• AI agents are moving online course cheating beyond chatbot-written essays via commands like "log in and complete my quiz"; major chatbots did not refuse prompts (New York Times)
• Sources: Microsoft plans to unveil its next-gen Maia 300 AI chip this fall, potentially as soon as September, and is negotiating with TSMC to make 300K+ in 2027 (The Information)
• Analysis: the 256GB iPhone 18 Pro is set to have a bill of materials cost ~38% higher than the iPhone 17 Pro due to memory prices; memory's BOM share hits 34% (TrendForce)
• Anthropic, Macquarie, and Singapore's GIC form Theseus Infrastructure to develop AI computing sites; Anthropic will cover consumer electricity price hikes (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)
• Google adds Venmo as a payment option on Google Play for games, apps, add-ons, subscriptions, and more in the US, adding to support for PayPal and Cash App (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Intel announces a $15B common stock offering, with proceeds going to general corporate purposes, like "maintaining a strong balance sheet"; INTC falls 4%+ (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)
• South Korea plans to launch a ~$3.5B chip fund for promising materials, parts, equipment, and fabless companies, and speed the development of domestic chip hubs (Reuters)
• Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor, which aims to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, is in advanced talks to raise ~$1.5B at an $8B valuation (Financial Times)
• Sources: the AI-driven memory chip shortage has kicked off a rush of DC lobbying; many US officials appear unsympathetic to Apple's desire to buy Chinese chips (New York Times)
• As AI salaries intensify competition in San Francisco's rental market, CoStar says average asking rent is up 18% in under two years to $3,728/month, passing NYC (Wall Street Journal)
• Q&A with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on his vision to "financialize everything", sports betting, Kalshi's "philosophical misalignment" with Polymarket, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)
• The UK's Report Remove service receives 420 reports from under-18s of explicit images digitally faked or manipulated to depict them in H1, exceeding 2025's 397 (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)
• Meta says Muse Glimmer has 30B parameters and is "small enough" to need only one GPU; Meta plans a $1B fund to invest in US communities near its data centers (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)
• Mark Zuckerberg criticizes "closed" AI model makers, says AI labs are espousing a "discourse ... so filled with doom", and defends distillation as a principle (Jamie John/Financial Times)
• Meta releases Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model, and plans to launch an open-weight version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, in the coming weeks (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)
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