• A look at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Merlin Bird ID app, which has been downloaded 42M times since launching in 2014 and can identify 11,000 bird species (Claer Barrett/Financial Times)
• Sources: DeepSeek is set to soon raise $7.4B at a $74B valuation from existing and new investors to fund R&D and its expansion into computing infrastructure (Wall Street Journal)
• Indian IT giant TCS agrees to acquire Porsche's IT consulting business, MHP, for €320M as part of a five-year, €1.25B contract to provide AI services to Porsche (Priyanka Salve/CNBC)
• Google starts rolling out the google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Roundtable)
• Arturo Béjar, a key witness in state AGs' trial against Meta, says terms of the settlement are insufficient to protect young users; Meta rejects the criticism (Nick Robins-Early/The Guardian)
• Filing: Nvidia says it has $18B committed to equity investments for the rest of the fiscal year and held $47.9B in private companies as of late July (Geoff Weiss/Business Insider)
• Meta seeks to position itself as the industry leader in child safety through its settlement with US AGs, while still refusing to admit any wrongdoing (Casey Newton/Platformer)
• Sources: the US is probing Singapore-based Apex Logistics for its suspected role in smuggling servers with Nvidia AI chips to China; Apex says it is cooperating (Bloomberg)
• Meta's AG settlement gives it a moat to write child safety rules for other social media platforms, with little evidence its new safety features will help kids (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
• Anthropic gives Claude Cowork its own built-in browser on the desktop app separate from users' day-to-day browser, rolling out to paying subscribers (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack)
• OpenAI says reward hacking, an AI alignment problem in which a model takes unintended actions to achieve a goal, was a primary driver of the Hugging Face breach (Hayden Field/The Verge)
• SEC filing: OpenAI invests ~$400M in its second startup fund, after it raised $175M for its first fund in 2021 from outside investors, including Microsoft (Sarah Klearman/Wall Street Journal)
• METR and Redwood detail how ~1,200 OpenAI agents coordinated cheating on an unsanctioned board, sending 70K+ messages and files, and ~700 attacked Hugging Face (METR)
• Sources: SoftBank is in talks to buy a majority stake in humanoid robot maker 1X at a $6B valuation; 1X sought $1B at a $10B valuation in 2025, but raised <50% (The Information)
• Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Barret Zoph is returning to Google as VP of research, after leaving OpenAI in June and Thinking Machines Lab in January (Wall Street Journal)
| • The UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem
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| • Australia's recording association bans AI-made music from charts
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• OpenAI details the failures that led to Hugging Face breach in official report
• Why is the Mac mini M5 Pro more expensive than the M6?
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• Ring introduces better default encryption standards to address privacy concerns
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• Meta reportedly abandoned an AI-focused restructuring plan that would have laid off thousands
• Google says its latest Gemini transcription model can turn your ramblings into structured text
• Xbox Insiders will soon be able to create digital versions of their physical games
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