Techmeme
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In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal)
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Source: Greg Brockman is "in founder mode" and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO (Madison Mills/Axios)
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France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, saying it infringed upon freedom of expression; Macron orders the PM to re-work the bill (Reuters)
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Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay has delayed its plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues (Bloomberg)
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Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, as it seeks to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+ (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
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DeepSeek debuts DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where "everything is a plugin" that can be swapped out as a plugin (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
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Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization (Bloomberg)
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Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove "anticompetitive friction" for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
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Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company (Financial Times)
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Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B (Australian Financial Review)
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Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, which uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding skills, and says it'll release weights in two weeks (Z.ai)
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A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024 (Nathaniel Meyersohn/CNN)
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The White House puts tariffs on drones and their components, including a 100% levy on "particularly sensitive" models, aiming to cut US reliance on Chinese tech (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)
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Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China (Reuters)
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SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun says the company raised its prices following negotiations with customers in Q1, and that it will charge more for wafers processed in Q3 (Reuters)