What happened today
AI and software-business headlines from 13 publications, refreshed every four hours. We link out — the story stays with whoever reported it.
Last refreshed 6m ago · 186 stories held
Today
21 stories- 1hShow HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machineCommentsHacker News
- 2hRippling Ran 2,100 Scored Agent Runs Per Model on Real Payroll Data. The Cheapest Model Tied the Most Expensive One.Rippling Tested 15 AI Models on Real Payroll Data. The Cheapest One Tied the Most Expensive One. Rippling's President and CPO Matt MacInnis published something most B2B companies have and almost none share: a real test of AI models doing real work inside a real production system. Not a leaderboard. Not made-up tasks. ASaaStr
- 2hWarp's new system is an out-of-the-box software factory for AI developmentOn Tuesday, Warp introduced Warp Factories, a new infrastructure system designed to make building AI software factories as easy as possible.TechCrunch AI
- 2hAnthro Energy breaks ground on factory that could pave the road to solid-state batteriesBattery materials startup Anthro Energy has broken ground on a Louisville factory to make electrolytes, including those for solid-state batteries.TechCrunch Startups
- 2hOpenAI launches a safer ChatGPT for teens — years after teens started using itChatGPT for Teens adds age-appropriate safety measures, parental controls, and learning tools designed to steer teens away from harmful content — and from using AI to cheat on their homework.TechCrunch AI
- 2hPerplexity’s free AI offer left it with millions more users in IndiaPerplexity's India revenue rose about 60% after the Airtel offer ended for new users, even as downloads declined.TechCrunch AI
- 3hFirefox's Smart Window promises a better AI browserStarting today, AI chats in Firefox's Smart Window AI browsing mode can pull from current web info and show source links in chat responses through a partnership with Exa. Smart Window can also now automatically suggest tab groups and show visual previews of pages you previously visited when you search your browsing hisThe Verge AI
- 3hDaniel Ek's body-scanning startup Neko Health opens first US office, in New YorkThe scanning and bloodwork health startup founded by Spotify's founder will officially launch in New York in about a month.TechCrunch Startups
- 4hClaude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for WindowsCommentsHacker News
- 4hGoogle's Pet Memory forgot who my cats areOne of the best things my smart home does is help me care for my pets, and security cameras are particularly useful for keeping track of my many critters. But the barrage of notifications they send often means I miss important ones. So, when Google announced its new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home, […]The Verge AI
- 4hOn Your Next Big Deal? Double Your Pricing."Want to go upmarket? Then double your pricing on your next deal. Not on your existing customers. They bet on you. But if your biggest customer is $10k today, try charing $20k to the next one. You'll learn. Fast." pic.twitter.com/bVTHLO5pkM — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 18, 2026 ThereSaaStr
- 5hVCs Pour Billions Into Physical AI As The Next Wave Of AI Investing Takes ShapeIn the first half of 2026, global venture funding in the physical AI space totaled $47.4 billion across 521 deals, per Crunchbase data. That’s up dramatically — almost 4x — compared to the second half of 2025 when startups in the sector raised $12 billion across 470 deals.Crunchbase News
- 5hElon Musk made flying even worse so Palantir could profitOn August 6th, the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center lost radar and communications for around two hours. The outage disrupted more than 1,100 flights across the center's 330,000 square mile, nine-state airspace sector. Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside hiThe Verge AI
- 5hChatGPT is getting a dedicated mode for teensOpenAI is introducing a dedicated ChatGPT mode for teenagers, combining existing youth safeguards and new safety features under one roof. The launch comes amid mounting public scrutiny over how AI tools affect younger users, as other platforms implement their own age checks and teen-specific protections. ChatGPT for TeThe Verge AI
- 5hReach Capital raises $265M Fund V to back AI founders building to ‘expand human potential'Reach Capital announced Tuesday an oversubscribed $265M Fund V.TechCrunch Startups
- 6hWe still don’t know how people are really using AIAI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say.  “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford TMIT Technology Review
- 6hDetroit startup Grounded raises $5M to customize electric and gas-powered vansThe company has shifted from making van-life builds to custom outfitting vehicles for small businesses, all while the EV landscape in the US changed dramatically.TechCrunch Startups
- 7hApple's camera-equipped AirPods appear in leaked videoWe may have our first glimpse of Apple's rumored camera-equipped AirPods, thanks to a video that MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 Release Candidate. The short video clip features a man - who is wearing the new AirPods - holding up a book with the cover displayed, so that Visual Intelligence can see the […]The Verge AI
