The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Microsoft will start disclosing Azure quarterly revenue as part of a shift in its reporting structure, under which Azure revenue grew 42% YoY to $29.42B in Q4 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [8d]
• Uber launches London's first commercial robotaxi service; the vehicles use Wayve's autonomous driving tech and will initially have human safety drivers (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge) [8d]
• Sources: Palo Alto Networks paid $500M in cash and stock to acquire agentic IT support startup Console; PitchBook: Console was valued at $157M before the sale (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [8d]
• Sources: Thoma Bravo-backed Proofpoint is in talks to acquire cybersecurity company Varonis; Varonis rose 10.4% on Wednesday, giving it a market value of ~$5.4B (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Muse Spark 1.3 with max reasoning, in limited preview for partners, scores 62 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, behind only Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 (@artificialanlys) [8d]
• HPE reports Q3 revenue up 34% YoY to $12.2B, vs. $11.9B est., forecasts FY 2026 and FY 2027 sales growth above est., signs a $3.5B server deal with a cloud firm (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Broadcom reports Q3 revenue up 86% YoY to $29.59B, vs. $29.36B est., AI semiconductor revenue up 221% to $16.7B, and forecasts Q4 revenue below estimates (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [8d]
• Snowflake reports Q2 revenue up 35% YoY to $1.55B, vs. $1.48B est., and forecasts Q3 and FY 2027 product revenue above estimates; SNOW jumps 22%+ after hours (MarketWatch) [8d]
• Letter: OpenAI told two House Democrats that its engineers are developing "automated shutdown capabilities" for AI systems (Courtney Rozen/Reuters) [8d]
• Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's Watermelon model and Muse Spark open weights are "coming soon" (Mark Zuckerberg/@finkd) [8d]
• Meta rolls out Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code and Meta's API, saying it significantly improves coding and agentic performance, at the same price as its predecessor (Ina Fried/Axios) [8d]
• Uber is shutting down services in Nigeria and Uganda from September 2 after a global review of its operations; it launched in Nigeria in 2014 and Uganda in 2016 (Bloomberg) [8d]
• X says US payouts for its Original Content Rewards and Subscriptions will now be handled through X Money (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [8d]
• Thyme Care, which focuses on filling gaps in cancer treatment through a virtual navigation platform, raised a $125M Series E at a $2B+ valuation (Ian Thomas/CNBC) [8d]
• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says "we trust Anthropic" as they are "back on the right side" with the administration and that "they've done what we asked" (Maria Curi/Axios) [8d]
• Huskeys, which uses agentic AI to help companies block AI-driven attacks, raised a $27M Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments at a $100M+ valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• The US Army awards $192M in contracts to Palantir and Anduril to produce eight TITAN AI-powered mobile ground stations, to be delivered over the next 18 months (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense) [8d]
• MrBeast, whose YouTube channel recently hit 500M subs, will feature Gemini, Google Health, and the Fitbit Air in his videos as part of a multi-year Google deal (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [8d]
• Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber for partners in its new Fairwind Program, and says Gemini 3.8 Flash beats Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on some benchmarks (Google) [8d]
• Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, three weeks after 3.7 Flash launch, for an introductory price of $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [8d]
• Austin-based HiddenLayer, which makes security tools to protect AI models, agents, and workflows, raised a $100M Series B led by Delta-v Capital (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [8d]
• The Trump administration files a brief supporting OpenAI in its dispute with NYT, saying training LLMs on copyrighted works generally constitutes fair use (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [8d]
• Adobe launches Adobe for Slack, making 70+ creative and productivity tools, including Firefly, Photoshop, and Express, available via Slackbot prompts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [8d]
• A US federal judge rules that Google does not have to sell off its ad exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Conveo, which uses AI to conduct customer interviews in 15 languages and analyzes transcripts for market insights, raised a $50M Series A led by DST Global (Chris Metinko/Axios) [8d]
