Techmeme
August 14, 2025, 7:40 PM

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:
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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More News

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Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica:

Earlier Picks

Zac Bowden / Windows Central:
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