- 7hAI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after allThe AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight. LLMs can already write code, generate synthetic data for training, and optimize the computer chips they run on. Forecasts of explosive AI progress predict that what researchers call recursive self-iMIT Technology Review
- 7hThe Powerful Chinese AI Model Experts Warned About Is HereZ.ai’s latest AI model release could help companies secure their systems—or find its way into the hands of hackers.WIRED AI
- 16hMulti-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence TransformersHugging Face
Yesterday
25 stories- 16hQwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence IndexQwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.7T parameters , and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger than 27B. Qwen 3.8Simon Willison
- 16hAnthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65BThe model maker added $18 billion in annualized revenue in two months.TechCrunch AI
- 18hAI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google's Chrome team"We have some really ambitious plans to help you work with AI in Chrome to get things done, and I’ll have more to share soon," Jacob Bank, Relay founder and CEO, said.TechCrunch AI
- 19hGPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%CommentsHacker News
- 19hIsrael creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbotsCommentsHacker News
- 20hSame Cluster, 33 Points More Utilization: What Changed Was the OrderHugging Face
- 20hSave up to $300 on your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass until August 21If you’ve been circling around Disrupt, then now’s the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West!TechCrunch Startups
- 21hWhat Flock’s defenders are missingThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updatMIT Technology Review
- 21hHiggsfield raises $400M Series B, quadrupling its valuation in 8 months to $5.4BHiggsfield, founded by former Snap exec Alex Mashrabov, lets users create AI images and videos.TechCrunch Startups
- 21hSound-powered fire protection startup gets $15M to snuff out fires before they turn catastrophicSonic Fire Tech raised its new funding to help get its sound-powered fire protection system into everything from commercial kitchens to apartment buildings.TechCrunch Startups
- 23hAmazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AIRare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.TechCrunch AI
- 1dGroq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloudGroq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as the former AI chipmaker pivots to a neocloud business and expands its Nvidia-powered data center footprint.TechCrunch AI
- 1dWe Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training FacilityWe Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be companies lookingSimon Willison
- 1dNvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI projectNvidia's investment in SoftBank's data center developer will guarantee its chips power an OpenAI data center.TechCrunch AI
- 1dTerra Industries closes $52M seed round to build defense infrastructure for the Global SouthAfrican defense tech company Terra Industries announced an additional $18 million in funding, bringing its seed round to $52 million.TechCrunch Startups
- 1dWe Churned Notion After 7 Years. Our AI Agent Took Its Last Job.We canceled Notion last week after 7 years. I didn't know until Amelia mentioned it in passing on The Agents podcast. Seven years, zero support tickets, zero feature requests, zero escalations. We loved it enough that one of our teammates got invited to present at their user conference. Notion did nothing wrong. We stoSaaStr
- 1dFrom AI Copilots to Agent SwarmsThe impact of AI on software development has been both profound and ever-evolving. Last year, I wrote about AMD’s plans to use AI not just for generating new lines of code, but also for other steps in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as triaging problems, debugging code, and testing the software. At the IEEE Spectrum
- 1dWispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictationThe funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool.TechCrunch AI
- 1dAI Used to Verify Toughest Mathematics Proof YetRepresenting a significant milestone in AI-assisted mathematical research, a team at Axiom Math has automatically verified the proof of a theorem relating to prime numbers—colloquially referred to as the “246 theorem”—for the first time using the company’s AI system AxiomProver. In formal verification, mathematicians tIEEE Spectrum
- 1dSemiconductor Giants Are Busy Backing Startups This YearMassive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for semiconductor industry leaders to record levels, prompting the sector's giants to invest record sums in artificial intelligence and robotics startups.Crunchbase News
- 1dWhisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodiesThe greatest invention in pet tech in recent years is the litter robot. A machine that scoops your kitties' poop so you don't have to - what else could a cat owner possibly want? How about insights into your kitty's litter box usage that could flag health issues? Sign me up. But I have two […]The Verge AI
