|
August 20, 2026, 4:05 PM
|
Mediagazer
memeorandum
WeSmirchTop News
| Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: |
Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific code channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents “like teammates” across all plans — Slack Code provides a dedicated open space for teams to collaborate with AI agents.
More: Salesforce, The New Stack, The Register, SiliconANGLE, Gizmodo, Salesforce Ben, WeRSM, Unite.AI, and RuntimeWire
X: @benioff, @scobleizer, @nrmehta, @eltintero, @jordienr, @kimmonismus, and @sawyerhood
LinkedIn: Sean Reape, James Baldwin, Zach Ciliotta-Young, Joseph P. DeMuyt, Jeff Wareham, and Slack. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
| Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal: |
Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, its largest yet, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and tokens are the central currency for businesses — The Stripe deal for OpenRouter, founded by an NFT entrepreneur, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models
More: Stripe, Financial Times, Axios, The Information, New York Times, and Bloomberg
| Douglas Gillison / Reuters: |
Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on internal US military information, making $8M overall with a 97.2% average win rate and attracting copycat bets — More than 150 wallets on Polymarket International may have traded on inside U.S. military information, attracting copycat bets …
More: CTech, International Business Times, Task & Purpose, The Crypto Times, and Bitcoin Insider
Bluesky: @jacobsilverman.com, @michaelsderby, @mims, @philippeauclair, @stucowan, @bradheath, and @willoremus.com
Forums: r/army and r/technology
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Anthropic expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting IPO, as it prepares to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of August — Anthropic PBC expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter … | Qianer Liu / The Information: |
Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules — Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an AI chip specially tailored for Chinese customers by the end of the year …
More: Wccftech, CNBC, Tech Times, Times Tabloid, Chip Briefing, Quartz, and Financial Times
| Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg: |
Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from third parties like Nvidia — Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo has built a custom chip that the company said will improve the performance of its robotaxis … | Brody Ford / Bloomberg: |
Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year to use trillions of AI tokens weekly via Azure, quietly becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers — Meta Platforms Inc. has become one of Microsoft Corp.'s biggest AI customers, underscoring how demand for the emerging technology remains concentrated in the tech industry.
More: Barchart.com, Implicator.ai, Blockonomi, Telecoms Tech News, and The Asia Business Daily. LinkedIn: Brody Ford
| Google: |
Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years — From outer space to underwater, here's how developers are bringing a positive impact with our open models.
More: Unite.AI. X: @ollama, @google, @ai_for_success, @o_lacombe, @osanseviero, @cockerillbill, and @_philschmid
| Ram Iyer / TechCrunch: |
Ramp launches Router, an AI model routing service it has been using internally over the past three years, in the US; Router is free to use for the rest of 2026 — Corporate expense management platform Ramp is hot on the heels of Stripe in setting up toll houses for AI inference.
More: The New Stack, Ramp, RuntimeWire, The Stack, Unite.AI, and MakeUseOf
| Reuters: |
The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations — It is not quite the “RoboCop” of the 1987 movie: no gun, no power to arrest and wheels rather than the Hollywood cyborg's mechanical stride.
