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August 14, 2025, 3:10 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
More: Bloomberg Law.  Bluesky: @kurtwagner.  X: @paraga, @p0, @joshk, and @shiringhaffary
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 …
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 3:10 PM ET, August 14, 2025.

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From Mediagazer

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Arkansas PBS severs ties with the PBS network, the first state public TV system to do so since Congress cut CPB funds, citing the annual $2M+ membership cost

Financial Times:
OpenAI hopes the Disney deal boosts Sora, which has high costs and limited traction; Sensor Tower: users average 13 minutes per day on Sora vs. 90 on TikTok

Sara Guaglione / Digiday:
The Washington Post's new Your Personal Podcast, which offers AI-generated customizable podcasts, was developed under a multiyear agreement with ElevenLabs

More News

Kyt Dotson / SiliconANGLE:
The US NSF and Nvidia partner to fund the Open Multimodal Infrastructure to Accelerate Science project, led by Ai2; the NSF is contributing $75M and Nvidia $77M

Earlier Picks

Jaspreet Singh / Reuters:
Google plans to spend $9B in Oklahoma over two years on cloud and AI infrastructure, including on building a data center campus and expanding its Pryor facility
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
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”
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