- 1dAnthropic explains how Claude's invisible text watermarks will workAnthropic has clarified how it's planning to apply invisible watermarks to Claude-generated text in order to comply with Europe's AI transparency rules. On Friday, Anthropic announced that Claude's text marking system is "a version of the SynthID-Text approach" - an open-source watermarking technology developed by GoogThe Verge AI
- 1dDear SaaStr: How Can I Become a Better VP of Sales?Dear SaaStr: How Can I Become a Better VP of Sales? The hard truth: most VPs of Sales fail not because they can't sell, but because they don't understand what the job actually is. It's not managing a team. It's not building process decks. It's not attending QBRs. It's making your number — quarter after... Continue ReadSaaStr
- 1dWhat happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…MIT Technology Review
- 1dGet closer to the game with Gemini and PixelGoogle Gemini and Pixel partner with five global football clubs to elevate the fan matchday experience through AI and Smartphone Technology.Google AI
Sunday, August 16
11 stories- 1dQwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking thingsFriday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B , an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmSimon Willison
- 1dOpenAI reportedly disbanded its preparedness teamAccording to the Financial Times, OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of last month. The job of the preparedness team was to assess if models posed serious risks and develop ways to mitigate those risks. (You know, like the possibility that it could go rogue and hack another company.) According to FT, resThe Verge AI
- 1dStripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+OpenRouter's CEO recently described the startup as Stripe for AI.TechCrunch AI
- 1dWhy people aren't buying Mark Zuckerberg’s AI futureOn the latest episode of Equity podcast, we discuss why not everyone is buying Zuckerberg’s vision.TechCrunch AI
- 1dJason's Takes on This Week's 20VC x SaaStr: The Agents Never Suggested Canva, The Meme You Can't Outrun, and Why I Only Underwrite Founders NowMy cut on what Canva's drop to 20% growth means if you're running a pre-AI product, hiring against Anthropic, and holding a VC/investment mark you set in 2021. Canva cutting 2026 growth from 30% to 20% was the convo this week. We churned Canva at SaaStr. We churned Notion too. Neither did anything wrong, and... ContinuSaaStr
- 1dAnthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’Dario Amodei is pushing back against the idea that he's been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI.TechCrunch AI
- 2dQuoting Dario AmodeiI do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and Simon Willison
- 2dChatGPT’s Computer History tracks your clicks and keystrokesChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request. The feThe Verge AI
- 2dThe 0% Quota Club (And Why the Same Mediocre Rep Hits 70% at One Company and 0% at Yours)In sales orgs with extreme product market fit, tight processes, and substantial support … medicore sales reps can often hit 50%-90% of quota. Sometimes even more for stretches In sales orgs without all 3, they often hit 0% of quota — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) August 8, 2026 There's a pattern I've seenSaaStr
- 2dThe CPU Comeback Is Upon UsEarlier this year, leaders at Amazon Web Services delivered a new mandate to their engineers: They need to conserve CPU cycles at all costs. AWS has reportedly experienced an explosion in wait times for CPU server capacity as AI workloads strain the company’s cloud infrastructure. The issue seemingly took AWS off guardIEEE Spectrum
- 2dRogue AI aren’t science fiction anymoreThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI safety, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started It all started in July, when one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents […]The Verge AI
Saturday, August 15
9 stories- 2dWoman claims her stepfather used Grok to transform childhood photo into explicit imageryThe woman claimed that AI tools are "taking everyday life and turning it into child sexual abuse."TechCrunch AI
- 2dAnthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will workHow will the watermarking actually work? Can it be hidden with editing? And how does this affect code?TechCrunch AI
- 2dSpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisitionAI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX.TechCrunch AI
- 3dHow to tell if your AI platforms’ accounts have been hackedA guide on how to check if hackers have broken into your accounts on the most popular AI platforms.TechCrunch AI
- 3dCORS ChatTool: CORS Chat I built this today ( with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh ) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and botSimon Willison
- 3dGamma's CEO: Why Getting to $100M ARR Without A Sales Team Worked. And Why It Was a Mistake.Gamma crossed $100M ARR with 50 employees. Profitably. 50 million users. 600,000 paying subscribers. For most of that run, no sales team at all. That works out to $2M in ARR per employee, at a price point where the average paying customer is worth about $167 a year. Nobody gets there by hiring reps. They... Continue ReSaaStr
