The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

A profile of Suno, which has been used by more than 100M people since 2023 and has 2M+ paid subscribers, as it faces copyright lawsuits from UMG and Sony Music (Bloomberg) [30d]
OpenAI launches a ChatGPT desktop app for Linux in preview, supporting ChatGPT Work, Codex, and more; Computer Use outside the in-app browser is not available (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [30d]
The CFTC uses its "emergency authority" to order Kalshi to continue operating in New York after the state filed a lawsuit in July seeking to shutter Kalshi (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk) [30d]
Source: Kalshi's annualized revenue topped $4B in July, up from $2B+ two months earlier, and its operating expenses totaled $300M in June (Yueqi Yang/The Information) [30d]
Accel raised $3.5B in funds for early-stage investments, including a $1.35B global expansion fund for larger early-stage rounds and rapid follow-on investments (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [30d]
Researchers find that feeding a frontier model's encrypted reasoning traces to a weaker model from the same provider can make it output the traces in plaintext (Will Knight/Wired) [30d]
Sources: former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil is aiming to raise $150M for a new AI science startup, seeking a valuation of at least $750M (Business Insider) [30d]
CoreWeave reports Q2 revenue up 112% YoY to $2.58B, vs. $2.56B est., and a $104B revenue backlog, with 1.5 GW of contracted power; CRWV jumps 9%+ after hours (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [30d]
Super Micro reports Q4 revenue up 93% YoY to $11.1B, vs. $11.3B est., and forecasts Q1 and FY 2027 revenue above estimates; SMCI jumps 9%+ after hours (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [30d]
Filings show Uber divested from long-time partner Serve Robotics in Q2, as the companies clash over how to deploy delivery robots; Serve has a DoorDash deal (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [30d]
Similarweb: Bluesky's mobile MAUs fell 27% YoY to 10.4M in June and DAUs fell 26% to 3M in July; X's mobile MAUs fell 3% to 302M and DAUs fell 7% to 123.7M (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [30d]
Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal agree to sell payments company Moneris to PE firm Francisco Partners for CA$2B in cash, splitting proceeds equally (Bloomberg) [30d]
Sources: David Sacks' Craft Ventures is targeting around $1B for a new fund, its first since Sacks stepped down as the White House AI and crypto czar (The Information) [30d]
SpaceXAI rolls out Grok Bot AI agent app in beta on Mac, iOS, Windows, and Linux, initially for SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra, and Cursor Teams Premium users (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [30d]
Sources: Nvidia is developing a Nemotron 4 model with 1T+ parameters, up from Nemotron 3 Ultra's 550B parameters but smaller than leading Chinese open models (The Information) [30d]
Sundar Pichai says Gemini has hit 1B+ MAUs, the company's fastest-growing product ever and its 14th product to hit the 1B-user mark (Sundar Pichai/@sundarpichai) [30d]
Brad Lightcap, who most recently led OpenAI's special projects division and formerly was its COO, says he is leaving the company "to start something new" (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [30d]
Flight tracking platform FlightAware sues Kalshi in New York, alleging Kalshi is using its data without permission to let users bet on flight cancellations (Jack Morphet/Wall Street Journal) [30d]
Sources: Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for and were aware for seven months of using "cookie stuffing" to claim affiliate commissions (Bloomberg) [30d]
eToro agrees to acquire US-focused online brokerage TradeZero for up to $231M in cash and stock; TradeZero had ~$80M in revenue over the 12 months ended June 30 (Daniel Kuhn/The Block) [31d]
Source: Trajectory, founded by ex-DeepMind, Apple, OpenAI, and Meta staffers to build continual learning models, raised $40M led by Sequoia at a $300M valuation (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information) [31d]
River Markets, which gives professional traders a single place to trade across multiple prediction markets, raised an $8.5M seed led by Haun Ventures (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune) [31d]
Manus says it will "soon return to operating as an independent company", implying it is close to finalizing the reversal of its acquisition by Meta (Jing Yang/The Information) [31d]
TSMC and Sony plan to establish Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, a $4.69B JV in Japan to make next-gen smartphone image sensors from 2029 (Reuters) [31d]