More: The Independent and Bloomberg
| Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: |
Source: Anthropic plans a safety system this year that still requires enterprises to retain data for 30 days but lets them do so on their own cloud systems — Anthropic PBC plans to allow business customers to keep greater control of their data when using its most capable artificial intelligence models …
More: Reuters, The American Bazaar, Business Standard, and The Decoder
| Alexander Gladstone / Wall Street Journal: |
A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants objected, seeking assurance their info would be removed — The flight attendants want assurance that their confidential information will be removed from the sale of the defunct airline's digital records
More: Gizmodo, Business Insider, Mercury News, Bloomberg Law, View from the Wing, Fortune, RuntimeWire, and PYOK
| Luz Ding / Bloomberg: |
Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$39.64B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.54B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption — Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s profit plunged more than 75% after the Chinese company ratcheted up quarterly capital spending …
More: CNBC, PYMNTS, Decrypt, International Business Times, Bloomberg, Business Wire, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, Associated Press, Nikkei Asia, Proactive, Quartz, Constellation Research, Blockonomi, Reuters, BusinessDay, and Finimize. LinkedIn: Alibaba Group
| Michael Martina / Reuters: |
How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military — China's Unitree Robotics - among the world's biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots - based designs …
More: Tech Brew, International Business Times, TechNode, diginomica, Business Insider, The Robot Report, Defense News, The Guardian, and Bloomberg
X: @reuters, @thesethian, @niubi, and @zichenwanghere
| Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: |
Meta rolls out Pocket, an experimental vibe-coding app that lets users create and share small games, in the US, after launching it in Brazil last month — Meta's experimental vibe-coding gaming app, Pocket, is now rolling out to everyone in the U.S. The app, which arrived quietly last month … | Olivia Carville / Bloomberg: |
Two US senators demand answers from TikTok about a “depraved” test that withheld a safety feature from 10% of US users, including a teenager who died by suicide — Two US senators have sent a letter to TikTok executives demanding answers about an experiment the company ran …
More: TechCrunch, Engadget, and The Record
| Newcomer: |
Sources: Poolside struck a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation; 109 staffers get Nvidia job offers — EXCLUSIVE TO NEWCOMER: Poolside AI, the artificial intelligence model-building startup, has struck a non-exclusive licensing deal …
X: @alexrkonrad, @ericnewcomer, and @ericnewcomer
| Dean Takahashi / GamesBeat: |
Astromech, which uses genomic data to build predictive AI models of biological change, raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, bringing its total funding to $60M — Astromech has raised $20 million to advance its evolutionary biology AI predictive models of biological change.| Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter: |
Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal — “When Liberty first invested in Charter more than a decade ago, we saw an opportunity to build scale behind a great management team and operating model," said John Malone.| Paul Kiernan / Wall Street Journal: |
PitchBook: 4,000+ California-based startups have raised ~$366B in venture capital in 2026 so far, more than triple the total of all other 49 US states combined — California-based companies have announced a record haul in startup funding, despite billionaire-tax fears
More: PYMNTS and Implicator.ai
| Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: |
Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users have to limit AI agents' access and trades — Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange with more than 300 million registered users, on Thursday launched a platform …
More: Techspective, Binance, Forbes, WWD, KnowBe4 Blog, Futurum, Blockonomi, API Evangelist, diginomica, Unite.AI, The Paypers, PYMNTS, Memeburn, and SiliconANGLE
| Bloomberg: |
Trump urges Congress to pass the Clarity Act at a White House event with execs, including the CEOs of Coinbase and Robinhood; the bill has stalled in the Senate — President Donald Trump pressed Congress to pass digital asset market structure legislation that is a top priority for the industry …
More: Decrypt, CBS News, The Crypto Times, Yahoo Finance, Motley Fool, The American Bazaar, Reuters, Bitcoin News, Quartz, Bitcoin Insider, Unchained, crypto.news, Blockonomi, Barron's Online, Wall Street Journal, Coinspeaker, Hindustan Times, NewsBTC, Bitcoin Magazine, Cointelegraph, CryptoNinjas, Coinpedia Fintech News, Yahoo Finance, CoinDesk, CHOSUNBIZ, Barron's Online, Washington Post, New York Times, StockStory, Bitcoin Magazine, CNBC, Cointelegraph, Dow Jones Newswires, Wall Street Journal, Bitcoin Insider, The Crypto Times, Investor's Business Daily, and Investor's Business Daily
X: @whitehouse, @rapidresponse47, @senmccormickpa, @onemorepeter, @eleanorterrett, @patrickjwitt, @billkingtm, @brian_armstrong, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, @rapidresponse47, and @rapidresponse47. LinkedIn: Rob Nichols
| Iain Martin / Forbes: |
Filing: in 2025, TikTok generated $702.5M in net profit in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, its first annual profit, on $9.1B in revenue, up 45.7% YoY — TikTok's operations in Europe, Africa and Latin America saw revenues jump 45.7% to $9.1 billion and turn its first profit …
Bluesky: @iainmartin
| Bloomberg: |
London-based Callosum, whose software matches AI tasks with models and chips, raised a $100M seed led by Atomico; the UK's Sovereign AI Fund also invested — Callosum, a startup that makes software to match specific artificial intelligence tasks with different models and chips …
More: Callosum, Silicon Republic, Tech Funding News, Resilience Media, Tech Times, Scaling-Europe on YouTube, FinSMEs, Atomico, Ventureburn, Sifted, Callosum, Callosum, Callosum, RuntimeWire, and UKTN
X: @mattocko and @callosumai
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.
