Open Links In New Tab
Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors
Techmeme
August 26, 2026, 8:30 AM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter

Top News

Bill Gates / GatesNotes:
Bill Gates says “the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history” and “we are not preparing adequately”, calling for a regulatory framework  —  Bill Gates, artificial intelligence, AI, generative AI for everyone, responsible ai news, ai and robotics …
Luz Ding / Bloomberg:
Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard  —  The new AI model that's swept to the top of online usage charts with high performance at zero cost was created by China's Z.AI Co., also known as Zhipu.
Reuters:
State AGs' trial: Adam Mosseri denies Instagram stalled by not making its “Take a Break” teen safety feature the default until nearly three years after launch  —  The top executive at Instagram said few teenagers used a key safety feature to limit their use before it was turned on by default …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta and state AGs have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement of the social media addiction lawsuit, which is currently in its second week of trial
Madlin Mekelburg / Bloomberg:
An ex-Meta staffer testified that less than 1% of teens used Instagram's opt-in “Take a Break” tool when it launched; the feature is now on by default for teens
John Walker / Kotaku:
Rockstar says GTA 6 gameplay leaking “in this way has been heartbreaking”, calling it “unfortunate” that the “game experience may now be impacted” by spoilers  —  The company also uncharacteristically apologizes for the lack of official information
Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI confirms Chris Malone, who joined OpenAI as head of data centers from Meta in March 2025, has left the company; his departure comes amid a broader exodus  —  Chris Malone joins a string of recent high-level executive departures as the AI giant heads toward an IPO and ramps up its spending on computing power
Annie Palmer / CNBC:
AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, “following an assessment”; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans  —  Amazon is soon pulling the plug on its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, called Mechanical Turk, the company said Tuesday.
Emma Roth / The Verge:
OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency than Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T  —  Jalapeño outperformed Nvidia's superchips on an AI inference benchmark test.
SemiAnalysis:
A detailed look at Jalapeño, OpenAI's ASIC developed with Broadcom in 16 months, which beat Nvidia, AMD, and Google chips on multiple top open-weight models
Wall Street Journal:
A profile of Leopold Aschenbrenner, who worked for SBF and OpenAI before launching Situational Awareness; Aschenbrenner married Dario Amodei's chief of staff  —  A 24-year-old investor was hailed as a visionary and attracted billions—before turning into Wall Street's latest cautionary tale
Financial Times:
Sources: YMTC, which seeks to raise $5B in an IPO, told investors in IPO prep meetings that it aims to become the largest NAND flash supplier by the end of 2027  —  YMTC sets out Nand production ambitions in investor meetings for $5bn Shanghai IPO  —  YMTC aims to overtake Samsung and SK Hynix …
Corrie Driebusch / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Anthropic is likely to tell IPO investors that its potential revenue opportunities are above $30T, topping SpaceX's $28.5T; Uber predicted $6T in 2019  —  The AI startup is likely to top SpaceX's eye-popping potential revenue estimate  —  SpaceX's record-breaking IPO tested the limits of an obscure financial metric.
Financial Times:
Source: Transport for London's delay in producing robotaxi guidance has frustrated some prospective operators, who play down the chances of launching in 2026  —  Operators play down chance of starting this year.  London's robotaxi rollout is running behind the ambitious schedule set …
Kurt Schlosser / GeekWire:
Digs, which is building AI software for residential construction, raised a $25.3M Series A led by building materials giant Builders FirstSource  —  Digs, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup building AI software for residential construction, raised $25.3 million in Series A funding led …
Andy Masley:
Public polling suggests the US' severe anti-data center backlash is primarily driven by local environmental and economic concerns, not anti-Big Tech sentiment  —  It's probably not your ideological thing, or mine.  It's about object-level claims about how data centers impact the communities …
Dwarkesh Patel / Dwarkesh Podcast:
Q&A with SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel on Anthropic and OpenAI controlling global compute, $11T of AI capex between 2024 and 2029, China's compute, and more  —  “Every force is screeching towards centralization.”  —  Had a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother Dylan Patel.
Evelyn Cheng / CNBC:
HP signs a multi-year global agreement with Huawei to license certain standard essential Wi-Fi patents, a sign of adoption of Huawei's technology outside China  —  BEIJING — U.S.-based personal computing and printing firm HP has signed a multi-year global agreement for licensing certain WiFi patents …

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.
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.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho connected apps for Google Gemini  —  Note: Now available to organizations in the Indian data center.  Support for other Zoho data centers will be available soon.AI assistants have gotten remarkably …
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.
Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

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.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Big Technology Podcast:
 How AI Should Handle News, Politics, Medicine, and Mental Health — With Campbell Brown
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.
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.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Invest Like the Best:
 Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
 Data Centers in Orbit by 2028: Baiju Bhatt on His Plans After Robinhood
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
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.
Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.
Add your podcast here
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 8:30 AM ET, August 26, 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

Max Tani / @maxwelltani:
WSJ opinion editor Paul Gigot defends Stanley Druckenmiller's use of AI to write an op-ed, saying “nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion”

Benjamin Mullin / New York Times:
Forbes and Shook Research suspend their joint rankings and events as they review a $6M payment from founder RJ Shook to former top editor Randall Lane

Matthew Keys / TheDesk.net:
A US federal appeals court sets aside an FCC notice that would have let political parties and joint fundraising committees qualify for lowest broadcast ad rates

More News

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Nitter, an open-source front end that let users read X without an account, says X sent cease-and-desist letters demanding a takedown; Nitter.net is now offline
Wall Street Journal:
Intuit reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $4.35B, above $4.27B est., and forecasts FY 2027 revenue growth of 9% to 10%, below ~11% est.; INTU drops 8%+

Earlier Picks

Skild AI:
Skild AI unveils S1, a robotics foundation model that it says can learn tasks never seen during pretraining, using a single video demo, without fine-tuning
David Gewirtz / ZDNET:
Anthropic merges the memory systems for Claude chat and Claude Cowork, making Claude chat history available to Cowork unless users opt out
Maxine Joselow / New York Times:
The EPA plans to eliminate a federal rule that US states must publicize and solicit public input on air pollution permit applications for data centers
Corbin Bolies / Variety:
Stability AI, which has deals with UMG, WMG, and EA to build AI models from their IP, raised a $76M Series B from them, Sony Music, and others
Michael Nuñez / VentureBeat:
Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a fully local version of Perplexity Computer with support for Qwen3.8-27B and Perplexity's PPLX 27B on Nvidia's DGX Spark
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter