Benedict Evans: An overview of macro tech trends for 2026, as “AI eats the world”: bubbles, the AI platform shift, Big Tech FOMO, capex, Nvidia, US power backlogs, and more — What happens in a platform shift? The New Thing! All tech innovation, investment and company creation switches …
Karissa Bell / Engadget: X replaces DMs with Chat, a new messaging system that it says is E2EE, supports file sharing, video calling, and more, rolling out first to iOS and the web — It also adds disappearing messages and file sharing features. — X has finally revealed its long-promised chat platform …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery: An interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg on lessons from AOL, the rise of esports, turning around EA's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Zynga, more — An interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg about a career focused on turnarounds, from EA's KOTR to Zynga and now to Unity.
Gian Volpicelli / Bloomberg: Sources: the EU plans to designate WhatsApp's Channels as a Very Large Online Platform under the DSA, meaning it must meet moderation and transparency standards — Meta Platforms Inc.'s messaging service WhatsApp will face stricter rules under the European Union's content moderation rulebook …
The Information: Sources: Apple may add a second camera to the next iPhone Air, possibly set for spring 2027 alongside the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e, to address user complaints — Apple is delaying the release of the second-generation iPhone Air to work on a redesign of the device and make it more appealing to consumers …
Adam Zsolt Wagner / @azwagner_: Researchers tested Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI agent on 67 mathematical problems and found that it discovered improved solutions to about 20 of them — Really happy to share our new paper on using AlphaEvolve for mathematical exploration at scale, written with Javier Gómez-Serrano, Terence Tao, and @GoogleDeepMind's Bogdan Georgiev. We tested it on 67 problems and documented all our successes and failures. 🧵 [image]
Dean Seal / Dow Jones Newswires: Block reports Q3 revenue up 2.3% YoY to $6.1B, below $6.3B est., adjusted EPS below est., and a $461.6M net income, up from $283.8M; XYZ drops 11%+ after hours — Shares of Block dropped after the company's third-quarter results fell short of Wall Street forecasts. — The stock was down 9.6% at $64.10 after hours.
Raechel Thankam Job / Reuters: The UK CMA says it will launch an in-depth investigation into Getty and Shutterstock's proposed merger after their proposed remedies failed to address concerns — Britain's competition watchdog said on Monday it will launch an in-depth investigation into the proposed merger between U.S.-based Getty Images …
Supantha Mukherjee / Reuters: Swedish startup Legora, whose AI tools help legal teams research and more, raised a $150M Series C at a $1.8B valuation, up from $675M in May after raising $80M — Sweden-based legal AI startup Legora said on Thursday it has raised $150 million, valuing the company at $1.8 billion …
Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget: Amazon relaunches its game streaming service Luna, available at no additional cost for Prime subscribers, and adds new beginner-friendly multiplayer games — The big addition is a collection of multiplayer games that can be controlled with a smartphone. — After detailing its plans …
Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Q&A with Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz on Facebook, starting Asana, SaaS companies, enterprise AI, the “empty seat problem”, AI modesty, AI safety, and more — This week's Stratechery Interview is with Asana co-founder and Chairman Dustin Moskovitz.
Michael J. de la Merced / New York Times: Reflection AI, which is developing an open-source AI model to compete with DeepSeek, raised $2B led by Nvidia, valuing it at $8B, up from $545M in March — The big fund-raising round was the latest sign of investor fervor for artificial intelligence companies despite concerns that the boom is overheated.
Ben Thompson / Stratechery: Q&A with Sam Altman on OpenAI's unifying vision, infrastructure deals, the investor mindset, ChatGPT apps, Instant Checkout, Sora, copyright, feedback, and more — Today's Stratechery Interview is with OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. I have interviewed Altman twice before …
@openai: OpenAI updates GPT-5 Instant to better recognize and support people in distress; ChatGPT will route such sensitive parts of conversations to the model — We're updating GPT-5 Instant to better recognize and support people in moments of distress. Sensitive parts of conversations will now route to GPT-5 Instant to quickly provide even more helpful responses. ChatGPT will continue to tell users what model is active when asked.
Sam Altman: Sam Altman says OpenAI is planning two Sora changes for rightsholders: granular controls over generation of their characters and a revenue sharing system — We have been learning quickly from how people are using Sora and taking feedback from users, rightsholders, and other interested groups.
Joel Drapper: Sources allege that nonprofit Ruby Central took control of some Ruby open-source projects from their maintainers without consent, after pressure from Shopify — Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.
Sam Altman: Sam Altman says OpenAI wants to create “a factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week” and plans to reveal more details this year — Growth in the use of AI services has been astonishing; we expect it to be even more astonishing going forward.
