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August 14, 2025, 7:40 PM
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Top News

Bloomberg:
Sources: the Trump administration is in talks with Intel to have the US government potentially take a stake in the company; INTC jumps 6%+ after hours  —  The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government potentially take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker …
Jeff Horwitz / Reuters:
An internal Meta policy doc had portions permitting its chatbots to hold “sensual” chats with kids, which Meta later removed, offer false medical info, and more  —  An internal Meta policy document, seen by Reuters, reveals the social-media giant's rules for chatbots …
Victoria Song / The Verge:
Apple rolls out a software update that enables a redesigned blood oxygen monitoring feature for its Watch Series 9, 10, and Ultra 2, circumventing the ITC ban  —  Apple will be rolling out a redesigned version of the feature to the Series 9, 10 and Ultra 2 today.
Wired:
Sources: xAI was part of a US government AI initiative alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, but was removed after Grok posted antisemitic content in July  —  Internal emails obtained by WIRED show a hasty process to onboard OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI providers to the federal government. xAI …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Bluesky revises its policies and Community Guidelines to comply with new regulations, including the EU DSA, UK Online Safety Act, and US Take It Down Act  —  Two years after launching, social network Bluesky is revising its Community Guidelines and other policies, and asking for feedback from its users on some of the changes.
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Google launches Flight Deals, an AI tool within Google Flights to let users find fares using natural language queries, in beta in the US, Canada, and India  —  Google on Thursday announced a new AI-powered search tool to help travelers find flight deals — even as regulators continue …
Google Developers Blog:
Google announces Gemma 3 270M, a compact model designed for task-specific fine-tuning with strong capabilities in instruction following and text structuring  —  The last few months have been an exciting time for the Gemma family of open models.  We introduced Gemma 3 and Gemma 3 QAT …
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Toronto-based Cohere raised $500M led by Radical and Inovia at a $6.8B valuation, up from $5.5B in July 2024, and has doubled its ARR to $100M so far in 2025  —  Canadian group recruits ex-Uber and Meta executives and boosts valuation to $6.8bn  —  Artificial intelligence start-up Cohere …
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Cohere hires Joelle Pineau, who previously led Meta's FAIR lab, as Chief AI Officer, to oversee AI strategy across Cohere's research, product, and policy teams
Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and 80+ fintech and crypto CEOs urge Trump to block US banks from charging fees to access customer data  —  Top fintech and crypto executives urged the Trump administration to block US banks from charging fees for access to customer data …
New York Times:
SCOTUS rejects NetChoice's emergency appeal to block a Mississippi law that requires age verification and parental consent for teens to join social networks  —  A trade group representing sites like Facebook and X said the law ran afoul of the First Amendment.
Financial Times:
Sources: DeepSeek R2's launch delay is due to training issues on Huawei Ascend chips, prompting a switch to Nvidia chips for training and Huawei's for inference  —  Difficulties of training the start-up's latest system with Huawei's semiconductors highlight dependence on Nvidia
Bloomberg:
Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal launches Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for AI agents to search the web, raising $30M from Khosla Ventures and others  —  Parag Agrawal says AI agents are the target customers for his new startup, Parallel.  —  No one would have blamed Parag Agrawal if …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Lambda is in talks for a funding round that could value the cloud services company between $4B and $5B ahead of a potential IPO by the end of 2025  —  Lambda Inc., a cloud infrastructure firm which counts Nvidia Corp. among its backers, is in talks with investors about a funding round …
New York Times:
A deep dive into Big Tech's AI energy boom as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google become major players, leading to fears of it driving up individuals' and SMBs' bills  —  A transmission line running near data centers in Ashburn, Va. As the electricity demands of the structures rapidly escalate …
The Information:
Sources: chip startup Rivos, which plans to release a GPU for inference as early as 2026, is seeking to raise between $400M and $500M at a $2B+ valuation  —  Rivos, a chip startup that aims to compete with Nvidia, is seeking to raise between $400 million and $500 million, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google rolls out Sensitive Content Warnings in Messages for Android to blur nude images for signed-in users on-device, powered by Android System SafetyCore  —  Google Messages for Android has now rolled out Sensitive Content Warnings that blur nude images.  —  In the Messages app …
Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE:
The US NSF and Nvidia partner for an Ai2-led project to build open AI models to accelerate scientific discovery; the NSF is contributing $75M and Nvidia $77M  —  The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced a new partnership with Nvidia Corp. to develop artificial intelligence models designed …
Rob Copeland / New York Times:
How Wall Street is embracing crypto, spurred in part by political opportunism, as some executives fear the rush may risk the safety of personal bank accounts  —  The reversal risks declawing a century of consumer financial protections and replacing the backbone of bank accounts.

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:40 PM ET, August 14, 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

David Folkenflik / NPR:
Former NPR President and CEO Kevin Klose, who also had been Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post, died Wednesday at 85 from Alzheimer's complications

Todd Spangler / Variety:
At a US Senate hearing on Paramount-WBD, Mark Ruffalo said the merger threatens the free press and democracy; Sen. Chuck Schumer called the merger a “nightmare”

Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
How UK tabloids, which once held a powerful grip on the national discourse, are struggling in an era of social media feeds, AI, and influencer-driven content

More News

Danny Park / The Block:
Arkham Intelligence: SpaceX holds 8,285 bitcoin, worth ~$1.02B, down from 28K bitcoin worth $1.8B in April 2021, after cutting its holdings by ~70% in mid-2022
Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica:
Q&A with researcher Petter Törnberg on his preprint study saying social media's dysfunctions, like echo chambers, may stem from its architecture, not algorithms

Earlier Picks

Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
Microsoft Windows head Pavan Davuluri says the next Windows version will be more ambient, more pervasive, and more multi-modal, as voice becomes more important
Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase:
GPT-5 review: GPT-5-Thinking is a substantial upgrade over o3-pro, Auto is only useful for free tier users, picking the right model still matters, and more
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