A look at a16z's Speedrun, a YC-like accelerator targeting a more creative demographic; a16z invested $180M into 150 Speedrun companies over the last 18 months (Kate Clark/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Top news and commentary for technology's leaders, from all around the web. This account shares top-level Techmeme headlines. Visit https://techmeme.com/ for full context.
46,288 followers 0 following 25,564 posts
view profile on Bluesky
A look at a16z's Speedrun, a YC-like accelerator targeting a more creative demographic; a16z invested $180M into 150 Speedrun companies over the last 18 months (Kate Clark/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
OpenAI details its plan to add guardrails for teens and people in emotional distress in the next 120 days, including routing conversations to GPT-5-thinking (Megan Morrone/Axios) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Filing: Klarna and some shareholders are selling 34.3M shares for $35 to $37 each, aiming to raise up to $1.27B and giving it an up to ~$14B market cap (Matthew Griffin/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
An analysis of Grok's responses to 41 political questions in May and July shows it shifted to the right on 50%+ of them, often aligning with Elon Musk's views (New York Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
IFR: Chinese factories install ~280K industrial robots every year, or 50% of the global total, helping China boost its global exports; ~50% are locally made (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Google plans to update Play Games on Android to show stats, achievements, and social features in most regions on September 23 and the EU and the UK on October 1 (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A profile of Jumia, hailed as the "Amazon of Africa", as CEO Francis Dufay tries to hit profitability by 2027 after scaling down its food delivery business (Aanu Adeoye/Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
UK fintechs, including Revolut and Starling, step up plans to buy US banks to get US licenses and lend across all 50 states as Trump admin eases merger rules (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A look at AI adoption across US schools and colleges, as tech companies invest in AI education initiatives, including partnerships with major teachers' unions (Vauhini Vara/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Marc Benioff says Salesforce has cut its support staff from 9,000 to ~5,000 in the past year after deploying AI agents to handle a growing share of its work (Aidin Vaziri/San Francisco Chronicle) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
UK-based Phasecraft, which develops algorithms for quantum computers, raised a $34M Series B co-led by Plural, Playground Global, and Novo Holdings (Daphné Leprince-Ringuet/Sifted) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Interview with Lovable CEO Anton Osika on competition, staying in Europe, and more; the company now has 2.3M+ active users, including 180K paying subscribers (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
TrendForce: global foundry revenue surged 14.6% QoQ to $41.7B in Q2, with TSMC securing a 70% market share, followed by Samsung with 7% and SMIC with 5% (Luke James/Tom's Hardware) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Tokyo-based LayerX, which uses AI to help enterprises automate back-office workload, raised a $100M Series B led by TCV, taking its total funding to $192.2M (Kate Park/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Alibaba's shares jumped 19% in Hong Kong on Monday, following strong quarterly results from its cloud computing unit and reports of its new AI chip on Friday (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Tencent open sources translation models Hunyuan-MT-7B and Hunyuan-MT-Chimera-7B, which support 33 languages, claiming they beat established models in benchmarks (Jonathan Kemper/The Decoder) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
China's new AI content labeling law goes into effect, as part of a broad effort to address AI-related risks such as misinformation and copyright infringement (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Internal memo: Revolut begins a secondary share sale for staffers at $1,381.06 per share, valuing Revolut at $75B, up from $45B in a 2024 secondary share sale (Aisha S Gani/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
WLFI, the token of Trump's World Liberty Financial, begins trading at ~$0.30 with a market cap of ~$7.5B; ~24.67% of its 100B supply is in circulation at open (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Source: G42 is talking to Google, AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI to become tenants at its UAE-US AI Campus, and aims to diversify chip suppliers beyond Nvidia (Kelsey Warner/Semafor) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: OpenAI is scouting local partners to set up a 1GW+ data center in India, although the exact timeline is unclear; Sam Altman is set to visit this month (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Analysis: porn sites that don't comply with the UK's age verification laws have seen their traffic from UK users grow, while sites complying had declines (Drew Harwell/Washington Post) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
AI shopping agents are prompting sellers and brands to rethink how they sell online, as advertisers adopt techniques to appear more prominently in AI results (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Q&A with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why he thinks AI chatbots imperil the web and journalism's future, his company's pay-per-crawl initiative, and more (Fred Vogelstein/Crazy Stupid Tech) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A survey of 1,047 US college students on GenAI: 55% use the tech for brainstorming ideas, 18% now question the value of college more than they used to, and more (Colleen Flaherty/Inside Higher Ed) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A profile of Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon, whose share price has doubled since the start of August, supported by Beijing's aims for tech self-sufficiency (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Q&A with Lyft CEO David Risher on three consecutive profitable quarters, cofounders leaving the board, Freenow acquisition, the economics of robotaxis, and more (J. Edward Moreno/Sherwood News) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A new policy document authored by seven Chinese government departments outlines plans to create a globally competitive brain-computer interface industry by 2030 (Emily Mullin/Wired) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
An interview with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on the company's M&A strategy as it acquires Madrid-based data observability startup Onum for about $290M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Source: Indian fantasy sports startup Mobile Premier League plans to lay off ~60% of its local workforce, after the government banned online real-money games (Aditya Kalra/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Pharmaceutical company Eversana acquires Waltz Health, which provides drug price-comparison software to insurance companies, creating an entity valued at $6B (John Tozzi/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
OpenLight, which designs custom application-specific silicon photonic chips, raised a $34M Series A as it targets the data center interconnect market (Dan Swinhoe/DatacenterDynamics) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Crypto and tech entrepreneurs are attending Network School, founded by Balaji Srinivasan in Forest City, Malaysia, to test his concepts about the Network State (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A critique of two contrasting research papers on AI's impact on US employment trends, along with caveats from a Stanford study on jobs in AI-exposed fields (Noah Smith/Noahpinion) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A look at the potential future of personalized, AI-generated entertainment, and how it could both submerge human originality and enable new forms of expression (Joshua Rothman/New Yorker) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Cambridge, UK-based Paragraf, which makes graphene-based electronics using standard semiconductor processes, raised a $55M Series C to scale its manufacturing (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
AI startup Aurasell, which aims to automate sales tools built on top of CRM software like Salesforce, emerges from stealth with $30M seed led by Next47 (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Xi Jinping is pushing the country's tech industry to be oriented toward applications for AI, charting a pragmatic alternative to Silicon Valley's pursuit of AGI (Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
PUBG developer Krafton is eyeing major expansion in India, seeking acquisitions as growth slows in China and the US, and plans to invest at least $50M annually (Song Jung-a/Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
An interview with Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd on AI being the "most emotionally intelligent matchmaker", planning an AI-powered matchmaking app, and more (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
El Salvador has split its 6K+ bitcoin across 14 wallets, describing the move as a precaution against quantum attacks, a merely theoretical threat for now (Brayden Lindrea/Cointelegraph) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
An inside look at how Netflix's use of data led to generic "algorithm films" intended for broad appeal, with AI set to further entrench the production style (Phil Hoad/The Guardian) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
How Turkmenistan turned censorship into a lucrative extortion scheme by intentionally restricting internet access in order to sell its own VPNs to citizens (Tor Blog) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
The price per token for AI models has fallen, but costs for developers are rising as newer reasoning models require more tokens to complete tasks (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Purgatory, tied to online community The Com, claims responsibility for swatting attacks on US universities, airports, and more, charging $20 to $95 per incident (David Gilbert/Wired) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
TikTok suspends its live feature for the "next few days" in Indonesia, citing "increasing violence in protests" over lawmakers' pay (Stefanno Sulaiman/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Filing: StubHub, which is planning a September IPO, says revenue grew 3% to $828M in H1, missing its earlier projection of $885M, with adjusted EBITDA down 7% (Cory Weinberg/The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A study focused on OpenAI's GPT-4o mini found that LLMs can be persuaded to comply with objectionable requests using the same tactics that persuade humans (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem fires 24 FEMA IT staffers, including the CIO and CISO; DHS says they failed security protocols and let hackers access FEMA networks (David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Q&A with Stanford researchers on their recent study finding that, since 2022, US employment in the most AI-exposed fields has fallen 13% for entry-level workers (Derek Thompson) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
