WD
The Powerful Chinese Model Experts Warned About—and Waited for—Is Here
Z.ai’s latest AI model release could help companies secure their systems—or find its way into the hands of hackers.
MIT
The role of the astronaut is in flux
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles.  While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of…
OpenAI Pentagon Agreement Triggers QuitGPT Boycott, 1.5 Million Users Exit ChatGPT
OpenAI has signed an agreement with the US Department of Defense to deploy its AI models on classified networks, triggering a QuitGPT boycott with over 1.5 million users reportedly canceling ChatGPT subscriptions or pledging to stop using the service.
NVIDIA Launches $500B AI Financing Platform; Circular Financing Concerns Send Stock Down 2.9%
NVIDIA has partnered with six major financial institutions to launch a computing resource financing platform targeting over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI data center and GPU debt financing. The stock fell 2.9% as markets worried that circular financing could amplify apparent demand.
TC
Anthropic’s annualized revenue surges to $65B
The model maker added $18 billion in annualized revenue in two months.
ARS
Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts
“We're not necessarily building in a dogmatic fashion towards full autonomy.”
TC
AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team
"We have some really ambitious plans to help you work with AI in Chrome to get things done, and I’ll have more to share soon," Jacob Bank, Relay founder and CEO, said.
EU AI Act Article 50 Takes Effect in 27 Countries on August 2, 2026; Anthropic Embeds Watermarks for Compliance
Starting August 2, 2026, the transparency obligations of Article 50 of the EU AI Act will be fully enforced across 27 member states, mandating disclosure of AI-generated content. Companies such as Anthropic have begun embedding invisible watermarks in Claude models to ensure compliance.
Databricks Completes $5 Billion Funding Round at $190 Billion Valuation, Focused on Agent Data Infrastructure
Databricks announced the completion of a $5 billion funding round at a valuation of $190 billion, with proceeds focused on agent-oriented data and infrastructure products. The round underscores a broader shift in AI infrastructure investment toward data and agent execution chain integration.
MIT
What Flock’s defenders are missing
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent…
GPT-o3 Leads with 96.93 Points: 2026-08-18 Smoke Quick-Test Data Brief
On 2026-08-18, the YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 10 models, with GPT-o3 ranking first at 96.93 points. Smoke is a daily 10-question quick test suitable for observing short-term signals and is not equivalent to the Full weekly leaderboard conclusions.
TC
Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud
Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation as the former AI chipmaker pivots to a neocloud business and expands its Nvidia-powered data center footprint.
TC
Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
Rare books are incredibly valuable for training LLMs, since these models have already trained on whatever's available online.
ARS
Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI
Amazon’s team uses a T. rex preparing to devour a book as its logo.
TC
Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project
Nvidia's investment in SoftBank's data center developer will guarantee its chips power an OpenAI data center.
MIT
The Download: dead robot friends and the “censorship-industrial complex”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she…
TC
Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictation
Wispr’s total funding is now over $361 million.
MIT
What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?
When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…
MIT
How much hydrogen awaits us underground?
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There her team of geochemists found water that had been confined underground for more than a billion years. This ancient brine turned out to be a habitat…
Meta Releases Muse Glimmer 30B Open-Weight Model, Runs on a Single Consumer GPU
Meta has released the Muse Glimmer 30B multimodal model with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. Distilled from Muse Spark and optimized for always-on local agent workflows, it runs on a single consumer GPU or Mac without network calls.