Nvidia releases Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open 30B-parameter MoE model that it says delivers up to 4x faster output speeds, and an agentic AI model router (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [31d]
Spotify plans to roll out AI Persona labeling in mid-September for profiles that do "not represent a real person"; the system uses human review and AI tools (Emma Roth/The Verge) [31d]
Bumble rolls out a global update letting any user send an opening message after matching, a major reversal from its signature women-go-first model (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [31d]
Apple's iOS 27 beta 5 contains references to six unreleased iPhones: iPhone Air 2, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone 18, iPhone Ultra, and iPhone 18e (Filipe Esposito/Macworld) [31d]
IBM and Together AI sign a $240M, multi-year deal to build an AI inference cluster on IBM Cloud, using Nvidia's HGX B300 systems, to support open-source models (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [31d]
Big Tech's AI boom echoes the 1870s railroad expansion, and Nvidia shifting risk to institutional capital may expose investors if revenues fail to materialize (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [31d]
An NYC bill, backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calls for Amazon, FedEx, and others to directly employ thousands of delivery workers; the bill could pass this fall (Bloomberg) [31d]
xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin's River AI raised $1B led by General Catalyst to build home or small business computer servers capable of running AI locally (Cade Metz/New York Times) [31d]
How India's IT services sector, which employs 6M people, contributes ~7% of GDP, and generates $300B+ annually, is shedding jobs as AI automates formulaic work (Financial Times) [31d]
OpenAI is hiring a power-trading lead to manage commodity hedging across its expanding data center power portfolio, as tech companies seek reliable electricity (Julian Hast/Bloomberg) [31d]
How a wave of disinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, and Telegram contributed to a surge of migrants from Morocco to Spain's Ceuta enclave (New York Times) [31d]
A look at London-based AI startup Cosine, which is building a frontier model with UK government backing, as some question if it has the talent and resources (Financial Times) [31d]
Intel raised $20B in an upsized share sale, up from the $15B it was targeting; sources say the sale drew $100B+ in demand; INTC is up ~146% in 2026 so far (Bloomberg) [31d]
A look at Western Australian police's first live facial recognition trial, which has scanned 130,000+ people since June, raising accuracy and privacy concerns (ABC) [31d]
Owner of 1.5M-page site PatronView on a year of fighting scrapers: 214:1 bot-to-human page loads, 35K Claude crawls per referred user, Amazon bot referred none (Nick Gray/PatronView) [31d]
Singapore raises its 2026 GDP growth forecast to 4.5%-5.5% from 2%-4%, citing stronger-than-expected global AI investment and improved external demand (Bloomberg) [31d]
Anthropic says Claude models in the EU will now add invisible watermarks to generated text and C2PA metadata to generated files, to comply with the EU AI Act (Thomas Claburn/The Register) [31d]
Sources: Anthropic is courting investors for what could be the biggest IPO ever, touting rapid growth and plans to address mounting public backlash against AI (Wall Street Journal) [31d]
Sources: investor interest in Situational Awareness surged after it nearly blew up on leveraged positions; the fund says it's not accepting new capital for now (Matt Levine/Bloomberg) [31d]
Sources: Anthropic agreed to a 20-year, $9.1B compute deal with Riot Platforms for 191 MW of capacity at a Rockdale, TX campus; RIOT jumps ~25% after hours (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [31d]
How a clause in Elon Musk's Tesla pay package, worth up to ~$1T, could provide him a shortcut around lofty performance targets if Tesla merged with SpaceX (Wall Street Journal) [31d]
Sources: Apple remains on track for a glass-centric design overhaul of iPhone Pro's line for 2027, countering rumors that led Jefferies to downgrade AAPL (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [31d]
Trump Media reports a Q2 net loss of $238.1M, vs. a net loss of $20M in Q2 2025, and says 10+ clients are paying up to $100K per month for its Truth API (Steve Kopack/NBC News) [31d]
SpaceX's earnings show X's Q2 ad revenue at $367M, down from $1.08B at Twitter in Q2 2022; Musk once said he would take its annual ad revenue to $12B in 2027 (Mike Masnick/Techdirt) [31d]