Techmeme
August 2, 2025, 11:55 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the researcher who declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B+ package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch  —  The loyalties and larger-than-life figures prompting some people to turn down insanely lucrative offers in Silicon Valley right now
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
An in-depth look at the rise of relationships between humans and AI companion chatbots on apps like Nomi, coinciding with a loneliness epidemic in the US  —  Nikolai Daskalov lives alone in a small house in rural Virginia.  His preferred spot is a brown suede recliner in the middle …
Jonathan Greig / The Record:
SentinelOne researchers detail over 10 offensive cybersecurity patents filed by Shanghai Firetech, a company allegedly involved in Beijing's Silk Typhoon hacks  —  Researchers have discovered more than 10 patents for powerful offensive cybersecurity technologies filed by a prominent Chinese …
Washington Post:
How Palantir has benefited since President Trump took office, securing new and expanded government contracts and becoming the S&P's top-performing stock of 2025  —  From warfighting and tracking deportations to writing State Department cables with AI, the company is benefiting …
Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Anthropic cited OpenAI's use of Claude Code “ahead of the launch of GPT-5” but says it will provide API access to OpenAI for benchmarking and safety evaluations  —  Anthropic says it has revoked OpenAI's access to the Claude API after ChatGPT's engineers were found using Claude's coding tools.
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat:
Manus unveils Wide Research, an experimental feature that lets users on its Pro plan enlist dozens of parallelized AI agents for large-scale, high-volume tasks  —  Chinese AI startup Manus, which made headlines earlier this year for its approach to a multi-agent orchestration platform for consumers and …
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Lina Khan cites Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny, saying letting startups grow independently, rather than be acquired, can generate “enormous value”  —  A surprising figure is celebrating Figma's successful IPO: Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal:
@semianalysis_:
Microsoft's latest 10-K shows that the company's committed datacenter construction is down YoY, with almost no new leases signed in the past 12 months  —  Microsoft datacenter strategy - still in⏸️mode 🧵 @JeremieEO Four months ago we flagged Microsoft's pause on more than 1.5 GW of self-build capacity — on top of the leasing freeze we called out in December. Microsoft's latest 10-K backs us up: committed datacenter construction [image]
Bloomberg:
Analysis: since April 2, President Trump has excluded over $100B in US smartphone and laptop imports from tariffs, highlighting conflicting administration goals  —  Exclusions reflect conflicting goals: to rip up the rules of global trade while cushioning US consumers.
Anthropic:
Anthropic details “persona vectors”, patterns of activity within an AI model's neural network that control its character traits, such as evil and sycophancy  —  Read the paper  —  Language models are strange beasts.  In many ways they appear to have human-like “personalities” …

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Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:
OpenAI Bailout?, Elon's $1 Trillion Pay Deal, Amazon Sues Perplexity
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Hard Fork:
We Met NEO, the Viral Humanoid Robot + HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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Spotlight On:
Q&A with Zhenya Loginov: the Euro founder flywheel, 2025 IPOs, and leveling up from PLG
A podcast from Accel about how companies are built, from the people doing the building.
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Decoder with Nilay Patel:
How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education
A show from the Verge about big ideas - and other problems.
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Great Chat:
Tech is getting more political—should you?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Dylan Field from Figma
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
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More News

Daniel Kim / Cerebras:

Earlier Picks

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Ryan Browne / CNBC: