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August 18, 2025, 12:30 AM
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Mediagazer
memeorandum
WeSmirchTop News
| Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: |
Sources: Meta may debut “Hypernova” smart glasses with display for ~$800 in Sept.; Apple slow-walks releasing immersive video it shot around Vision Pro's debut — Apple has slow-walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro.
More: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, 9to5Mac, Digit, Appleosophy, The Verge, Philip Elmer‑DeWitt, iThinkDifferent, PhoneArena, AppleInsider, UploadVR, PhoneArena, iClarified, Digital Trends, Benzinga, Wccftech, and TweakTown
X: @heaney555, @skarredghost, @_thejasonc, @9to5mac, @markgurman, @heaney555, @vadimyuryev, @lunayian, @markgurman, @nathievr, and @justinryanio
Forums: r/VisionPro, r/RaybanMeta, and r/augmentedreality
| Kevin Collier / NBC News: |
AI is increasingly being used in hacking, with cybercriminals using AI to enhance their capabilities and cybersecurity firms using it to find vulnerabilities — Hackers and cybersecurity companies have entered an AI arms race. — This summer, Russia's hackers put a new twist on the barrage of phishing emails sent to Ukrainians.
Bluesky: @kevincollier
| Ashley Capoot / CNBC: |
A profile of Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner, who has led the EHR software company for 46 years, building it into one of the largest US private tech companies — Do not go public. Do not acquire or be acquired. Software must work. — These are the first three of the 10 commandments … | Himanshi Akhand / Reuters: |
Australia's ACCC says Google agreed pay a ~$36M fine over deals from 2019-2021 with Telstra and Optus to pre-install only Google Search on Android phones — Australia's competition regulator said on Monday it has begun proceedings against Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) over its past deals …
More: Australian Competition …, Reuters, Capital Brief, Mediaweek, 9News, Proactiveinvestors UK, and Cyber Daily. Forums: r/australia
| Politico: |
A look at OpenAI's campaign over the past year to secure its transition from a nonprofit, led by a team of Democratic insiders in California — SAN FRANCISCO — Sam Altman, the driving force behind ChatGPT's meteoric rise, is running a team of veteran political operatives, campaigning to secure his company OpenAI's future.
More: ZeroHedge News
| Anthropic: |
Anthropic enables Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to end conversations in “cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions”; users can still start new chats — We recently gave Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 the ability to end conversations in our consumer chat interfaces.
More: TechCrunch, BleepingComputer, Engadget, The Decoder, and Blockchain.News
Bluesky: @evijit.io, @quinnypig.com, @mmasnick, @paleofuture, @carnage4life, @mariadagloriaii, @pekka, and @timkellogg.me. Mastodon: @tommorris@mastodon.social
X: @aisafetymemes, @aisafetymemes, @elonmusk, @elonmusk, @anthropicai, @rough__sea, @jmbollenbacher, @caleb_cassell, and @roguewpa. LinkedIn: Sergio Marrero
Forums: Hacker News, r/Futurology, r/technews, r/technology, r/ClaudeAI, r/artificial, r/ArtificialSentience, and r/singularity
| Financial Times: |
GPT-5's underwhelming performance on benchmarks suggests that the current approach of scaling LLMs is starting to reach the limits of available resources — OpenAI's underwhelming new GPT-5 model suggests progress is slowing — and competition in the space is changing
More: Washington Post, The Future, Now and Then, Fortune India, and CNET
Bluesky: @carnage4life, @anita, @endblock, @axellycan, @dominicervolina.com, and @thiagokrause. Mastodon: @colincornaby@mastodon.social
X: @jacksonatkinsx, @emollick, @apples_jimmy, @swyx, @petergostev, and @shashj
| Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal: |
A look at the “Palantir Mafia”, a group of Palantir alumni who have started or are leading 350+ tech companies, including at least a dozen valued at $1B+ — The network connects founders and venture capitalists with ‘Palantir Pals’ and a Russian River camping trip| Patrick Howell O'Neill / Bloomberg: |
Interview with Trent Brunson, R&D director at cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, which won $3M and 2nd place in DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge, behind Team Atlanta — Last week, the Pentagon's long AI Cyber Challenge, or AIxCC, came to a head onstage in Las Vegas.
| Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: |
PitchBook: 15.9% of VC-backed deals in 2025 so far have been down rounds, a 10-year high, with AI and ML startups accounting for 29.3% of the down rounds — Chime executives, along with family, celebrating the company's IPO at the Nasdaq. — The soaring valuations of the early 2020s are, finally, coming back to earth.| Asa Fitch / Wall Street Journal: |
Big Tech's reverse acquihires for AI talent are hollowing out startups and eroding the culture that has made Silicon Valley an unparalleled source of innovation — Tech companies' scramble for AI talent uses unorthodox methods that imperil Silicon Valley's startup culture| Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: |
A new Artificial Analysis benchmark, focusing on OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, shows how open-weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across hosting providers — Artificial Analysis published a new benchmark the other day, this time focusing on how an individual model - OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b - performs across different hosted providers.
More: Artificial Analysis. Bluesky: @simonwillison.net. X: @dkundel, @emostaque, and @andrewlekashman
| Maxine Bernstein / Oregonian: |
Ex-Intel engineer Varun Gupta was sentenced to two years' probation and fined $34K+ for stealing trade secrets and sharing them with his new employer Microsoft — An engineer who stole trade secrets from Intel and shared them with his new bosses at Microsoft was sentenced Tuesday to two years … | Nikkei Asia: |
How Chinese streaming giants iQiyi and Tencent are gaining on Netflix in Southeast Asia through original productions and free, ad-supported services — BANGKOK/SHANGHAI — Chinese streaming services are catching up with American rivals in the Southeast Asian market, with giants iQiyi …
More: South China Morning Post
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