Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!
TLDR:
🌊 Nepal/Tibet floods became the week’s major global story: 469 dead and 1,400+ missing after a glacier/bedrock collapse sent floodwater and debris through Himalayan border towns.
🧬 Nvidia/Hugging Face is the big AI-deal watch: The Information says Nvidia agreed to buy the open-model hub for $12.9B.
🛡️ OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and 100+ others warned that hospitals, water systems and internet infrastructure may have only months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks.
🧑🏭 The Labor Department is cutting AI/jobs data deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon and others to track labor-market shifts faster.
🚗 Uber says weekly AI-agent requests are up 9.4x since February while costs have stayed flat since April. AI, but make it budget discipline.
🦆 Microduck is Hugging Face/Pollen’s $399 open-source robot, a very visual physical-AI palate cleanser.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🌊 Nepal-Tibet floods’ death toll has risen to 469, with 1,400+ people reported missing across Nepal and Tibet after a glacier/bedrock collapse.
🧾 U.S. inflation stayed sticky: July PCE was 3.7% year over year, core PCE was 3.3%, and real consumer spending was basically flat.
🧑🏭 The Labor Department is striking data-sharing deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon and others to track how AI is changing hiring and jobs in something closer to real time.
🇨🇦 U.S.-Canada trade tensions escalated: Trump threatened 50% tariffs on Canadian autos, parts and steel, while Canada prepared retaliatory tariffs. Supply chains are putting on tiny helmets.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🧮 Nvidia revenue hit $96.2B, data-center revenue hit $89.0B, and next quarter’s guide is $108B.
📱 Meta agreed to an up-to-$18B teen-safety settlement, including default two-hour daily limits, night mode, school-hour notification muting, hidden like counts, and age assurance.
🍎 Apple set its Sept. 9 event, with the first foldable iPhone expected and John Ternus getting his first big keynote as CEO.
🚨 Flock Safety, maker of AI license-plate camera systems, is facing a Senate investigation into how it collects, retains, and shares surveillance data.
📈 Okta and CrowdStrike jumped 28.6% and 20.5% after results, powered by the AI boom.
🏠 Zillow + Redfin settled an FTC/state antitrust case over rentals: Redfin must reenter rental ads after a deal where Zillow allegedly paid $100M to keep it from competing.
🤖AI News
🧰 OpenAI is pushing ChatGPT Work beyond coding: the $20/month product connects agents to email, Slack, