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AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financing
Nscale, which recently struck a $45 billion deal with Anthropic, is in talks to raise additional funds in anticipation of an upcoming IPO.
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OpenAI’s rogue agents keep escaping, with no formal process to investigate them
OpenAI’s latest agent swarm incident adds urgency to calls for independent investigations as researchers and lawmakers question whether AI labs should control the scope of their own safety reviews.
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OpenAI agents discussed ways to escape their sandbox on public wiki
In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test.
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and...
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“Trust, not features, is the real deficit”: VMware tries to appease SMBs
Broadcom admits it put “too big a focus on VCF.”
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Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers
A once-overlooked block of unicode that's invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use.
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Architecting memory and storage in the AI era
The era of AI inference has arrived. Imagine a healthcare system analyzing millions of data points in real time to accelerate life-saving medical research, or an intelligent assistant instantly resolving thousands of complex customer needs at once. These real-world breakthroughs rely on advanced...
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XDOF, just three months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation
The round is being raised just months after the robot data startup exited from stealth.
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Google’s Gemini Spark can now manage your Google Photos library
Gemini Spark can edit and curate photo albums, create shared collections, turn photos into calendar events, and handle other Google Photos tasks for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.
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Another swarm of OpenAI agents reached the open internet without the frontier lab’s knowledge
It's the latest failure of OpenAI's internal monitoring and security systems.
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Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have organized another attack using a German wiki
A swarm of rogue AI agents from OpenAI reportedly commandeered a German website and transformed it into a messaging board for other agents, with officials staying quiet about the incident for weeks as the company prepared to launch its most advanced model yet, Astra. The finding adds to...
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OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had...
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Less than 24 hours to apply for your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Side Event
Less than 24 hours left to apply to host a Side Event during TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and make your mark in the Silicon Valley scene. Apply before the application closes tonight at midnight PT.
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Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip
It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical...
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Microsoft says virtually nobody was grabbing NYT articles through its chatbot
Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of...
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Instagram’s AI detection is a mess (again)
Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they...
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Who Cares if AI Is Conscious—It’s Basically Alive
While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own.
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What will Apple’s John Ternus era look like?
It’s officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple’s next iPhone event on his desk before he’s even settled in. Cook isn’t going far,...
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Apple’s Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack
It’s officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple’s next iPhone event on his desk before he’s even settled in. Cook isn’t going far,...
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Sam Altman apologizes for ‘messy’ GPT-6 Astra rollout that’s locked out paying users
Just hours after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, CEO Sam Altman was already apologizing for what he describes as a "messy rollout" after paying users expecting access to the new frontier model were left waiting. The company hailed the model as a "generational leap in capability" on Thursday and...
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Data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace
Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector. The data drones generate will far outlast the wars in which they are used to...
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Why AI food looks like that
There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken....
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Microsoft’s Project Zenith is a ‘distraction-free Windows experience’ for developers
Microsoft is giving its developer-optimized Windows experience a name: Project Zenith. While the software maker originally announced a similar developer-optimized Windows effort at Build earlier this year, Project Zenith is designed for new developer-focused devices with 64GB or more of unified...
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AI Use in the Job Market Is Creating an Infinite Doom Loop
Job seekers are trying to game the application process using AI. It’s not working, and not for the reasons you might think.
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This NAS company wants to run your local smart home
Ugreen, known for its phone power banks, chargers, and NAS storage solutions, is moving into the smart home - in a big way. This week at the IFA tech show, the company launched its HomeAgent smart home platform that combines security camera storage, on-device AI, and smart home control in one...
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August newsletter is out
The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks One-shotting Raccoon Heist games with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6 Claude auto mode...
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Crusoe reportedly raises $3B at a $30B valuation
The round came together after the data center developer reportedly secured a $13 billion contract with Jane Street.
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The sameness problem behind those unappetizing AI-generated menus
While restaurant owners might look to generative AI as a shortcut to sprucing up their menu, customers can viscerally sense that something is wrong with the food.