Vitalik Buterin / Vitalik Buterin's website: Ethereum's “low-risk DeFi” applications like payments and savings could drive the chain's revenue in a similar way that search and ads sustain Google's business — One of the important tensions in the Ethereum community for a long time has been the tension between (i) …
Karoline Leavitt / @presssec: White House Press Secretary says the $100K H-1B fee is not an annual fee and it is a “one-time fee that applies only to the petition” in the upcoming lottery — To be clear: 1.) This is NOT an annual fee. It's a one-time fee that applies only to the petition. 2.) Those who already hold H-1B visas and are currently outside of the country right now will NOT be charged $100,000 to re-enter. H-1B visa holders can leave and re-enter the
Dean Takahashi / GamesBeat: LA-based Lingokids, an interactive learning app for kids aged 2-8, raised $120M led by Bullhound Capital and General Catalyst to help expand its IP partnerships — Lingokids, the top interactive app for kids ages two to eight and used by more than 185 million families worldwide, has raised $120 million in new financing.
Theo Wayt / The Information: Report: at a September 17 xAI meeting, Elon Musk and his executives said Grok has 64M monthly users; OpenAI said in August that ChatGPT had 700M weekly users — Elon Musk's xAI told staff this week that its Grok chatbot has 64 million monthly users, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
Peter Guest / Bloomberg: Nearly all funding for AI safety research comes from Silicon Valley companies racing to develop AI, as the voices of AI “doomers” fade in prominence — As AI advances and the incentives to release products grow, safety research on superintelligence is playing catch-up.
Reuters: Digital banking group NOBA plans to list on Nasdaq Stockholm in Q3 2025, in a deal expected to value the company at around $3.74B — Digital banking group NOBA has announced plans to list on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange sometime in the third quarter of this year in a deal expected to value …
Fred Vogelstein / Crazy Stupid Tech: A profile of Techmeme, which turns 20 this week yet oddly works and looks the same way it did in 2005, as its executive-heavy readership expands in the AI boom — Every morning nearly 100,000 geeks world wide, including some of the richest tech barons in the universe, fire …
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: Alibaba debuts Qwen3-Max-Preview, its largest AI model with over 1T parameters, showcasing strong benchmark performance; the model is not open source — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's “Qwen Team” of AI researchers has done it again. After a busy summer in which the AI lab released …
Steven Scheer / Reuters: Israeli cybersecurity company Cato Networks acquires Aim Security, sources say for ~$350M, its first acquisition, says it passed $300M in ARR, and raised $50M — Israeli cyber security firm Cato Networks said on Wednesday it was buying cyber startup Aim Security, its first ever acquisition …
Dan Swinhoe / DatacenterDynamics: OpenLight, which designs custom application-specific silicon photonic chips, raised a $34M Series A as it targets the data center interconnect market — Company secures funds, targets data center interconnect market — OpenLight, a designer of custom application-specific photonic chips, has secured $34 million in funding.
Yueqi Yang / The Information: Rain, a stablecoin-backed Visa card issuer, raised a $58M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures, after raising a $24.5M Series A led by Norwest in March — Rain, a stablecoin-backed card issuer that works with Visa, said it raised $58 million in Series B round led by Sapphire Ventures …
Everything Typepad: Typepad is shutting down on September 30 and users' “account and all related services will be permanently deactivated”; users can export content before then — We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025. What Does This Mean for You?
Wen-Yee Lee / Reuters: Taiwan indicts three people for allegedly stealing TSMC's 2nm secrets to help Tokyo Electron, the first such case, and recommends a combined 14-year prison term — Taiwan prosecutors said on Wednesday that they indicted three people for theft of trade secrets from chipmaker TSMC (2330.TW) …
Bloomberg: Perplexity launches Comet Plus, a $5/month tier offering curated content, and says it has allocated $42.5M for publishers, which will receive 80% of the revenue — The company has clashed with media outlets over use of their work. — Add us on Google — Perplexity AI Inc. is offering publishers …
Elon Musk / @elonmusk: Elon Musk says xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5 and plans to do the same for Grok 3 in about six months, with Grok 2's weights now available on Hugging Face — The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source. Grok 3 will be made open source in about 6 months. https://huggingface.co/...
