Techmeme
July 15, 2025, 5:30 AM

Top News

Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Cognition acquires Windsurf, saying it will waive 100% of Windsurf employees' vesting cliffs and give them “fully accelerated vesting for their work to date”  —  The deal follows Google's $2.4 billion investment in Windsurf, an A.I. start-up, as companies race to gain technological talent and provide A.I. tools.
Eli Tan / New York Times:
Sources: Meta's new superintelligence lab led by Alexandr Wang discussed abandoning its top open-source model, Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model  —  Members of the lab, including the new chief A.I. officer, Alexandr Wang, have talked about abandoning Meta's most powerful open source …
Riley Griffin / Bloomberg:
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is building several multi-gigawatt “clusters”, starting with Prometheus, a massive datacenter that is scheduled to come online in 2026  —  Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company is building several massive data centers …
Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
Nvidia plans to resume H20 AI chip sales to China after the US assured it shipments will be approved, reversing an earlier Trump administration stance in April  —  US government officials told Nvidia they would green-light export licenses for the H20 artificial intelligence accelerator …
Deborah Sophia / Reuters:
The US DOD announces OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and xAI have each won contracts with a $200M ceiling, aimed at enabling agentic AI national security workflows  —  OpenAI, Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O), Anthropic and Elon Musk's AI firm xAI have won contracts aimed at scaling up adoption …
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
Reddit says it has started verifying UK users' ages before letting them “view certain mature content”, in order to comply with the country's Online Safety Act  —  Reddit announced today that it has started verifying UK users' ages before letting them “view certain mature content” …
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Alexey Shabanov / TestingCatalog:
Grok's iOS app now features two AI “Companions”, or 3D animated avatars that interact with users via voice, including Ani, an anime character with an NSFW mode  —  Grok on iOS just got 2 AI Companions with one more labelled as “Coming soon”.  Ani and Rudy are fully animated …
Riley Goodside / @goodside:
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
A look at SpaceX's investment and Tesla's potential cash infusion in xAI, and the idea that investing in Tesla is betting on the “Musk Mars Conglomerate”  —  Also the Windsurf deal, duct cleaning, tokenization and HYPE.  —  The Musk Mars Conglomerate
Andrew Orr / AppleInsider:
IDC: the global smartphone market grew 1% YoY in Q2, despite economic uncertainty and weak demand in China; Samsung led with 58M shipments, up 7.9% YoY  —  Apple shipped more iPhone models worldwide in Q2 2025  —  Apple posted a slight gain in global iPhone shipments in Q2, navigating falling demand in China with growth elsewhere.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google adds featured notebooks to NotebookLM from publications, including The Economist and The Atlantic, as well as professors, authors, and select works  —  Google is transforming its popular AI-powered research and note-taking assistant, NotebookLM, into more of a destination.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Meta says it has taken down around 10M Facebook profiles so far this year that were impersonating or repeatedly reusing content from large content producers  —  Meta announced on Monday that it will take additional measures to crack down on accounts sharing “unoriginal” content to Facebook …
Todd Bishop / GeekWire:
Amazon launches Kiro, an IDE that aims to bridge the gap between rapidly vibe-coded prototypes and production systems with specs, testing, and documentation  —  A new AI coding tool from Amazon uses agents to automatically create and update project plans and technical blueprints …

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Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Naga Avan-Nomayo / The Block:
Trisha Thadani / Washington Post: