Techmeme
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott orders state agencies to pause funding for Flock cameras; an investigation found an agency allocating $30M+ to build Texas' Flock network (Ayden Runnels/The Texas Tribune)
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Metriport, whose tools help doctors retrieve patient data, raised $26M in Series A and seed funding led by Matrix GP TJ Parker, taking its total raise to $28.4M (Ngai Yeung/Endpoints News)
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Z.ai releases GLM-5.3's weights under a new license requiring companies with $10B+ in revenue over 12 months to pass Z.ai's security review to host the model (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack)
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Shares of French quantum computing company Pasqal closed up 95% in their Nasdaq debut on Friday following a merger with a SPAC (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg)
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An appeals court rules states can regulate prediction markets, finding Kalshi's sports event contracts are bets, not swaps, and subject to state gambling laws (Lauren McCarthy/New York Times)
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A deep dive into Grok Bot, including its architecture, use cases, and alternatives, as xAI adds shareable bot templates and online purchases through Stripe Link (Flavio Copes)
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Meta intensifies its pressure campaign on TikTok and YouTube, running full-page ads in US newspapers demanding they adopt comparable teen safety protections (Alexandra S. Levine/Bloomberg)
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Modders get an experimental version of Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering library running in over a dozen games after it leaked in NBA 2K27's early access build (VideoCardz.com)
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Owner, which makes AI agents that manage restaurants' websites, marketing, and other functions, raised a $240M Series D at a $2.3B valuation (Joe Guszkowski/Restaurant Business)
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Sources: AI cloud computing provider Lambda raised ~$1B of private short-dated debt to finance the purchase of Nvidia GPUs, which will be leased by Microsoft (Emily Graffeo/Bloomberg)
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Unlike internet's one-dimensional, flat-fee growth, AI grows across two exponentials, user penetration and tokens per user, allowing AI labs' economics to work (Fin/@fi56622380)
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Filing: Lone Palm Labs, the startup behind friend-focused photo sharing app Retro, raised a $21M+ Series A from Thrive Capital and others (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider)
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Sources: the US is drafting a rule to close an export controls loophole that lets Chinese companies access AI chips via data centers in countries like Thailand (The Information)
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a16z creates a $1.1B Machine Age fund focusing on hardware to "open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)
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Stock trading app Ajaib raised a $270M Series C from SBI Holdings, the largest round since 2022 in Indonesia, where startups raised just ~$340M last year (Olivia Poh/Bloomberg)