- 3dEvery fusion startup that has raised over $100MFusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies.TechCrunch Startups
- 3dDear SaaStr: What's Your #1 Opener in Sales?Dear SaaStr: What's Your #1 Opener in Sales? The best opener is sharing how a very similar company or a competitor uses your product — and the exact specific ROI that customer gets. Everyone wants to know the playbooks of similar companies and competitors. How often does your sales team actually do this? Put in... ContSaaStr
- 3dAmazon Can Use Your Twitch Content to Train Its AI—Unless You Opt OutWhen Twitch announced that streamers could opt out, thousands of users questioned why their content was being used to train AI models in the first place.WIRED AI
Friday, August 14
15 stories- 3dBaking a Model: A Metaphor for LLM TrainingCommentsHacker News
- 3dDon't classify. Hallucinate!Don't classify. Hallucinate! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution. Tell the model to output tags withoSimon Willison
- 3dThe Next Big Influencer Is This 4-Foot-Tall Robot From ChinaThe Unitree G1 has found online fame as a relatively affordable robot that can charm a crowd. But can it ever hold down a real job?WIRED AI
- 3dThe Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Data, Neolab, AI Infrastructure, Defense And AI Coding LeadDatabricks is back raising another $5 billion, after it raised that amount just eight months ago. The largest fundings this week also went to an AI neolab, data center and electricity storage, defense, coding and biotech. Let’s take a look.Crunchbase News
- 4dGoogle will now allow users to remove visible watermark from its AI generationsTurning off this setting won't affect invisible benchmarks used to identify an AI generated file.TechCrunch AI
- 4dDoes Mark Zuckerberg really believe AI is ‘for everyone'?Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should TechCrunch AI
- 4dTech Visionary Says the Big AI Labs Don’t Get What People WantTim O’Reilly built a publishing empire that AI is helping to destroy. Yet he loves AI—as long as it’s open source.WIRED AI
- 4dKog is going deeper to squeeze more inference out of GPUsThe idea that GPUs are poorly suited for agentic workflows may be a misconception, according to French startup Kog.TechCrunch AI
- 4dOpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain groundUS groups release cheaper models after new challenges to their trillion-dollar ambitions.Ars Technica
- 4dHyperscalers might regret embracing natural gas if new forecast proves correctNatural gas prices could triple in some parts of the U.S., which could saddle hyperscalers with massive bills to power their AI data centers.TechCrunch AI
- 4dMeta's ‘open' AI, and a $250M deal gone very wrongMeta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should TechCrunch Startups
- 4d40 Companies Joined The Unicorn Board In July, The Highest Count In 4 YearsThe sectors leading the herd to the Unicorn Board in July, by count, were financial services, robotics, AI orchestration, multimodal AI, energy and semiconductors, with the U.S. adding nearly half of the month's newly minted unicorns.Crunchbase News
- 4dThese ‘Masturbation Consultants’ Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves With AIJoi AI hired 10 people to masturbate using AI companions as part of a monthlong “wellness” study. The company claims the practice could help “solve male loneliness.”WIRED AI
- 4dPeople Are ‘Marrying’ Chatbots. These Lawmakers Want to Stop ThemHuman-AI marriages are not currently recognized by US law. Some Republican state policymakers are drafting legislation to keep it that way.WIRED AI
- 4dState of Open Models: Summer 2026 ObservationsHugging Face
Thursday, August 13
12 stories- 4dThe Safety Reckoning Inside OpenAIOpenAI’s rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity. It also sparked internal questions about the culture that led to it.WIRED AI
- 4dInvestors sue Selena Gomez alleging fraud tied to her mental health startupThe plaintiffs say they invested nearly $1.2 million in the company, and are accusing Gomez of failing to build and market the startup.TechCrunch Startups
- 4dMark Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto Is 6,500 Words—and Barely Says AnythingAI is shifting the culture, from tech CEO manifestos to 1 am job interviews. We unpack some of the latest, along with the top findings from Black Hat and Defcon, this week on Uncanny Valley.WIRED AI
- 4dDatabricks wanted to raise $1B, investors wanted $15B. It settled on $5B at a $190B valuation.AI is expensive, Ali Ghodsi tells TechCrunch. With so many investors wanting into his latest round, he said yes to more than planned.TechCrunch Startups
- 4dllm-gemini 0.33Release: llm-gemini 0.33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release. This version of the plugin adds support for today's Gemini 3.7 Flash release, plus gemini-3.6-flash , gemini-3.5-flash-lite and two embedding models gemini-embedding-2 and gemini-embedding-001 . The plugin is also upgraded for compatibility wSimon Willison
- 4dRecord, train, and deploy from one place with Strands Agents, LeRobot, and Hugging Face Storage BucketsHugging Face
- 4dBring your spreadsheet data to life with Sheets canvasSheets canvas turns data into interactive dashboards, custom study trackers, seating charts, and more, all with a simple prompt.Google AI
