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August 17, 2025, 2:55 PM
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| 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, The Decoder, and Blockchain.News
Bluesky: @paleofuture, @evijit.io, @mmasnick, @carnage4life, @mariadagloriaii, @pekka, and @timkellogg.me. Mastodon: @tommorris@mastodon.social
X: @roguewpa, @aisafetymemes, @aisafetymemes, @elonmusk, @anthropicai, @elonmusk, @rough__sea, @jmbollenbacher, and @caleb_cassell. 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: The Future, Now and Then, Washington Post, Fortune India, and CNET
Bluesky: @carnage4life, @anita, @endblock, @axellycan, @dominicervolina.com, and @thiagokrause. Mastodon: @colincornaby@mastodon.social
X: @petergostev, @swyx, and @shashj
| Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: |
Sources: Apple slow-walks immersive content it shot around the launch of Vision Pro; Meta may launch “Hypernova” smart glasses with display for ~$800 next month — Apple has slow-walked the release of immersive video, creating a conundrum for the Vision Pro.
More: MacRumors, UploadVR, Digital Trends, iClarified, PhoneArena, Philip Elmer‑DeWitt, AppleInsider, and Streaming Better
X: @nathievr, @heaney555, @markgurman, @lunayian, and @markgurman
Forums: r/VisionPro and r/augmentedreality
| 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| 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| Natasha Mascarenhas / The Information: |
NYC-based Protege, which prepares and sells real-world datasets like lab results and sports footage for AI training, raised a $25M Series A led by Footwork — Companies like Scale AI and Surge have proven there's a market for human-labeled data, like professionals' answers to complex math or law questions …
More: Protege and FinSMEs
X: @ericnewcomer and @saarsaar
LinkedIn: Nikhil Basu Trivedi and Bobby Samuels
| 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.| 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 … | Nate Anderson / Ars Technica: |
How an editor uncovered the “largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history” that promoted obscure composer David Woodard with entries in 335 languages — Quick—what are the top entries in the category “Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages”?
More: The Signpost. Mastodon: @Khrys@mamot.fr. X: @egavactip and @wikisignpost
Forums: news.ycombinator.com, r/wikipedia, and r/classicalmusic
| Michael S. Rosenwald / New York Times: |
Cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, whose books helped shape the philosophical conversation about human intelligence and AI, died on July 18 at age 88 — A cognitive scientist, she used the language of computers to explore the nature of human thought and creativity, offering prescient insights about A.I.
More: Royal Institution, The Guardian, Nature, The University of Sussex, The Times, and Telegraph
Bluesky: @goodbinary. Mastodon: @ianb@mastodon.well.com. X: @anilkseth, @nytobits, @kenneth0stanley, and @mikerosenwald. LinkedIn: Stephanie Krishnan. Forums: Slashdot
| Manish Singh / India Dispatch: |
India's blueprint to displace China as the world's electronics workshop relies heavily on Chinese companies' technical expertise and manufacturing know-how — India's electronics manufacturing self-reliance strategy requires reliance on its biggest rival — India's blueprint for displacing China …
More: SammyGuru, Financial Express, American Thinker, Press Trust of India, and iDrop News. X: @sajithpai
| Thomas Black / Bloomberg: |
A look at the problems at Uber Freight, which has posted operating losses every year since it was founded in 2017, except for 2022, and just appointed a new CEO — The unprofitable unit doesn't fit the company's model and has little to no synergies with its main ride-hailing and delivery businesses.| 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 … Sponsor Posts
Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cape:
Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.
Zoho:
The hidden tax of making employees search, switch, and repeat — Employees lose more time to digital friction than organizations often realize. Searching for information, switching between tools …
The hidden tax of making employees search, switch, and repeat — Employees lose more time to digital friction than organizations often realize. Searching for information, switching between tools …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.Featured Podcasts
Big Technology Podcast:
Software's Epic Comeback, Meta's AI Layoffs Blunder, South Korea Stock Market Chaos
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
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Hard Fork:
Meta Shifts the Blame + Do Data Center Bans Work? + The Final HatGPT
The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.
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Channels with Peter Kafka:
The Weird, Big Business of Microdramas
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
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Training Data:
Parallel's Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
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Invest Like the Best:
Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper
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Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:
Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.
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