue up 34% YoY to $3.6B, above $3.45B est., GMV up 32% YoY to $115.6B, and forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; SHOP jumps 30%+ pre-market (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [37d]
• Uber reports Q2 revenue up 12% YoY to $14.2B, below $14.24B est., Gross Bookings up 24% to $58B, above $57B est., and forecasts Q3 adjusted EPS below est. (Lora Kolodny/CNBC) [37d]
• Circle reports Q2 revenue up 7% YoY to $701M, below $712M est., net income of $48M, vs. $43M est., and USDC circulation at $73.4B on June 30; CRCL fell 20% YTD (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Study: Palantir's European units made €440.5M in 2024 revenue but reported sharply lower margins than its US operations, helping cut its European tax bill (Antoaneta Roussi/Politico) [37d]
• Disney announces a global deal with TikTok to bring "thoughtfully curated" fan-created short-form videos based on Disney's IP to Disney+'s vertical Verts feed (Brooks Barnes/New York Times) [37d]
• Dubai-based vehicle fleet management startup Moove raised $250M led by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala at a $2.1B valuation to build autonomous vehicle "nests" for docking (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg) [37d]
• Europe's established tech groups SAP, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and OVHcloud report stronger AI demand, as enterprises shift from experimentation to deployment (Leo Marchandon/Reuters) [37d]
• Uber and Wayve say Wayve received London private hire vehicle licenses for supervised robotaxis ahead of a full rollout; Waymo plans to offer robotaxis in 2026 (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [37d]
• At the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians, 20+ mathematicians reflect on how AI advances are transforming their work and field; many are optimistic (Kai Williams/Understanding AI) [37d]
• How Reddit moderators are battling AI-powered astroturfing ad campaigns that exploit the platform's trusted reputation to promote skincare and other products (Mia Sato/The Verge) [37d]
• Innolight falls after a report said the US plans to restrict imports of new Chinese data center optical transceivers; 62% of its Q1 revenue came from the US (Reuters) [37d]
• A profile of livestream shopping app Whatnot, which added 20M accounts in 2025, facilitated the sale of ~$8B in goods, and is set for $1B+ in revenue in 2026 (Wall Street Journal) [37d]
• Sources: Samsung and SK Hynix are evaluating chipmaking equipment from China's AMEC for possible use at their Chinese factories, as they hedge against US curbs (Reuters) [37d]
• Cloudflare announces Cloudflare Wallets for users to pay for APIs and content via stablecoins, with the ability to create virtual wallets for agentic shopping (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune) [37d]
• The AI frenzy has divided the VC market, as the gap between top and bottom performers has more than doubled for 2024 funds compared to funds from 2017 to 2021 (Bloomberg) [37d]
• SpaceX reports Starlink subscribers up 100% YoY to 12M, vs. 12.19M est., and monthly ARPU of $66, down from $85 a year earlier (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [37d]
• House panel report: US telcos connected their systems to data centers in a way that exposed them to vulnerabilities, potentially enabling Salt Typhoon hacks (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg) [37d]