Reuters 2025 Digital News Report: in a first, Americans' top news source is social media, at 54%, overtaking TV, at 50%, and news websites and apps, at 48%  —  Plus: The pivot to video is really happening, digital subscriptions may have peaked, and other findings from RISJ's 2025 Digital News Report.

Sources: OpenAI wants Microsoft to take a ~33% stake in exchange for foregoing future profit rights, and seeks to modify its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft  —  Negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI over the startup's plan to restructure its for-profit unit, which requires Microsoft's approval …

Amazon plans to hold Prime Day 2025 from July 8 at 12:01am PT through July 11, lasting four days instead of the usual two and exclusive to Prime subscribers  —  Prime members will have even longer than usual to score some of the year's best tech deals.

Sources: xAI is in talks to raise $4.3B via an equity investment on top of the $5B in debt it's trying to borrow; of its previously raised $14B, it has $4B left  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion through an equity investment on top …

Memo: Intel's manufacturing VP says Intel plans to cut 15%-20% of factory staff from July “to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position”  —  Intel plans to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker's core businesses.

At Cannes, Meta adds AI tools to its Advantage+ suite for advertisers and agencies, including turning images into videos, video highlights, and Virtual Try-On  —  The new features include the ability to transform still images into video.  —  With the advertising world congregating this week …

The US Defense Department awards OpenAI a one-year $200M contract to develop prototype AI tools that address challenges in “warfighting and enterprise domains”  —  OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

The Meta AI app now shows a pop-up warning before users share to the public Discover feed, after reports showed accidentally shared chats with personal info  —  - Business Insider found that the Meta AI app's public feed was full of personal information that looked to be accidentally published.

German defense tech startup Helsing raised €600M led by Daniel Ek's Prima Materia, sources say at a ~€12B valuation, bringing its total funding to €1.37B  —  Defence start-up valued at €12bn to become one of Europe's most valuable tech groups

AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup Sword Health raised $40M led by General Catalyst at a $4B valuation, up from its $3B valuation from June 2024  —  Sword Health, an AI-powered digital health startup, has raised $40 million at a $4 billion valuation, a 33% jump from the $3 billion price tag it earned just a year ago.

Adobe debuts Firefly for iOS and Android, letting mobile users generate images and videos using text prompts and experiment with popular AI photo editing tools  —  The iPhone and Android Firefly app can sync AI image and video projects to desktops via Creative Cloud.

Shanghai-based MiniMax open sources MiniMax-M1, a model for complicated productivity tasks that supports 1M input tokens and it says beats DeepSeek's R1-0528  —  Chinese AI upstart MiniMax released a new large language model, joining a slew of domestic peers inspired to surpass DeepSeek in the field of reasoning AI.

[Thread] A US paper shows the best frontier LLM models solve 0% of hard coding problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI, domains where expert humans still excel  —  This is really BAD news of LLM's coding skill. ☹️ The best Frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel. LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI ("International [image]

Survey: US employees using AI at work at least a few times/year grows from 21% in 2023 to 40% in 2025, and those using AI a few times/week is up from 11% to 19%  —  The use of AI at work is accelerating.  In the past two years, the percentage of U.S. employees who say they have used AI …