Mark Anderson / Bloomberg Law: Accenture plans to acquire Melbourne-based cybersecurity company CyberCX from private equity firm BGH Capital, reportedly valuing CyberCX at AU$1B+ — Accenture Plc is buying Australian cybersecurity firm CyberCX, its largest acquisition to date in the sector that will boost operations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Paige Smith / Bloomberg: Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and 80+ fintech and crypto CEOs urge Trump to block US banks from charging fees to access customer data — Top fintech and crypto executives urged the Trump administration to block US banks from charging fees for access to customer data …
A.J. Vicens / Reuters: Cisco Talos finds a flaw in the Broadcom BCM5820X chip used in Dell's ControlVault security firmware, affecting 100+ laptop models; Dell issued patches in 2025 — A flaw in the chips used to secure tens of millions of Dell (DELL.N) laptops could have given attackers the ability …
Kelly Lawler / USA Today: Roku launches Howdy, an ad-free streaming service for $2.99 per month, initially only on Roku devices, with content from Lionsgate, WBD, FilmRise, and more — Roku is ready to say Howdy. — The company − which sells set-top streaming devices, smart TVs and has its own free …
Mark Zuckerberg / Meta: Zuckerberg says superintelligence is in sight, and, when personal superintelligence comes, context-aware devices like glasses will become our primary computers — Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable.
Jeff Wang / @jeffwsurf: Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang on what happened after co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen left for Google, and how Cognition's deal to acquire Windsurf unfolded — To put it mildly, the past week at Windsurf has been crazy. There have been a lot of different rumors and reports …
Dean Takahashi / GamesBeat: Berlin-based Motor Ai, which develops neuroscience-driven Level 4 autonomous driving tech and plans to deploy it on German roads in 2025, raised a $20M seed — After eight years of work, Motor Ai has raised $20 million for autonomous driving software that prioritizes compliance.
@artificialanlys: Artificial Analysis benchmarks: Grok 4 is now the leading AI model, a first for xAI; Grok 4's per-token pricing is more expensive than Gemini 2.5 Pro's and o3's — xAI gave us early access to Grok 4 - and the results are in. Grok 4 is now the leading AI model. We have run our full suite of benchmarks and Grok 4 achieves an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of 73, ahead of OpenAI o3 at 70, Google Gemini 2.5 Pro at 70, Anthropic Claude [image]
Bhavya Sukheja / NDTV: Mixpanel founder Suhail Doshi calls out Soham Parekh, who he says “works at 3-4 startups at the same time” and has “been preying on YC companies and more” — The AI founder shared Soham Parekh's resume, which shows that the techie has worked at Dynamo AI, Union AI …
Sudip Kar-Gupta / Reuters: Amsterdam-based Dexter Energy, which offers AI-based forecasting and trading products for renewable energy and batteries, raised a €23M Series C led by Alantra — Dexter Energy, an Amsterdam-based climate tech firm, has raised 23 million euros ($27.1 million) via a funding round to expand …
Bloomberg: Sources: Foxconn recalled 300+ Chinese engineers from its Indian iPhone factories over the past two months, a blow for Apple as it ramps up iPhone 17 production — The bulk of Foxconn's Chinese staff at iPhone plants in southern India have been told to fly back in a move that began about two months ago …
Miles Kruppa / The Information: Morgan Stanley says xAI raised $5B of equity in addition to $5B in debt; the startup raised $6B in December from a16z, BlackRock, Lightspeed, MGX, and others — Elon Musk's xAI raised $5 billion of equity in addition to $5 billion in debt, according to Morgan Stanley, which advised on the debt transactions.
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: The term “context engineering” is gaining traction over “prompt engineering” as it better describes the skill of providing LLMs with the necessary information — I've spoken favorably of prompt engineering in the past - I hoped that term could capture the inherent complexity of constructing reliable prompts.
Rohan Paul / @rohanpaul_ai: [Thread] A US paper shows the best frontier LLM models solve 0% of hard coding problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI, domains where expert humans still excel — This is really BAD news of LLM's coding skill. ☹️ The best Frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel. LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI ("International [image]
Steven Scheer / Reuters: Israeli data security startup Cyera raised $540M led by Georgian, Greenoaks, and Lightspeed at a $6B valuation, up from $3B in November 2024 after raising $300M — Israeli data security startup Cyera said on Wednesday it raised $540 million in a late-stage private funding round that doubled …
Max Mitchell: Cloudflare open sourced an OAuth library mostly written by Claude, showing how AI handles mechanical implementation while humans guide with context and judgment — A few days ago, my CTO Chris shared Cloudflare's open-sourced OAuth 2.1 library that was almost entirely written by Claude.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball: Bill Atkinson, a pioneering Apple engineer and key member of the original Macintosh team, died on June 5 at age 74 from pancreatic cancer — From his family, on Atkinson's Facebook page: … One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history.
Bloomberg: Simetrik, which uses AI to automate account reconciliation, raised a $30M Series B extension led by a Goldman Sachs Alternatives unit, taking the round to $85M — Simetrik, a financial and accounting services startup, raised $30 million in fresh funding led by a unit of Goldman Sachs Alternatives.