Techmeme
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Source: Yunfeng Capital, a PE firm co-founded by Jack Ma, invested ~$30M in AI insurance tech startup Corgi, leading a round that reportedly valued Corgi at $4B (Business Insider)
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Mysk: Apple's Private Relay tool can leak users' IP addresses due to issues in Apple's WebKit browser engine, also affecting OnionBrowser, a Tor browser for iOS (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
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Reddit expands its test of Rules Hub, a suite of tools that rely on LLMs to help moderators manage their communities, and plans a full launch later this year (Jay Peters/The Verge)
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Hark, founded by Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, previews Handoff, a computer use agent it says outperforms GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.8, and plans for a summer release (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
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Google says Chief AI Architect and Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu will lead Google DeepMind as SVP, reporting to Sundar Pichai (Bloomberg)
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Discovery Loop, co-founded by Jeff Dean, is backed by seed funding from Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others; Google also has a stake in the company (Cade Metz/New York Times)
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Jeff Dean and three other Google execs are leaving to launch Discovery Loop, which will seek AI-powered breakthroughs in drug discovery, chip design, and more (Steven Levy/Wired)
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Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to be the unit's chairman and will add the title of Alphabet chief scientist; GOOG drops 3%+ (Axios)
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Elon Musk says SpaceX has decided to "build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture" (Shubhangi Goel/Business Insider)
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Amazon's Zoox will start charging for rides in Las Vegas from August 10, marking the launch of its commercial operations after offering free rides since 2025 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)
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Faye, which offers travel insurance services and uses AI to help resolve claims, raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona, taking its total funding to $100M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
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Developers in Africa are increasingly choosing Chinese open-source AI models over US models, saying they are downloadable, easier to customize, and much cheaper (New York Times)
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Sources: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at an AI team all-hands in July that the company won't use model distillation to accelerate capabilities (The Information)
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How Pringles maker Kellanova is using AI and a partnership with Siemens to improve production of the chip in Europe, including making digital twins of its dough (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
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Anthropic confirms it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, co-designing hardware and models and using a "multi-chip approach" (Tom Carter/Business Insider)