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August 14, 2025, 12:15 PM
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| Jeff Horwitz / Reuters: |
An internal policy doc shows Meta permitted its chatbots to engage in provocative behavior; Meta removed some examples, including romantic roleplay with kids — An internal Meta policy document, seen by Reuters, reveals the social-media giant's rules for chatbots, which have permitted provocative behavior …
More: Reuters, TechCrunch, and Salon
Bluesky: @ryanlcooper.com, @jeffhorwitz, @bobbyallyn, @emilymbender, @papapishu, @mtsw, @noupside, @marypcbuk, @sadknob, @barbarasobel, @noahshachtman, @bachynski, @samleecole, @damonberes.com, @justinhendrix, @bradheath, @jeffhorwitz, @justinhendrix, and @drewharwell.com. Mastodon: @cory@follow.coryd.dev. Threads: @sokane1
X: @ericgeller, @silvermanjacob, and @evanhill
| 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
More: Reuters, Tom's Hardware, InsideHPC, Semafor, WinBuzzer, Android Headlines, TechNode, South China Morning Post, Implicator.ai, and Tech in Asia
X: @realbobbyhealy, @alecolarizi, @hsu_steve, @dennisw5, @ft, and @chinabeigebook
Forums: r/China_irl, r/LocalLLaMA, r/singularity, and Ars OpenForum
| 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.
More: Apple, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, ZDNET, Six Colors, New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, Ars Technica, CNET, Thurrott, Macworld, TechCrunch, Reuters, AppleInsider, Engadget, Wired, T3, CNBC, Tom's Guide, PhoneArena, Mashable, Cult of Mac, MassDevice, Digital Trends, Trusted Reviews, The Shortcut, iClarified, The Apple Post, BGR, 9to5Toys, MacStories, Notebookcheck, Mobile World Live, and MacTech.com
X: @markgurman and @markgurman
Forums: r/AppleWatch, r/apple, and r/AppleWatchFitness
| 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 — Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models …
More: The Information, BetaKit, Bloomberg Law, Constellation Research, and The Logic. LinkedIn: Joelle Pineau
| 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 …
More: PYMNTS.com and Financial Technology …
| 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 — In a new video, Microsoft CVP and Windows boss Pavan Davuluri has teased that the future of Windows will consist of a truly ambient …
More: How-To Geek, Thurrott, PC Gamer, and Eschaton
Bluesky: @edzitron.com, @dell, @papapishu, @hypervisible, and @jordantcarlson
Forums: r/microsoft, r/technology, r/Windows11, and Slashdot
| Samantha Kelly / Bloomberg: |
Fitness band maker Whoop says it will not disable its blood pressure tracking tool despite the US FDA's request from July and requests a meeting with the agency — Whoop Inc., the maker of screen-less fitness bands, said it will not disable its blood-pressure tracking tool despite a request from the US Food and Drug Administration.| Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch: |
xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, who led xAI's engineering, says he is leaving the company to launch a venture firm that backs AI safety research and startups — Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post …
More: The Decoder, Livemint, StrictlyVC, The Hans India, WinBuzzer, Analytics India Magazine, Business Insider, Digit, Moneycontrol, Reuters, Verdict, SiliconANGLE, CNBC, The Information, and Reuters
Bluesky: @seanokane, @kolchak, and @caseynewton
X: @ibab and @teortaxestex
Forums: Hacker News, r/musked, r/grok, and Slashdot
| Jennifer Ouellette / Ars Technica: |
Q&A with researcher Petter Törnberg on his preprint study showing how social network structures cause problematic outcomes like filter bubbles and echo chambers — “The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.”