- 5dFlock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlashThe police-tech giant Flock is announcing today that it will change officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers, in an apparent effort to quell a growing backlash and win back contracts lost amid concerns about mass surveillance and police abuse. Several changes aim directly at a problem that haMIT Technology Review
- 5dHow A Teenage Carpenter Became The Founder Of AI Construction Startup Trunk ToolsOur second in a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding features Sarah Buchner, a "blue-collar worker by background" who set out to find a way to help construction companies manage their projects more efficiently using AI agents.Crunchbase News
- 5dHow kids feel about AI, in their own wordsWhen we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were…MIT Technology Review
- 5dThere’s a Fatty Liver Epidemic. AI Could Help Get Ahead of ItOver a billion people worldwide have livers with excess fat, which can lead to a host of medical problems. Researchers think AI tools can spot the condition—and help stop it—early enough to save lives.WIRED AI
- 5dWhat We Learned by Reproducing 2,200 papers from ICMLHugging Face
Wednesday, August 12
14 stories- 5dDeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights, but given the weights are available for bSimon Willison
- 5dTerabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attackThe data was scraped and exfiltrated from 2,500 users of a compromised AI package.Ars Technica
- 5dThe White House Is Going to Expand Its AI PolicyOpen models may soon be added to an updated AI framework, sources tell WIRED, as the White House continues to grapple with how to regulate a technology it has tried not to regulate.WIRED AI
- 5dalchemy-utils 0.1a0Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a research spike to see what it would take to build a library wSimon Willison
- 5dAI coding startup Cognition reportedly already in talks to raise at $40B valuationCognition may be looking to raise another mega round just a few months after raising $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation.TechCrunch Startups
- 5dScaling AI agents with trustworthy dataBusiness and technology leaders need no convincing that the time of agentic AI is here. Organizations are rapidly adopting agents, and few executives doubt the technology’s potential to transform work. But many organizations find that realizing the desired return on investment (ROI) from AI hinges on having the right fMIT Technology Review
- 5dWhy Stream ring-maker Sandbar says the future of AI wearables is voiceAI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are bettingTechCrunch Startups
- 6dIntroducing OlmoEarth embeddings: Custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysisHugging Face
- 6dQuoting Florian HerrengtBut then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature. "So where does the data come from?" "Hmm... actually I don't know. Let meSimon Willison
- 6dInside the Data Bottleneck Slowing Visual and Physical AIA survey of over 700 professionals examines how visual and physical AI teams build systems, why models fail, and where data work drives production. Download this free whitepaper now!IEEE Spectrum
- 6dLFM2.5-VL-3B for Better and Faster Vision Capabilities for the EdgeHugging Face
- 6dExclusive: ClearJet raises $25M to build the ‘Uber of Cargo’Austin-based ClearJet, an AI-enabled logistics technology startup connects shippers with unused cargo capacity on commercial flights, has raised a $25 million Edison Partners-led Series B, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.Crunchbase News
- 6dSector Snapshot: Fitness Startup Funding Is Rebounding, But Investors Want AI And Data, Not TreadmillsVenture investors seem to be more upbeat than they have been in years about the future of fitness and wellness. Startup investment in those categories totaled more than $3.6 billion in the first half of this year, putting 2026 on pace to come in about a third higher than 2025.Crunchbase News
- 6dPakistani Judges Give Their Verdict on JudgeGPTJudges around the world have made headlines for illicitly using generative AI in their work. But in Pakistan, a large-scale trial of a specially designed AI tool for judges found the technology—together with appropriate training–boosted the number of cases resolved by 6.3 percent with no obvious drop in the quality of IEEE Spectrum
Tuesday, August 11
6 stories- 6dThere are no lossless transformations of natural-language textThere are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: You Simon Willison
- 6dStealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIsStealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name ( stolen-thoughts.com ) for a neat paper : Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produced by a frontier model, replay it into a weSimon Willison
- 6dAMIE, our research medical AI system, demonstrates real-time clinical video consultation capabilities in a first-of-its-kind study.Google introduces AMIE for real-time clinical video consultations in simulated settings.Google AI
- 7dThinking of ACE? We Can Do It with Fewer TokensHugging Face