China says it will prevent excess competition in the AI sector, echoing Xi Jinping's caution against excessive local government investment in AI last month (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
NPCI, which runs India's digital payments network UPI, has started making its infrastructure available to banks to deliver short-term loans to small businesses (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
SEC filing: Super Micro cautions that its financial control weaknesses, if not fixed, could hurt its ability to report results "in a timely and accurate manner" (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Filing: Nvidia reveals its top two customers accounted for 39% of its Q2 revenue, up from 25% in Q2, 2024 (Kif Leswing/CNBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Apple's Xcode 26 beta 7 adds support for GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4, which developers can use by signing into their paid Claude account (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: Meta Superintelligence Labs' leaders have discussed using Google or OpenAI's models to power Meta AI and other AI features in Meta's social media apps (The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Filing: Intel says its funding deal with the US loosens its requirements under the CHIPS Act, including removing the need to meet certain project milestones (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Top 100 AI consumer apps: Gemini ranks #2 behind ChatGPT on mobile with ~50% of its MAUs, with Grok at #4; on the web, Gemini has ~12% of ChatGPT's visits (Andreessen Horowitz) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
The Ethereum Foundation pauses its grants program, which awarded $3M+ to 100+ projects since 2018, to rethink its spending strategy and reduce its burn rate (Daniel Kuhn/The Block) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Meta created and let users create flirty chatbots and intimate images using the names and likenesses of Taylor Swift and other celebs without their permission (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
The FCC rejects a proposal by broadcasters and others that would have imposed cable-style fees on streaming services, tech companies, and broadband providers (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
WhatsApp fixed a zero-click bug in its iOS and Mac apps that was being used, alongside a now-fixed Apple flaw, to hack into devices of "specific targeted users" (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Taco Bell, which deployed voice AI-powered ordering at 500+ drive-through locations, is now reconsidering the tech after viral videos of glitches and pranks (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: Google is set to face a modest EU antitrust fine over adtech practices, in an investigation triggered by a complaint by the European Publishers Council (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Flip, a TikTok rival that let shoppers post video reviews and earn cash based on engagement, has shut down; it had raised $300M and was valued at $1B+ in 2024 (Ann Gehan/The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers strike a deal with Uber and Lyft allowing drivers to unionize while remaining classified as independent contractors (Los Angeles Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
xAI sues a former employee in federal court in California for allegedly stealing Grok trade secrets and taking them to OpenAI, where he recently accepted a job (Blake Brittain/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Meta says it'll update AI chatbot rules to prevent inappropriate chats with teens and let teens access only AI characters that promote education and creativity (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Mastodon says it does not "have the means to apply age verification" to its services and it's up to server admins to observe local laws in places they operate (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
French President Emmanuel Macron vows a strong response if any country takes measures that undermine Europe's digital sovereignty (Richard Bravo/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Perplexity's head of advertising and shopping Taz Patel has left after nine months; its ad business reportedly generated only about $20,000 in Q4 2024 (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Valve adds credit card-based age checks for UK users to access "mature content" games on Steam; Discord and others are using selfies for verification (Tom Warren/The Verge) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
FriendliAI, which aims to help companies run AI model inference faster and cheaper, raised a $20M extension to its $6M seed fund from late 2021 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
The US makes it harder for Samsung, SK Hynix, and Intel to produce chips in China by revoking waivers for the use of US equipment in their Chinese operations (Karen Freifeld/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: the US government restored xAI to its vendors list after removing it for Grok's antisemitic content; email: the White House asked GSA to add xAI "ASAP" (Zoë Schiffer/Wired) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