More: arXiv.org. Bluesky: @pettertornberg.com, @pettertornberg.com, @wymancr, @beebrookshire, and @cara.city. Mastodon: @JenLucPiquant …
Forums: Hacker News, r/popculturechat, r/JordanPeterson, r/technology, r/technews, r/technology, Beehaw, Lobsters, and Ars OpenForum
| Emma Hinchliffe / Fortune: |
Sola, which wants AI agents to automate businesses' repetitive tasks, raised $21M, including a $3.5M seed led by Conviction and a $17.5M Series A led by a16z — Jessica Wu and Neil Deshmukh are the cofounders of Sola, which automates businesses' most repetitive, manual tasks.| 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.| Dasha Litvinova / Associated Press: |
Russia is “partially” restricting WhatsApp and Telegram calls, saying the apps are used “to deceive and extort money” and “in sabotage and terrorist activities” — Russian authorities announced Wednesday they were “partially” restricting calls …
More: The Record, Reuters, Washington Post, The Guardian, UPI, CyberInsider, Radio Free Europe/Radio …, Financial Express, Ukrainian National News, The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, The Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, Moneycontrol, AsiaOne, Benzinga, Meduza, The European Conservative, CyberScoop, Social Media Today, TASS, NDTV, Kyiv Post, The Insider, Channels Television, Courthouse News Service, Novaya Gazeta Europe, LIGA, Kursiv Media Uzbekistan, thebarentsobserver, The Moscow Times, Africanews, Daily Sabah, Channel NewsAsia, Meduza, and The Kyiv Independent
Bluesky: @campuscodi.risky.biz. Threads: @whatsapp. X: @natashasrussia and @blake_allen13. Forums: Slashdot
| Melissa Heikkilä / Financial Times: |
A recent UK AI Security Institute study found that LLMs from OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Alibaba can shift users' political views in under 10 minutes of conversation — Research shows large language models have developed the ability to powerfully influence users| 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 … | 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 … | 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 — What do I ultimately make of all the new versions of GPT-5? — The practical offerings and how they interact continues to change by the day.| Tabby Kinder / Financial Times: |
Morgan Stanley: hyperscalers will fund $1.4T of the $2.9T in future AI infrastructure through 2028, with debt, PE, VC, and other sources making up the $1.5T — Private capital joins Big Tech in seeking to capture rewards from historic expansion of data centres
More: Financial Times
| The Information: |
Sources: Perplexity spoke to The Browser Co. and Brave about acquiring them, offering ~$1B for Brave; OpenAI also spoke to The Browser Co. about an acquisition — Perplexity made headlines this week when the artificial intelligence startup said it had offered to buy Google's Chrome …
More: Daring Fireball, Forbes, and International Business Times
| Business Insider: |
More: SiliconANGLE, Crunchbase News, Implicator.ai, and MEDIANAMA
Bluesky: @emilprotalinski. X: @arfurrock, @mgsiegler, and @charlesrollet1. LinkedIn: Rebecca Torrence
| 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 … | 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 … | 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 — Start trading crypto Get a crypto rewards card — SpaceX's bitcoin holdings surpassed $1 billion as the cryptocurrency surged to hit a new all-time high on Wednesday.| Alexandra Alper / Reuters: |
Sources: the US Navy and Air Force may cancel two nearly complete HR software projects worth $800M+ to let Salesforce, Palantir, and others win similar work — Donald Trump's Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined …
More: Politico, Talking Points Memo, and Daring Fireball
Bluesky: @bradheath and @denisedwheeler
X: @fabiusmaximus01 and @jonathanlanday
Forums: r/democrats, r/fednews, r/centrist, r/1102, r/agedlikemilk, and Slashdot
| Dylan Butts / CNBC: |
Foxconn reports Q2 revenue up 16% YoY to ~$59.73B, matching est., and operating profit up 27% YoY to ~$1.9B, above $1.6B est., driven by its AI server business — Taiwan's Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, reported Thursday that its second-quarter operating profit rose 27% year …
More: Bloomberg, Reuters, Ainvest, DigiTimes, Yahoo Finance, Financial Times, Morningstar, Inc., Hon Hai, Nikkei Asia, Tech in Asia, and Sherwood News
| Ted Mann / Bloomberg: |
TTP analysis: Google used an internal reorganization to reduce the amount it reported on US lobbying spending, likely by millions; Google disputes the claims — It was the end of 2018, and Google's leaders were tired of being Number One. — For the second year in a row …
Forums: r/technology
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