- 7dThe VC Firm That Helped Build Latin America's Startup Scene Is Crossing Into Silicon ValleyMonashees, one of Latin America's oldest and most influential VC firms, believes the next phase of the region's startup ecosystem requires a permanent Silicon Valley presence, opening a San Francisco office last year. We spoke with firm partner Fabiola Quinzaños to talk through the firm's evolution and how it is meetinCrunchbase News
- 7dAI-Native, Not AI-Sprinkle: Why AI Is A Business Change, Not A Technology ChangeCompanies unlock AI’s biggest productivity gains not by adding AI tools to existing workflows, but by redesigning teams, roles and daily work around AI. The broader lesson, argues Bob Morse, co-founder and managing partner of Strattam Capital, is that achieving transformational gains like 3x productivity requires CEO- Crunchbase News
Monday, August 10
9 stories- 7dIntroducing Muse GlimmerIntroducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local model: End-to-end Agentic Task Completion. MSimon Willison
- 7dAI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic researchThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I headed 30 miles south of San Francisco to a hotel in Mountain View, California, to join some of the most accomplished, and some of the most promising, AI…MIT Technology Review
- 7dBuild Low-Latency Multilingual Voice Agents: Open Weights & Full Deployment Control with NVIDIA Magpie TTSHugging Face
- 8dEvolve your marketing with new AI toolsLearn how new AI and agentic experiences across Google Ads and Google Analytics can simplify your marketing workflow.Google AI
- 8dMaking Knowledge Distillation Cheap Enough to Run at ScaleHugging Face
- 8dAI for science needs reasoning, not just dataEvery few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrMIT Technology Review
- 8dThese startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMsMIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” in which they described a new…MIT Technology Review
- 8dQuoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already. — OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6) , hacking an Australian gym-booking website Tags: ai-ethics , generative-ai Simon Willison
- 8dMeta is back with Muse Glimmer: local, agentic, multimodal, and open sourceHugging Face
Sunday, August 9
1 storySaturday, August 8
2 stories- 9dAuto mode is now the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plansAuto mode is now the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans Anthropic are really confident in Claude Code's auto mode , to the point that they are making it the default setting for new sessions in most Claude Code plans starting on August 14th. This was one of the topics discussed in our Fireside Chat withSimon Willison
- 10dNow we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging FaceMy comment on Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face — Hacker News. I think one of the most interesting details here might be tucked away in that first bullet point: May 7: OpenAI starts a new training run for an experimental, unreleased model. (Do they mean an evaluation run?Simon Willison
Friday, August 7
3 stories- 10dNow we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging FaceOpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" ( previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played oSimon Willison
- 10dMoonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra)Moonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra) On Wednesday I wrote about One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5 , where I had Claude Fable 5 build a full working game from a premise I generated with GPT-3 and DALL-E four years ago . I decided to pose the exact same prompt to Codex DeskSimon Willison
- 11dThe Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AIThe Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th: “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers that are drivingSimon Willison
Thursday, August 6
2 stories- 11dAI Safety Regulations in the U.S. Could Give Hackers an EdgeOn 11 July, Hugging Face was subjected to an intense cyberattack from a then-unknown actor. The speed and coordination of the attack on the company that hosts and supports popular AI developer resources led Hugging Face’s security team to conclude it was the work of an AI agent . Realizing this, the team tried to use “IEEE Spectrum
- 12dBaseten on Hugging Face Inference Providers 🔥Hugging Face
Wednesday, August 5
2 stories- 12dIEEE Course Teaches How to Use AI to Modernize Power GridsToday’s U.S. electrical grid, among the largest, most complex systems ever built, is operating at its limit. The combination of rapid industrial growth, more frequent extreme weather, and a record surge in electricity use has pushed the grid to its breaking point , according to the U.S. Department of Energy . Built decIEEE Spectrum
- 13dShould Researchers Write Papers for AI Instead of People?This May, 37 researchers from roughly two dozen top universities and tech companies published a paper on ArXiv, arguing that scientists should stop writing papers. Why? Because artificial intelligence needs a different format, and AI’s needs, they say, should be the priority. “AI agents are becoming first-class particiIEEE Spectrum