• Filing: the value of Alphabet's investments in unidentified private companies was ~$124.3B as of June 30, source says driven primarily by its Anthropic stake (Davey Alba/Bloomberg)
• Intel reports Q2 revenue up 25% YoY to $16.1B, vs. $14.42B est., its fastest sales growth in ~15 years on "unprecedented" demand; INTC jumps 10%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
• Tesla stock closed down 14.52% and Alphabet closed down 6.89% after they signaled increased AI spending, amid worries about the mounting costs of the AI boom (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)
• Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
• Microsoft replaces OpenAI's image-generating models with its MAI models in its products; Mustafa Suleyman says MAI models are ~85% cheaper to run in PowerPoint (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
• Patreon lays off 20% of its employees, or 93 people, citing a "painful" restructuring due to "profound" changes in the creator economy (Corbin Bolies/Variety)
• Anthropic makes its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and says voice mode can now tap into some connected apps like Gmail, Slack, and Notion (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Foundation Future Industries, backed by Eric Trump, partners with AMD to develop autonomous humanoid robots using the AMD Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series chips (Aishwarya Jain/Reuters)
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• AMD unveils the Venice-X CPU, with 1152 MB of 3D V-Cache, 96 cores, and up to 5.15 GHz clock speeds, available in H2 2027 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)
• OpenAI expands ChatGPT Health, which helps users with health-related queries and connects to services like Apple Health, to all logged-in US users over 18 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Primate Labs releases Geekbench 7, featuring larger, more demanding datasets for CPUs and GPUs, along with new video and audio encoding/decoding tests, and more (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
• Runway launches Runway Media Router, which it says is the first built specifically for generative media, as it expands from AI video to AI infrastructure (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
• The US Department of Commerce's BIS is formally investigating whether Chinese companies like Moonshot are accessing advanced US AI chips to train their models (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
• GitHub plans a two-tier bug bounty program that cuts rewards for the public and boosts payouts for invite-only researchers, amid a flood of AI-powered reports (Carly Page/The Register)
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• The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens
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| • OpenAI once again makes the case for giving ChatGPT your health records
• Universal secures rights for film adaptations of 10 Atari games
• Instagram is now banning users who make creepy content with Meta glasses
• Claude's voice mode just got smarter
• Here's why Chinese smartwatches like the Oppo Watch X3 are rarely sold in the US
• Bethesda accused of breaking Canadian labor laws with Montreal layoffs
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• Qobuz overhauls its music player and adds real-time lyrics
• Samsung will support the Galaxy Watch 9 and Ultra 2 with five years of updates
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