Techmeme
September 22, 2026, 8:40 AM

Top News

Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal:
Shopify plans to allow Meta's Muse to complete purchases on behalf of users at Shopify-powered stores via its one-tap checkout service Shop Pay  —  Shopify plans to allow Meta's personal AI agent to complete purchases on behalf of users with the e-commerce platform's roster of stores
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
A researcher says a flaw in Meta's Muse Mac app lets any app or terminal command access users' Muse authentication tokens; Meta says it issued a hotfix  —  Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”
Bloomberg:
Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Source: Xbox plans to lay off hundreds of employees this week in its second major staff cut in 2026, as it also plans to consolidate several of its game studios  —  Xbox is planning to lay off hundreds of employees this week in its second major staff reduction this year, according to someone briefed on the plans.
Xiaomi:
Xiaomi debuts open-weight omnimodal models MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash; Pro allegedly performs “on par with Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol across most agent benchmarks”  —  Frontier intelligence, all the modalities, built in public.  Today, we are releasing and open-sourcing the MiMo-V2.6 series.
Reuters:
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu says the company plans to train a 5T- to 10T-parameter AI model, as it lays out a sweeping push across AI models, chips, and data centers  —  Alibaba Group (9988.HK) said on Tuesday it was developing an AI model up to four times larger than the company's flagship model …
Bloomberg:
Alibaba's T-Head unveils the Zhenwu V900 AI accelerator, which it says triples its predecessor's performance and can scale to clusters of up to 500K units  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is rolling out what it calls China's most powerful AI chip, an accelerator to compete with Nvidia Corp …
Bloomberg:
Harvey, Abridge, Ramp, Rogo, and other AI startups are embracing open-weight models or training their own models to reduce expensive reliance on frontier labs  —  The $15.6 billion legal startup Harvey built its business around training AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 to do specialized work for lawyers.
Will Oremus / The Atlantic:
Some universities have barred using AI detectors due to student-instructor distrust over false positives; some educators have just cancelled writing assignments  —  Professors are tearing their hair out over AI detectors.  —  Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI.
Paula Doenecke / Bloomberg:
Finnish neocloud startup Verda raised $189M led by Emergence at a $1B+ valuation and aims to raise up to $1.5B in equity and debt in 2026 and up to $10B in 2027  —  Cloud startup Verda has raised $189 million in fresh financing, underscoring continued investor appetite for the infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence boom.
OpenAI:
OpenAI says it is working with an independent math advisory group to responsibly share AI advances, following an open letter raising concerns from researchers  —  Loading...  On August 28, we began training a new internal model.  In addition to resolving the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem …
OpenAI:
Financial Times:
Sources: multiple staff at the UK's AISI have been signed off work with stress, as tight model release schedules and AI fears lead to low morale and burnout  —  Top researchers at Aisi, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind report burnout and stress over developing powerful AI
David Phelan / Forbes:
Apple unveils Apple Music Hall, a 600-person live music venue built in its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station with two recording and mixing studios  —  This voice experience is generated by AI.  Learn more. … Apple has just announced a new live music venue, built into its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station.
Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
US startup Firebird is building a 300MW data center in Armenia, set to host 70K+ Nvidia chips by 2027; sources: Trump pledged Nvidia export approvals to Armenia  —  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's smallest republic was an electronics and tech center for the Communist superpower.
More: Bloomberg LawForums: r/armenia
Joel Khalili / Wired:
The Austrian Academy of Science, Mistral, and Sail Reply plan to launch Apollo, an Ancient Greek LLM trained on ~600M historical Greek words, available for free  —  In the hope of uncovering new details about ancient life, researchers have developed a large language model that fills in the gaps in papyrus fragments.
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Baselayer, which uses AI to help financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, raised a $35M Series A led by M13, for ~$40M in total funding  —  Baselayer, an AI-powered startup that helps financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk …
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal:
a16z invests $35M in Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an independent, unaccredited two-year alternative to college; Anthropic, Meta, and others will provide compute  —  Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spending $35 million to back two-year academy, with other Bay Area tech giants on board
More: a16z

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Earlier Picks

Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
Maureen Farrell / New York Times:
Nichola Groom / Reuters:
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xAI:
Federico Viticci / MacStories: