The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• State AGs' trial: Adam Mosseri denies Instagram stalled by not making its "Take a Break" teen safety feature the default until nearly three years after launch (Reuters) [16d]
• Nitter, an open-source front end that let users read X without an account, says X sent cease-and-desist letters demanding a takedown; Nitter.net is now offline (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [16d]
• Intuit reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $4.35B, vs. $4.27B est., and forecasts FY 2027 revenue growth of 9% to 10%, below ~11% est.; INTU drops 8%+ after hours (Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Zoom reports Q2 revenue up 4.9% YoY to $1.28B, vs. $1.27B est., enterprise revenue up 7.8% to $787.5M, and forecasts Q3 adjusted EPS below estimates (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Skild AI unveils S1, a robotics foundation model that it says can learn tasks never seen during pretraining, using a single video demo, without fine-tuning (Skild AI) [16d]
• Sources: Chris Malone, who joined OpenAI as head of data centers in March 2025, left the company last week amid a broader exodus (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Keenable, which is building a web search index for AI agents and says several AI labs are using its API, raised a $26M seed led by Accel (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) [16d]
• An ex-Meta staffer testified that less than 1% of teens used Instagram's opt-in "Take a Break" tool when it launched; the feature is now on by default for teens (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg) [16d]
• UK filing: in FY 2025, OnlyFans paid out $6.3B to creators, net revenue rose 10% YoY to $1.55B, and creator accounts hit 5M; 5,076 creators made $1M+ since 2016 (Todd Spangler/Variety) [16d]
• Anthropic merges the memory systems for Claude chat and Claude Cowork, making Claude chat history available to Cowork unless users opt out (David Gewirtz/ZDNET) [16d]
• The EPA plans to eliminate a federal rule that US states must publicize and solicit public input on air pollution permit applications for data centers (Maxine Joselow/New York Times) [16d]
• Stability AI, which has deals with UMG, WMG, and EA to build AI models from their IP, raised a $76M Series B from them, Sony Music, and others (Corbin Bolies/Variety) [16d]
• Sources: Anthropic is likely to tell IPO investors that its potential revenue opportunities are above $30T, topping SpaceX's $28.5T; Uber predicted $6T in 2019 (Corrie Driebusch/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• Nvidia unveils the Jetson Orin Nano 2 edge AI computer that it says doubles inference performance, with 78 TOPS of AI compute and an eight-core Arm CPU (Eugene Demaitre/The Robot Report) [16d]
• A detailed look at Jalapeño, OpenAI's ASIC developed with Broadcom in 16 months, which beat Nvidia, AMD, and Google chips on multiple top open-source models (SemiAnalysis) [16d]
• Uber launches an optional safety feature allowing parents or guardians to watch a livestream of their teen's ride via the driver's front-facing phone camera (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Mexico-based Primero, which aims to modernize legacy software used by Latin American companies with AI, raised a $12M seed co-led by Kaszek and General Catalyst (Kylie Madry/Reuters) [16d]
• Tel Aviv and NYC-based Alice, which works to protect AI models from misuse and rogue behavior, raised $140M led by Apax Digital at a valuation "close to $1B" (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a local AI agent platform running fully on-device with zero token costs, starting with Nvidia DGX Spark and RTX Linux PCs (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [16d]
• Waymo plans to offer ride-hailing services in Germany, starting with Munich, by the end of 2027, marking its third international market and the first in the EU (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [16d]
• Autonomous trucking startup Gatik raised $200M, two months after striking a multi-year commercial agreement with PepsiCo, bringing its total funding to ~$500M (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [16d]
• OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency vs. Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T (Emma Roth/The Verge) [16d]
• Apple raises Mac mini and Studio prices: the M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini are $899+ and $1,699+, $100 above M4 models, and the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is $5,499+, up $200 (Nicole Nguyen/Wall Street Journal) [16d]
• WhatsApp upgrades its two-step verification, letting users replace the six-digit PIN with a longer alphanumeric password, and adds support for multiple passkeys (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [16d]
• Apple says M5 Ultra uses a quad-die 3nm architecture, "a first for Apple silicon", with inter-die bandwidth of 4.4TB/s+ and up to a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU (Steve Dent/Engadget) [16d]
• Apple unveils M6, a 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and GPU, and up to 32GB of unified memory, saying it provides "the world's fastest single-threaded performance" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [16d]
• Apple unveils a Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro, with up to 4x faster AI performance and up to 2x faster graphics, for $899+ with M6 and $1,699+ with M5 Pro (Apple) [16d]
• Apple updates the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with up to 4.3x faster AI performance, faster graphics, and up to 512GB of unified memory for $2,499+ (Apple) [16d]
• Asus opens pre-orders for the standalone Xbox Ally X20 at $1,300+, with shipments from October 15; a $2,500 bundle includes the X20 and ROG Xreal R1 glasses (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [16d]
• Google launches Gemini Enterprise for Legal, expanding its platform with specialized AI agents and integrations with Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Harvey (Mike Scarcella/Reuters) [16d]
• Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman unveil the $250 Luffu Link, a screenless, jewelry-inspired LTE health and safety band, set to ship in early 2027 (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch) [17d]
• Emerald AI, which uses AI to optimize data center power consumption based on grid demands, raised $150M led by DCVC and Energize Capital at a $1.05B valuation (Sri Muppidi/New York Times) [17d]
• OpenAI bans a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to evade restrictions and run an influence operation, including creating social media comments (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [17d]
• Accelerated Understanding launches an enterprise-focused physics AI model that uses neural operators and handled 5T pieces of data in a single prompt in tests (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters) [17d]
• Xiaomi unveils the Xring O100, a 6nm AI accelerator to boost its MiMo models when paired with its O3 mobile chip, and the 3nm Xring D100 for autonomous driving (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post) [17d]
• Google is rolling out Motion Assist, a feature to reduce motion sickness by showing visual cues on the screen, to Android 17, starting with select Pixel devices (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority) [17d]
• A profile of French software maker ChapsVision, which won a contract to replace Palantir at France's domestic intel agency in June and targets an IPO by 2030 (Adrienne Klasa/Financial Times) [17d]
• Tim Cook is set to step down on September 1, and a source says Apple hosted an intimate farewell party; sources say Cook's assistant will work with John Ternus (Aaron Tilley/The Information) [17d]
• Qustodio: 26% of Australian children aged 13 to 15 were on TikTok in July, just one percentage point below pre-ban levels, and 10-to-12-year-olds' usage is up (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Q&A with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine on lessons from Apple's Beats acquisition, creativity, being pro-AI music creation, AI as a tool like drum machines, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times) [17d]
• Bitcoin rises above $80K after jumping 20%+ last week, its biggest three-day gain since 2023; US spot bitcoin ETFs had $1.92B in net inflows last week (Lee Ying Shan/CNBC) [17d]
• UK filings: OnlyFans parent Fenix paid late owner Leonid Radvinsky $709M in the months leading up to his death in March; FY 2025 revenue rose 10% YoY to $1.55B (Shona Ghosh/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Australia's ARIA says songs created mostly or entirely by AI will be excluded from its charts; a song that used AI became the most-played song on radio in July (Cam Wilson/ABC) [17d]
• Bengaluru-based autonomous drone startup Airbound raised a $37M Series A led by Greenoaks, less than a year after an $8.65M seed, taking total funding to ~$50M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [17d]
• Unitree shares fell 45% after surging more than 5x in their August 19 Shanghai debut, cutting its valuation from $66B to $36B, raising robotics bubble concerns (Reuters) [17d]
• Sources: Nvidia-backed neocloud Lambda is in talks to raise up to $3B at a $12B+ valuation; its revenue this year is estimated to reach $1.5B+ (Bloomberg) [17d]
• Sources: Apple is about to launch a new Mac mini, potentially before its September iPhone event; Apple has tested versions with M5 and M6 (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [17d]
• OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users, after weeks without the restriction, saying it would smoothen the load on its compute (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [17d]
• Researchers detail the growing use of AI in cyberattacks across many Chinese state-linked groups, primarily using open-weight models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek (Mark Anderson/Bloomberg) [17d]
• Quintessent, a startup making optical interconnects for data centers, raised a $40M Series A led by Cycle Capital, following its $11.4M seed round in 2024 (Maria Deutscher/SiliconANGLE) [17d]