Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time streaming was king of TV over a full month  —  In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said.

Google makes Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro generally available and introduces 2.5 Flash-Lite, which it says is its most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet  —  Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro are now generally available, and we're introducing 2.5 Flash-Lite, our most cost-efficient and fastest 2.5 model yet.

Sources: OpenAI wants Microsoft to take a ~33% stake in exchange for foregoing future profit rights, and seeks to modify its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft  —  Negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI over the startup's plan to restructure its for-profit unit, which requires Microsoft's approval …

Amazon plans to hold Prime Day 2025 from July 8 at 12:01am PT through July 11, lasting four days instead of the usual two and exclusive to Prime subscribers  —  Prime members will have even longer than usual to score some of the year's best tech deals.

Threads launches a fediverse feed and a way to search for fediverse users, with support for Mastodon and others, for users who turned on fediverse sharing  —  A dedicated feed, and better search, will make social web content much more visible in Threads.

Sources: xAI is in talks to raise $4.3B via an equity investment on top of the $5B in debt it's trying to borrow; of its previously raised $14B, it has $4B left  —  Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion through an equity investment on top …

At Cannes, Meta adds AI tools to its Advantage+ suite for advertisers and agencies, including turning images into videos, video highlights, and Virtual Try-On  —  The new features include the ability to transform still images into video.  —  With the advertising world congregating this week …

Memo: Intel's manufacturing VP says Intel plans to cut 15%-20% of factory staff from July “to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position”  —  Intel plans to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker's core businesses.

Survey: US employees using AI at work at least a few times/year grows from 21% in 2023 to 40% in 2025, and those using AI a few times/week is up from 11% to 19%  —  The use of AI at work is accelerating.  In the past two years, the percentage of U.S. employees who say they have used AI …

The US Defense Department awards OpenAI a one-year $200M contract to develop prototype AI tools that address challenges in “warfighting and enterprise domains”  —  OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

German defense tech startup Helsing raised €600M led by Daniel Ek's Prima Materia, sources say at a ~€12B valuation, bringing its total funding to €1.37B  —  Defence start-up valued at €12bn to become one of Europe's most valuable tech groups

Waymo expands its coverage area in San Francisco and LA by 80 square miles each, bringing its total coverage area in California to 250 square miles  —  The company's robotaxis are now operating across 250 square miles of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Shanghai-based MiniMax open sources MiniMax-M1, a model for complicated productivity tasks that supports 1M input tokens and it says beats DeepSeek's R1-0528  —  Chinese AI upstart MiniMax released a new large language model, joining a slew of domestic peers inspired to surpass DeepSeek in the field of reasoning AI.

[Thread] A US paper shows the best frontier LLM models solve 0% of hard coding problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI, domains where expert humans still excel  —  This is really BAD news of LLM's coding skill. ☹️ The best Frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel. LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI ("International [image]

Adobe debuts Firefly for iOS and Android, letting mobile users generate images and videos using text prompts and experiment with popular AI photo editing tools  —  The iPhone and Android Firefly app can sync AI image and video projects to desktops via Creative Cloud.

Salesforce says it will increase prices on many products in August, including Slack; major product lines will see a 6% increase on average  —  List prices will go up by an average of 6% for major product lines in August, the company said in a statement Tuesday.  The cost of the workplace communications tool Slack will also rise.