Zoho:
Ask an Expert: How to effectively recover stuck TDS refunds with reduced TDS reconciliation time — The 26AS/Form 168 gets updated quarterly and often gets checked only during the time of ITR filing.
Ask an Expert: How to effectively recover stuck TDS refunds with reduced TDS reconciliation time — The 26AS/Form 168 gets updated quarterly and often gets checked only during the time of ITR filing.
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.
Soxton:
Fast, affordable law for startups — Soxton automates startup legal so founders can move faster and sleep better. We handle incorporation, advisor, employment and commercial contracts. Join the waitlist for early access!
Fast, affordable law for startups — Soxton automates startup legal so founders can move faster and sleep better. We handle incorporation, advisor, employment and commercial contracts. Join the waitlist for early access!Featured Podcasts
Training Data:
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Invest Like the Best:
Andrew Huberman - The Frontier of Neurotechnology
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Big Technology Podcast:
Who Wins The AI Assistant Wars? + Why Didn't Google Build Muse?
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Sources:
Reflection's founders on building a DeepSeek of the West
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Grit:
How Vercel Is Rethinking Go-to-Market With AI | COO Jeanne Grosser
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT: We're entering a new era of AI (again) | Tibo Sottiaux
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
About This Page
This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:05 PM ET, August 20, 2026.
The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.
From Mediagazer
Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:Michael Schneider / Variety:
Megan Trotter / Greensburg Tribune-Review:
Upcoming Tech Events
More News
| Hugo Lowell / Wired: |
More: New York Post. Bluesky: @hugolowell, @brbarrett, @katie-drummond, @kleinman, and @teslatakedown.com
Forums: r/politics and r/texas
| Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: |
| Cecilia Kang / New York Times: |
Earlier Picks
| Meir Orbach / CTech: |
| Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: |
More: Engadget, Quartz, Dexerto, The Drum, The Economic Times, Newser, The Hans India, Punch Newspapers, Digital Trends, Business Insider, Tubefilter, and Semafor
X: @nickbyt_, @jacksettleman, @kirbyslastsnack, @knowsworthy, @tvgrimreaper, @shadetv, and @lucas_shaw. Bluesky: @counternotions
Forums: r/h3h3productions, r/MediaMergers, r/technology, and Slashdot
| Reuters: |
More: The Guardian, International Business Times, NPR, The Indian Express, Breitbart, EasternEye, Futurism, ANI News, Implicator.ai, KQED, Courthouse News Service, Associated Press, Yeni Şafak English, Telegraph, New York Post, The Times, CBS News, Bloomberg Law, The Independent, NC Newsline, Agence France-Presse, Fox News, Anadolu Ajansı …, Quartz, and News 12 New Jersey
X: @jonhaidt, @awinston, @ncago, @awinston, @tylerkatzen, @pweiser, @marshablackburn, and @jason_kint. Bluesky: @jessefelder.com. Mastodon: @Lazarou@mastodon.social
Forums: Hacker News, r/Maxcactus_TrailGuide, r/BetterOffline, r/ABoringDystopia, r/Fauxmoi, r/business, r/technology, r/USNEWS, and Slashdot
| Matt Day / Bloomberg: |
More: Reuters, Wall Street Journal, About Amazon, Tom's Hardware, The American Bazaar, SiliconANGLE, The Verge, Ars Technica, Ubergizmo, AI News, iClarified, WAGA-TV, Phandroid, Forbes, The Daily Upside, ZeroHedge News, The Verge, The Daily Wire, Fortune, Inc, ABC News, USA Today, Business Insider, CNBC, WTTG-TV, The Mac Observer, Cautious Optimism, Mashable, UPI, Supply Chain Dive, SupplyChainBrain, AppleInsider, TechCrunch, FreightWaves, Digital Trends, Blockonomi, PCMag, 9to5Mac, DroneDJ, PYMNTS, and Quartz
X: @lexnfx, @de_gifford, @mweinbach, @amazon, @itschrisray, and @annierpalmer
LinkedIn: Eve Jakubowski, Jason Patrao, Sam Bailey, Teresa Uthurralt, Annie Palmer, and Courtney Trimble. Bluesky: @peark.es. Forums: r/technology