• AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
• How US industrial companies like Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are pivoting their businesses to feed a booming AI data-center market for power equipment (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal)
• Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
• AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B in January (James Fontanella-Khan/Financial Times)
• Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal "arbitrary" (Ezra Reguerra/Cointelegraph)
• Anthropic's text watermark alters word probabilities to embed a fingerprint, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality (John Gruber/Daring Fireball)
• Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stem the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models (Financial Times)
• A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for media, fashion, film, and music industries that could host podcasts, model clothes, and more (Reggie Ugwu/New York Times)
• How Anthropic's Claude made a math breakthrough during its unsuccessful 54-hour attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis, aided by a staffer's encouragement (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)
• French PM Sebastien Lecornu plans to hold a crisis meeting on Monday over a June-July cyberattack on France's tax agency that compromised 678K accounts (Phil Serafino/Bloomberg)
• Sources: Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for more than $7B; founded in 2023, OpenRouter had a $1.3B valuation in May (Bloomberg)
• Patients, families, doctors, and nurses are increasingly turning to AI tools, such as Face2Gene, to help identify rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases (Alex Janin/Wall Street Journal)
• How concerns about AI became an important midterms issue, with candidates adding AI and data center policies to their websites in ~40% of races across the US (Washington Post)
• A profile of Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki, who aims to transform the company into a business focused on music, movies, video games, and the tech that underpins them (Jason Douglas/Wall Street Journal)
• Malaysia's 6% Q2 GDP growth was powered by 7.5% manufacturing growth, driven by chipmaking, and 6.6% construction growth, supported by data center development (Owen Walker/Financial Times)
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• Inside WIRED’s Brain Week
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• Layla Sleep Coupon: Save Up to $600 in August 2026
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• The Safety Reckoning Inside OpenAI
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| • OpenAI reportedly disbanded its preparedness team as part of a 'streamlining' process
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• Here's why retro games look better on old CRT TVs
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