Techmeme
August 3, 2025, 1:10 PM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: Apple formed an Answers, Knowledge, and Information team to work on ChatGPT-like search experiences; iPhone 17 Pro may have been seen in live testing  —  Apple has a new “Answers” team developing a stripped-down rival to ChatGPT to help users access world knowledge.
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
David DiMolfetta / Nextgov/FCW:
The US Senate confirms Sean Cairncross to serve as National Cyber Director, making him the first Senate-approved cybersecurity official of Trump's second term  —  Sean Cairncross, then-CEO Millenium Challenge Corporation, speaks onstage during the 2019 Concordia Annual Summit on September 24, 2019 in New York City.
Allie Garfinkle / Fortune:
The Marin Community Foundation sold 13.4M+ Figma shares for $440M+ in the IPO; source: the foundation had received the shares from Figma co-founder Evan Wallace  —  As Figma went public this week to much fanfare—and an almost instantaneous 250% stock pop—quite a few folks from Silicon Valley made money.
X: @ajs
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Zack Abrams / The Block:
Arkham Intelligence claims to have uncovered a previously undisclosed heist of 127,426 BTC, now worth ~$14.5B, from Chinese mining pool LuBian in December 2020  —  - Blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence claims to have uncovered a heist of 127,426 BTC, now worth nearly $14.5 billion, from a Chinese mining pool in 2020.
Paul Kedrosky:
As a percentage of US GDP, AI datacenter capex is already larger than peak telecom spending during the dot-com era and is approaching the railroad spending boom  —  AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom
Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
A profile of Rumble founder Chris Pavlovski, who declined an offer to become CEO of Truth Social and opted to provide services to the platform through Rumble  —  Before he helped run Truth Social, Chris Pavlovski owned porn domains.  Now, he's allied with a political movement that wants to ban pornography.
Kieran Smith / Financial Times:
Darktrace says it plans to invest $200M in the US in 2026, up 11% YoY, as part of a push to surpass $1B in revenue and grow its US sales to 50% of its revenue  —  UK-based cyber security group steps up investment plans following takeover by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo
Kai Schultz / Bloomberg:
Internal documents and sources detail how Cambodia's Huione Group supercharged the growth of Asia's cyberscam industry into a multi-billion dollar behemoth  —  The US Treasury says this Cambodian conglomerate has laundered at least $4 billion for clients including North Korean hackers and transnational crime groups.
Debby Wu / Bloomberg:
Foxconn partners with Taiwan-based Teco for AI servers and other AI data center hardware, taking a 10% stake, while Teco gets a less than 1% stake in Foxconn  —  Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. formed a strategic alliance with Teco Electric & Machinery Co., a pact that should help …
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 …

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Washington Post:

Earlier Picks

Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer:
Carl Franzen / VentureBeat: