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:
Zuckerberg's Disappointment, OpenAI's Equity Gamble, Alex Karp's Rally Cry
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:
Fable Ban Reversed + Dr. Dana Suskind on Parenting With A.I. + Prediction Market Drama
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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The Upstarts Podcast:
Blitzy's Brian Elliott: Cursor And Claude Code Are Looking At Your Enterprise Code 'Through A Straw'
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
The Nick, Dick and Paul Show:
Re-Release: The Death of Hollywood? W/ Allan Loeb
Nick Bilton, Dick Costolo, and Paul Kedrosky pull back the curtain on AI, startups, and the future rushing toward us, all with healthy dose of irreverence.
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Great Chat:
Maybe Twitter isn't real life
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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Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
 

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More News

Daniel Kim / Cerebras:

Earlier Picks

Tom Warren / The Verge:
Ryan Browne / CNBC: