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August 4, 2025, 6:00 PM
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Top News

Cloudflare:
Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules and network blocks  —  We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine.  Although Perplexity initially crawls …
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Silicon Valley has shifted from Web 2.0 to a new “hard tech”, AI-dominated era with fewer perks and a more serious mood, as startups use San Francisco as a base  —  In a scene in HBO's “Silicon Valley” in 2014, a character who had just sold his idea to a fictional tech company …
Natallie Rocha / New York Times:
How 20-something CEOs like Cognition AI's Scott Wu, Cursor's Michael Truell, Cluely's Roy Lee, and Scale AI's Alexandr Wang are swarming San Francisco's AI boom  —  Some dropped out of M.I.T., Georgetown and Stanford.  Others decided not to go to college.  They all say they could not afford …
Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Lyft partners with Baidu to launch autonomous vehicles in Germany and the UK in 2026, pending regulatory approval; Lyft will deploy Baidu's sixth-gen robotaxis  —  Lyft Inc. said it's partnering with China's Baidu Inc. to launch autonomous vehicles in Europe starting next year …
Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget:
OpenAI says ChatGPT now offers “gentle reminders” to take breaks during long sessions, and it is building tools to better detect signs of emotional distress  —  OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will now remind users to take breaks if they're in a particularly long chat with AI.
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
OpenAI says it will hit 700M weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500M in March and up 4x YoY, and has 5M paying business users, up from June's 3M  —  OpenAI is set to hit 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500 million in March …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Elon Musk says Vine's video archive is being brought back, and xAI's newly launched Grok Imagine, available to X Premium+ subscribers, is “AI Vine”  —  Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine — sort of.  The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered …
Bloomberg:
Amazon denies it's closing its Wondery podcast studio but says it will break up its operations; source: ~110 people will lose their jobs because of the reorg  —  As podcasting becomes video-oriented, Amazon is shuffling Wondery into Audible and a new “creator services” team while cutting approximately 110 staff members
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
Spotify says it is updating prices across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific; an example email had a €1/month rise  —  Spotify Technology SA shares gained in premarket trading after the company announced it's raising premium subscription prices across many markets outside the US.
Anthony Hughes / Bloomberg:
Source: Figma considered a higher IPO price, but its CEO wanted to bring on board certain long-term institutional shareholders and signed off on $33 per share  —  Figma Inc.'s record-breaking debut gains are cooling, but they have still handed a windfall to investors including the select institutions …
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Transcripts from the trial over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash: Tesla withheld crash‑snapshot data and took years to admit it existed or was relevant to the case  —  Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week.
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Google unveils Kaggle Game Arena, a benchmarking platform where AI models compete head-to-head in strategic games, starting with a chess tournament this week  —  The world's top performing artificial intelligence models, including OpenAI's o3 and 04-mini, Google LLC's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash …
Matt Kapko / CyberScoop:
CrowdStrike's 2025 Threat Hunting Report: 320+ investigations into North Korean operatives in remote IT jobs in the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the past year  —  Threat hunters saw North Korean operatives almost daily, reflecting a 220% year-over-year increase in activity, CrowdStrike said in a new report.
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 48% YoY to $1B, vs. $940M expected, and boosts full-year outlook guidance to $4.14B-$4.15B, up from $3.89B-$3.90B  —  Palantir topped Wall Street's estimates Monday, surpassing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and hiking its full-year guidance.
Dan Milmo / The Guardian:
The UK Online Safety Act's approach to keeping children safe online has become a rallying point for the right in the UK and the US over alleged censorship  —  Farage accuses government of being ‘so below the belt’ as right wing doubles down on censorship claims  —  The UK's Online Safety Act has been greatly anticipated.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Google says Big Sleep, its vulnerability research tool “powered by Gemini”, found 20 flaws in various popular open-source software projects  —  Google's AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities.  —  Heather Adkins, Google's vice president …
Noah Smith / Noahpinion:
How the AI data center building boom could cause a financial crisis akin to 2008, including the rising use of short-term debt financing via private credit funds  —  This time let's think about a financial crisis before it happens.  —  The U.S. economic data for the last few months is looking decidedly meh.

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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:00 PM ET, August 4, 2025.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Noor Nanji / BBC:
The BBC apologizes to President Trump for a Panorama episode that spliced parts of his January 6 speech together but rejects his demands for compensation

Tony Maglio / The Hollywood Reporter:
Bob Iger says upcoming changes to Disney+ include “game-like features” and “mostly short-form” user-generated content made with generative AI

Wall Street Journal:
Sources: the first-round bid deadline for WBD is November 20; Paramount wants the full company, and Comcast and Netflix are eying movie/TV studios and HBO Max

More News

Lauren Thomas / Wall Street Journal:
Connecticut-based Amphenol plans to acquire North Carolina-based CommScope's broadband connectivity and cable unit for ~$10.5B, including debt, amid the AI boom
Monique Mulima / Bloomberg:
Bullish, a digital asset exchange and CoinDesk's owner, plans to sell 20.3M shares at $28 to $31 in a US IPO, raising up to $629.3M at an up to ~$4.2B valuation
Wall Street Journal:
Disney is grappling with using AI in its filmmaking process while protecting its characters against it, plus legal uncertainty, fan backlash, and union concerns

Earlier Picks

George Osborne / Financial Times:
Former UK Chancellor and Coinbase Advisory Council member George Osborne says the UK missed the first crypto wave and risks missing the stablecoin-driven second
Lu Wang / Bloomberg:
Simulated markets study: without explicit instruction, AI trading bots collude to fix prices, hoard profits, and sideline human traders, a regulatory challenge
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