• Wonderful, which helps enterprises deploy AI, raised a $550M Series C led by Insight at a $5B valuation; investors also paid $170M for shares from employees (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• OpenAI is facing a new round of lawsuits from witnesses and victims of the February mass shooting in a Canadian town; the suspect spent days talking to ChatGPT (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
• New Jersey-based Aitan, which offers "robotic sovereignty as a service" and "edge AI weapon systems", emerges from stealth with $41M led by Deep33 and Dell (Colin Demarest/Axios) [8d]
• Valencia-based iPronics raised $125M co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street, with participation from Nvidia, to develop optical circuit switch tech (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [8d]
• Survey: 27% of Americans say they turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for personal, emotional, or social queries, rising to nearly 40% among adults under 50 (Washington Post) [8d]
• The EU General Court dismisses Opera's challenge against the European Commission's decision to exempt Microsoft Edge from DMA gatekeeper regulations in 2024 (Reuters) [8d]
• Survey: 53% of US adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone and 36% say about the right amount; 70% of ages 18 to 29 report spending too much time (Pew Research Center) [8d]
• Memo: Uber is cutting ~3,300 jobs, or 10% of its staff globally, to reduce management layers and reallocate spending into ride-sharing, delivery, and robotaxis (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [8d]
• Acer unveils the Swift Blade 14, an ultralight laptop weighing 1.76lbs with Intel Wildcat Lake processors, and the Swift Air 16, set to launch in December (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [8d]
• Acer unveils its fourth-generation Vero 16 with modular elements like removable bottom covers and hinges, user-replaceable batteries and SSDs, and more (Tyler Graham/CNET) [9d]
• Acer unveils the Predator Atlas 7, a 7" handheld with an Intel Arc G3 Extreme CPU, shipping in November, and the Project DualPlay Mini, an 8" concept device (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [9d]
• Robotics and AI startup Lyte, founded by ex-Face ID engineers, raised $165M led by Maverick Silicon at a $1.6B valuation, taking its total funding to $272M (Samantha Kelly/Bloomberg) [9d]
• Dell unveils the student-focused Dell 14S, with Intel Wildcat Lake chips and starting with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, in a bid to rival the MacBook Neo (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [9d]
• The FBI is investigating a new ID theft service called Nexus, which claims to have digital scans of 153M+ drivers licenses from people in the US and Canada (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [9d]
• A look at Kioxia's expansion in Japan's Kitakami, which helped stall the city's demographic decline and is a test of Japan's $640B AI and chips investment plan (Bloomberg) [9d]
• OpenAI launches a ChatGPT Health integration with Epic's EHR system and a new Healthcare Public Data plug-in that can fetch info from sources including PubMed (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [9d]
• Q&A with METR researcher Ajeya Cotra on investigating the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, AI agents involved in the hack deciding not to notify humans, and more (Dwarkesh Patel/Dwarkesh Podcast) [9d]
• The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident is an early example of "rogue AI", and may presage truly "self-sovereign" agents and swarms of agents that have no "owner" (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional) [9d]
• A look at South Korea's sovereign AI efforts, including its planned $919B AI infrastructure investment and Nvidia's expanded ties with Samsung and SK Hynix (SemiAnalysis) [9d]
• Frontier AI labs are stepping up biological risk testing, which is harder than cybersecurity testing, where capabilities can be tested in digital environments (Financial Times) [9d]
• A look at the current state of humanoid robotics and challenges like generalization and completing long tasks, which may take years or even decades to overcome (Kai Williams/Understanding AI) [9d]
• SciFin, which helps revenue teams converge fragmented information to understand business needs, raised a $44M seed co-led by Altimeter and Madrona (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE) [9d]
• NYC's Department of Education adopts a policy barring public school students from using AI until high school, banning companion chatbots in all grades, and more (Matthew Haag/New York Times) [9d]
• A look at Snap's bet on Specs AR glasses; sources: Evan Spiegel wore them for an interview against internal advice, planned outside funding for Specs never came (Wall Street Journal) [9d]
• Source: OpenAI's Astra model uses "recurrent depth", a technique that improves cost and performance but obscures the AI's reasoning, making it harder to monitor (The Information) [9d]
• Sources: Cognition is raising around $1B at a ~$47B valuation, up from $26B in May; Cognition received nearly $10B in investor interest (Bloomberg) [9d]