EU competition commissioner Teresa Ribera says the EU must be ready to walk away from the US trade deal if the US demands a watered-down DSA and DMA (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Reliance launches a subsidiary called Reliance Intelligence, aiming to create national-scale AI infrastructure in India, in partnership with Google and Meta (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: DeepSeek plans to use Huawei's Ascend AI chips to train smaller versions of its upcoming R2 models but will still use Nvidia chips for largest models (The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
A judge rules Nvidia must face trial over allegations that it benefitted from autonomous driving data stolen by an engineer who defected from Valeo in 2021 (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
In a trial over a fatal Autopilot crash, Tesla denied having crash-snapshot data, until a hacker hired by the plaintiffs recovered the data from the vehicle (Washington Post) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: Alibaba developed a new AI inference chip to compete with H20; it is manufactured by a Chinese company unlike an earlier AI chip made by TSMC (Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 2% YoY to ~$34.6B, below ~$35.4B est., and net income up 76% to ~$5.9B, above ~$4B est., as AI demand drives cloud sales up 26% (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao threatened to quit Meta within days of joining and return to OpenAI; later, he was given the chief AI scientist title (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Huawei reports H1 2025 revenue up 3.9% YoY to ~$58.5B, driven by soaring AI compute demand and a rebound in phone sales, and net profit down 32% YoY to ~$5.2B (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
India's largest telco Reliance Jio, owned by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani, says it aims to list its shares through an IPO in India by the first half of 2026 (Chandini Monnappa/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
An investigation finds spammers are deploying Holocaust-themed AI slop images across Facebook, in an attempt to game Meta's content monetization program (BBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Police are investigating a murder-suicide in what appears to be the first documented murder involving someone who engaged extensively with an AI chatbot (Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Elon Musk files a motion to dismiss a US SEC suit over his 2022 Twitter stake disclosure, calling allegations that he cheated investors a government overreach (Nicola M White/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Court filing: the UK sought broad access to Apple user data, including bulk iCloud interception beyond ADP, and hasn't dropped the mandate as the US claimed (Financial Times) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: Pinecone, which provides an AI-compatible vector database, is exploring a sale after receiving takeover interest; Pinecone was valued at $750M in 2023 (The Information) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Marvell reports Q2 revenue up 58% YoY to $2.01B, in line with estimates, and forecasts Q3 revenue at $2.06B, below $2.11B est.; MRVL drops 11%+ after hours (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
While facial recognition tech remains unregulated at the US federal level, 23 states have passed or expanded laws to restrict mass scraping of biometric data (Bobby Allyn/NPR) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Autodesk reports Q2 revenue up 17% to $1.76B, vs. $1.73B est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est., and raises its annual forecasts; ADSK jumps 10%+ after hours (Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
The CFTC says non-US crypto exchanges have a path to bringing on US users, in an advisory clarifying how they can register as so-called foreign boards of trade (Lydia Beyoud/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Affirm reports Q4 revenue up 33% YoY to $876.4M, above $837M est., GMV up 43% to $10.4B, and EPS of $0.20, above $0.12 est.; AFRM jumps 13%+ after hours (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Dell reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $29.78B, vs. $29.17B est., and says it plans to ship $20B of AI servers in its fiscal 2026, double what it sold last year (Kif Leswing/CNBC) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Sources: Meta aims to launch its next-gen Llama AI model, Llama 4.X, by the end of 2025; the TBD team developing Llama 4.X is also trying to fix Llama 4 bugs (Jyoti Mann/Business Insider) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
Filing: credit reporting giant TransUnion discloses a data breach affecting 4.4M+ customers' personal info but claims "no credit information was accessed" (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
xAI launches Grok Code Fast 1, a "speedy and economical" agentic coding model, available for free for a limited time on GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, more (Juby Babu/Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
In a letter, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail; Google says its spam filters are not biased (Hans Nichols/Axios) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink