Threads launches a fediverse feed and a way to search for fediverse users, with support for Mastodon and others, for users who turned on fediverse sharing  —  A dedicated feed, and better search, will make social web content much more visible in Threads.

Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time streaming was king of TV over a full month  —  In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said.

Google makes Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro generally available and introduces 2.5 Flash-Lite, which it says is its most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet  —  Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro are now generally available, and we're introducing 2.5 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet.

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: 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 …

Waymo expands its coverage area in San Francisco and LA by 80 square miles each, bringing its total coverage area in California to 250 square miles  —  The company's robotaxis are now operating across 250 square miles of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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

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.

Salesforce says it will increase prices on many products in August, including Slack; major product lines will see a 6% increase on average  —  List prices will go up by an average of 6% for major product lines in August, the company said in a statement Tuesday.  The cost of the workplace communications tool Slack will also rise.

Self-driving simulation software maker Applied Intuition raised $600M co-led by BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins at a $15B valuation, up from $6B in March 2024  —  The company raised $600 million from investors as it prepares for an eventual IPO. … The financing, which the company plans to announce Tuesday …

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.

[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]

Sports data company Teamworks raised a $235M Series F led by Dragoneer at a $1B+ valuation; its tech is used by 6.5K+ sports teams including all NFL teams  —  Teamworks has raised $235 million in a new funding round that pushes the value of the sports data company to more than $1 billion.