Techmeme
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Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal)
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Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, the first price hike for Apple Music since 2022 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
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Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws (Bloomberg)
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Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years (New York Times)
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Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers (Gavin Baker/@gavinsbaker)
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Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China; K3 is a good model but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer)
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ASML plans to give its ~45K employees globally a ā¬20K bonus, issued as a share award that vests in 2030, joining other chip industry companies offering payouts (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg)
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AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal to use inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
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Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
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San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google, demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it deleted five apps (Matt Burgess/Wired)
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Sources: Apple has sent personal legal warnings to ~40 former employees who now work at OpenAI, directing them to preserve documents and meet with its lawyers (Michael Acton/Financial Times)
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At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters)
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The Alphabet Workers Union sends a layoff protections petition with 4,500+ signatures to Sundar Pichai, calling for guaranteed severance, buyouts, and more (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian)
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Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg)
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Sources: Dave Brown, the outgoing SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on Meta's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)