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August 14, 2025, 1:35 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, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, The Verge, Salon, and Mashable
Bluesky: @ryanlcooper.com, @mgsiegler.com, @alexboyd, @jeffhorwitz, @carlbergstrom.com, @jonathan-a-thon, @bobbyallyn, @emilymbender, @newsjennifer, @papapishu, @justinhendrix, @bradheath, @bachynski, @noupside, @jeffhorwitz, @marypcbuk, @barbarasobel, @samleecole, @damonberes.com, @justinhendrix, @sadknob, @mtsw, @noahshachtman, and @drewharwell.com
Mastodon: @harrymccracken@mastodon …, @mattsheffield@mastodon.social, @j12t@j12t.social, and @cory@follow.coryd.dev. Threads: @sokane1
X: @ericgeller, @silvermanjacob, and @evanhill
LinkedIn: Erika Hall, Shana V., and Georg Zoeller
Forums: Hacker News and r/artificial
| 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, Benzinga, Appleosophy, How-To Geek, ZDNET, New York Times, Forbes, Six Colors, Bloomberg, Ars Technica, CNET, TechCrunch, Thurrott, Reuters, Macworld, Android Authority, AppleInsider, Wired, Redmond Pie, TizenHelp, Mobi Health News, T3, Engadget, Gadgets & Wearables, CNBC, Tom's Guide, Mashable, Cult of Mac, PhoneArena, MassDevice, Notebookcheck, The Apple Post, Digital Trends, iClarified, Trusted Reviews, The Shortcut, 9to5Toys, BGR, Mobile World Live, MacStories, and MacTech.com
X: @markgurman and @markgurman
Forums: r/AppleWatch, r/AppleWatchFitness, and r/apple
| 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, InsideHPC, Tom's Hardware, AI News, Semafor, Android Headlines, TechNode, WinBuzzer, 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
| 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.
More: 9to5Google, Android Central, PCMag, and The Boston Globe
| 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 …
| 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 … | 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 …
More: The Keyword, 9to5Google, Business Standard, Moneycontrol, Livemint, The Verge, Engadget, Android Police, Droid Life, iPhone in Canada, The Economic Times, Android Authority, Lifewire, The Points Guy, The Indian Express, The Hindu BusinessLine, Yahoo Finance, Digital Content Next, Simply Wall St, and Observer. Bluesky: @daniloc.xyz
| 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: The Register, 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
| Alex Heath / The Verge: |
Q&A with OpenAI VP and Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley on ChatGPT's future, showing ads in chatbots, hallucinations, GPT-5 blowback, 4o, subscriptions, and more — Nick Turley says OpenAI wants to be able to ‘unequivocally endorse’ ChatGPT to ‘a struggling family member.’| 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 … | 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 …
More: Sherwood News and Sifted
| 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 … | 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
| 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| 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, The Hans India, WinBuzzer, Livemint, StrictlyVC, Analytics India Magazine, Business Insider, Verdict, Digit, Moneycontrol, Reuters, SiliconANGLE, CNBC, The Information, and Reuters
Bluesky: @seanokane, @kolchak, and @caseynewton
X: @ibab and @teortaxestex
Forums: Hacker News, r/musked, r/grok, and Slashdot
| 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.
X: @saranormous and @saranormous
| 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.| Igor Bonifacic / Engadget: |
Anthropic expands Claude's Learning Mode, available only to Education users since an April launch, to all users, including two learning variants for Claude Code — For Claude Code users, it means the chatbot will explain its coding decisions. — This past spring, Anthropic introduced learning mode …
More: ZDNET, Inc, and VentureBeat
| 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
| 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 — The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced a new partnership with Nvidia Corp. to develop artificial intelligence models designed …
More: NSF, GeekWire, NVIDIA, The AI Economy, HPCwire, and The Robot Report
X: @nsf, @mkratsios47, @natolambert, and @allen_ai
| 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, PCMag, TASS, Reclaim The Net, The Guardian, Washington Post, UPI, Radio Free Europe/Radio …, Financial Express, Ukrainian National News, The Moscow Times, The Independent, CyberInsider, Ukrainska Pravda, Al Jazeera, 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, The Kyiv Independent, Bloomberg Law, and Anadolu Ajansı …
Bluesky: @campuscodi.risky.biz. Threads: @whatsapp. X: @natashasrussia and @blake_allen13. Forums: Slashdot
| 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 … | Business Insider: |
More: SiliconANGLE, Implicator.ai, Crunchbase News, MEDIANAMA, and Rappler
Bluesky: @emilprotalinski. X: @arfurrock, @mgsiegler, and @charlesrollet1. LinkedIn: Rebecca Torrence
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Cheeky Pint:
What comes after smartphones, with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel
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