Techmeme
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Carrier Pidge hit 75K users and Roost 650K downloads, as slow messaging apps delivering texts at pigeon speeds attract users tired of constant notifications (Emmett Lindner/New York Times)
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A look at the narrowing US-China AI gap, as a spate of compelling, low-cost releases makes Chinese AI models increasingly attractive to businesses (Bloomberg)
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Ox Alpha, a "stealth model" from an unknown AI lab with a 1M-token multimodal context and capacity for 100T tokens/day, goes viral after launching on OpenRouter (Rohail Saleem/Wccftech)
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Cheap energy, abundant land, and proximity to Beijing have made Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, a data center hub, with ~100 data centers built or under construction (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
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Inside the World Robot Conference in Beijing, drawing over 300 exhibitors; Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said the industry's "ChatGPT moment" has yet to come (Financial Times)
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With each successive era of LLMs, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model (SemiAnalysis)
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Rundoo, a provider of AI-powered business operations software for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
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OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures (Hayden Field/The Verge)
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Following abandoned IPO attempts in NYC and London, Shein is struggling to grow as it nears a Hong Kong listing at a fraction of its peak valuation of $100B (Sui-Lee Wee/New York Times)
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How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability (Wall Street Journal)
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Sources: Anthropic's bankers said the company could raise $100B+ in its IPO, which could value it at $2T, in recent discussions with potential investors (New York Times)
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Amazon raises prices for its Echo smart speakers, Fire TV line, Kindle devices, and eero mesh networking systems to offset increases in memory and storage costs (Sebastian Herrera/Fortune)
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Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)
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OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks (Chase DiFeliciantonio/Politico)
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Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)