Techmeme

Reuters : 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 —  Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC (2330.TW) and Sony Group (6758.T) said on Tuesday they will form a $4.69 billion joint venture to develop …

Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE : 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 —  Artificial intelligence silicon and software giant Nvidia Corp. today announced two new services: a highly customizable Nemotron model …

Emma Roth / The Verge : 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 —  Artist profiles on Spotify that do ‘not represent a real person’ will get an ‘AI Persona’ badge.

Samantha Kelly / Bloomberg : 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 —  Bumble Inc. will allow men to make the first move in messaging on its dating app, marking a major reversal from the company's signature women …

Filipe Esposito / Macworld : 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 —  Hidden references in Apple's latest beta reveal unreleased iPhones, including the iPhone Ultra.  —  On Monday, Apple released iOS 27 beta 5 …

Anhata Rooprai / Reuters : 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 —  IBM (IBM.N) and startup Together AI have signed a $240 million multi-year agreement to build a large-scale artificial intelligence cluster …

Ben Thompson / Stratechery : Big Tech's AI boom echoes the 1870s railroad buildout, and Nvidia shifting risk to institutional capital may expose investors if AI revenues fail to materialize —  On January 1, 1870, Jay Cooke, hailed as an American hero for his role in financing the Union effort in the Civil War …

Bloomberg : 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 —  A New York City bill calls for the company to hire thousands of contract couriers.  Amazon says the proposal will make delivery pricier and slower.

Cade Metz / New York Times : 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 —  Igor Babuschkin built a new start-up, River AI, and hopes to provide ways for people to “retrain,” or modify, artificial intelligence …

Financial Times : 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 —  It was around 1.30am by the time Rakesh, a 45-year-old Oracle employee in the Indian technology hub of Bengaluru …

M.G. Siegler / Spyglass : With his long essay, Zuckerberg returns to his “open” AI arguments at an opportune time, as Chinese open models narrow the performance gap at much lower cost —  Zuck returns to his “open” AI arguments at an opportune time...  I'm old enough to remember the last time Mark Zuckerberg …

Bloomberg : Sources: OpenAI bought back ~$7B in shares from current and former employees in a tender offer valuing it at $852B, unchanged from its most recent funding round —  OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell roughly $7 billion worth of shares in the company ahead of a possible Wall Street debut …

The Information : Source: Applied Compute, which helps companies customize models with their data, is in talks to raise “hundreds of millions” led by Elad Gil at a ~$3B valuation —  Applied Compute, a year-old startup that helps companies run and customize open-source models with their own data …

Alicia Clanton / Bloomberg : Filing: Sergey Brin donated an additional $20M to Building a Better California, which fights California's wealth tax, bringing his total contributions to $102M —  Billionaire Sergey Brin has now poured over $100 million into his fight to stop a wealth tax in California.

Anthropic : Anthropic details an unreleased Claude model's attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis; it didn't solve it but “unexpectedly” made strides on a related problem —  Recently, a member of staff at Anthropic gave Claude an unreasonable challenge.  It was about one of the most famous …

Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg : The Ninth Circuit dismisses Meta's bid to pause a landmark trial by state AGs alleging its products addict children and have caused a youth mental health crisis —  Meta Platforms Inc. failed to obtain an emergency order pausing a landmark trial slated to begin this week involving claims …

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch : YouTube says new creators will need double, or 8,000+, watch hours over the past year or 20M Shorts views in the last 90 days to start earning money from Feb. 1 —  YouTube announced on Monday that new creators will have to meet higher thresholds to begin earning money from ads and subscriptions.

Financial Times : Nvidia partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on a $500B funding package for AI infrastructure development —  Apollo, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs are among groups working with chipmaker to raise capital for data centre boom

OpenAI : OpenAI unveils two Daybreak tiers: Daybreak Blue, which provides access to frontier models, and Daybreak Red, which offers purpose-trained cybersecurity models —  Introducing new ways to unlock advanced cyber capabilities together with GPT-5.6-Cyber, our latest cybersecurity-specific model.

Sam Sabin / Axios : OpenAI releases GPT-5.6-Cyber, a more cyber-permissive version of GPT-5.6 Sol, to some partners and expands its Daybreak cybersecurity initiative —  OpenAI is introducing a more cyber-permissive version of GPT-5.6 Sol to vetted defenders as it prepares companies for autonomous cyberattacks.

Shane Burke / The Information : US data center bans top 500, up from 300+ in late June, as New York and Texas join cities and counties pushing back against data center development —  Local government resistance to data center development accelerated this summer, a warning sign for big AI companies such as Anthropic …

Financial Times : A look at Chinese state-owned investment bank CICC, which sponsored multibillion-dollar listings of China's tech champions, including CXMT and Zhongji Innolight —  CICC has become a dominant financier in Beijing's drive to compete with US in tech race  —  China's top investment bank …

Wall Street Journal : As PC makers start using CXMT RAM chips, Apple is testing them too, but it needs a custom version for its devices, and US rules block Apple from sharing designs —  Maker of iPhones talks to China's CXMT, but any deal would be politically sensitive  —  Apple has been testing memory chips …

Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase : In-depth look at OpenAI's model training, dangerous decisions, and cluelessness before the HuggingFace hack; despite delaying Astra, OpenAI still doesn't get it —  Today I am taking the time to write the shorter, simpler version of What Happened.  —  For those who want all the details …

Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal : A look back at “Move 37”, a watershed AI moment from AlphaGo's 2016 Go victory, as math witnesses similar breakthroughs where AI makes surprising discoveries —  A decade ago, a computer did something that no human would have done.  It was considered a breakthrough for AI.

Tim O'Reilly / Asimov's Addendum : Google's AI shakeup suggests it may be prioritizing AI diffusion over frontier-model leadership, betting on AI compute as a bigger economic opportunity —  On August 5, Google announced what appeared to be a corporate version of Nixon's Saturday night massacre.  Demis Hassabis stepped back from day to day operations at DeepMind.

John Paul Rathbone / Financial Times : Rights groups warn Turkey's new cybersecurity law, which took effect in July, gives the presidency sweeping powers over online services operating in the country —  Move raises concern about ‘absolute digital obedience’ among social media and gaming platforms

FinTech Global : Cape Town-based Moment, a provider of digital payments and billing tools for businesses across Africa, raised a $22M Series A, taking its total funding to $55M —  Moment, a pan-African FinTech, has closed a $22m Series A funding round led by AlphaCode Venture Partners …

Wall Street Journal : Data Insight: Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries, which owes Russian banks $10B+ in loans, has lost as much as $5B in inventory to Ukrainian attacks —  Plans for a megamerger were blessed by Putin, tying company's fortunes to those of the Russian state

Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog : Anthropic says auto mode will be the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, Team plans, starting on Aug. 14, claiming it's good enough at catching harmful actions —  This was one of the topics discussed in our Fireside Chat with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar at the AI Engineer World's Fair last month.