• OpenAI says ChatGPT Voice can now be powered by GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and Luna, use plugins like email and calendar, and be used in ChatGPT Work on web and mobile (@openai)
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• Pilgrim, whose device combines air sampling and genomic sequencing to detect biological threats, raised a $25M seed led by Buckley at a $150M valuation (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
• Disney raises Disney+ and Hulu prices, the fourth price hike in as many years; the ad-free tiers will each cost $21.49/month, an increase of $2.50 (Rick Porter/The Hollywood Reporter)
• Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS, its "most expressive audio generation models yet", with support for more than 100 languages (Google)
• Q&A with Jensen Huang on AI creating more jobs than it destroys, pushing back against AI doomerism, Chinese open models, the Hugging Face acquisition, and more (Ezra Klein/New York Times)
• At its Accelerate conference, Amazon says it is opening its seller tools to third-party AI agents, starting with Claude, in beta for US merchants (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
• YouTube to Live Stream Coachella Through 2030, Outbidding Rivals (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)
• At its Made on YouTube event, YouTube unveils Custom Feeds, an LLM-powered feature that lets users generate and save tailored homepage video feeds, for US users (Reece Rogers/Wired)
• YouTube rolls out tools for microdramas, an AI storytelling assistant for script analysis, video A/B-testing, and more, as it battles Netflix over top creators (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)
• Seattle-based satellite startup Hubble, which is working to enable global Bluetooth connectivity, raised $200M at a $1.6B valuation, for $300M in total funding (Sana Pashankar/Bloomberg)
• Sony Music becomes the first music company to join ARIAM, which advocates for responsible AI adoption in the creative industry and includes the NYT and Disney (Corbin Bolies/Variety)
• London-based AI life sciences startup Basecamp Research raised a $140M Series C led by S32, with participation from Anthropic, taking its total funding to $225M (John Reynolds/Tech.eu)
• Bessemer raised $5.75B, allocating $4B to growth-stage funding, including young companies raising large rounds at high valuations, and $1.75B for early-stage (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)
• HypeAuditor: OpenAI doubled its sponsored Instagram posts promoting ChatGPT from 61 in June to 122 in July, rising again to 141 in August, as it seeks new users (Business Insider)
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| • Disney+ and Hulu are getting even more expensive (again)
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• Meta Connect 2026 live: Updates from Mark Zuckerberg's keynote on AI glasses, VR and more
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