Techmeme
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Australian AI infrastructure startup Firmus raised $505M led by Coatue at a $5.5B valuation, bringing its funding raised in the last six months to $1.35B (Ian King/Bloomberg)
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A look at Eko, whose Arkansas "capture factory" creates digital product catalogs intended to serve as training data for retail-focused AI models (Sarah Nassauer/Wall Street Journal)
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How social media became a freak show: X punishes external links and most top accounts, such as Catturd, are very low-quality but get more engagement than NYT (Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin)
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A federal appeals court rules New Jersey cannot block Kalshi users in the state from sports-related event contracts, finding CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction (Nate Raymond/Reuters)
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Sources: Meta is preparing to release the first AI models developed under Alexandr Wang, with plans to offer versions of those models via an open source license (Ina Fried/Axios)
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Netflix launches Netflix Playground, a games app for kids aged eight and under, in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand (Andrew Webster/The Verge)
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Source: Binance Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman is looking to leave in 2026 or 2027; other senior compliance staff have departed over the past few months (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)
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OpenAI buying TBPN makes little sense, par for the course for a company that, like Twitter, stumbled into a big market and may never build a functional business (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)
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How advanced chip packaging became one of Intel's fast-growing businesses; sources: Intel is in talks with Google and Amazon for its advanced packaging services (Lauren Goode/Wired)
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Xoople, which is developing a satellite constellation to collect earth data for training AI models, raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to $225M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
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Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times)
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Interviews with Sam Altman and 100+ people on if he can be trusted amid allegations of consistent lying and more: some defend him as others call him a sociopath (New Yorker)
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Jack Dorsey says Apple removed his Bluetooth P2P messaging app Bitchat, used during protests in five countries, from the App Store in China at the CAC's request (Stephen Katte/Cointelegraph)
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OpenAI unveils policy proposals for a world with superintelligence: higher taxes on capital gains, a public AI investment fund, bolstered safety nets, and more (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)
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Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale (Kate Park/TechCrunch)