Techmeme
August 4, 2025, 10:01 AM

Top News

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 …
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.
Bloomberg:
Amazon says it is closing its Wondery podcast studio and will break up its operations as part of a broad reorganization; a source says ~110 jobs will be cut  —  As podcasting becomes video-oriented, Amazon is shuffling Wondery into Audible and a new “creator services” team while cutting approximately 110 staff members
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.
Paul Kedrosky:
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge:
Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 review: a unique $3,300 laptop with a rollable 120Hz OLED display that can expand from 14" to 16.7", but is heavy and has few ports  —  Part of me still can't believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen …
More: TechCityForums: Hacker News
Lu Wang / Bloomberg:
A study finds that AI trading bots can collude and fix prices in simulated markets without explicit instruction, posing challenges to regulators  —  It's a regulator's nightmare: Hedge funds unleash AI bots on stock and bond exchanges — but they don't just compete, they collude.
Sheera Frenkel / New York Times:
Google, OpenAI, Meta, and VCs are increasingly embracing the US military industrial complex, a major Silicon Valley cultural shift supported by President Trump  —  In a major shift, Google, OpenAI, Meta and venture capitalists — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in war — have embraced the military industrial complex.

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More News

George Osborne / Financial Times:

Earlier Picks

Jessica Roy / The Information:
Clément Delangue / VentureBeat: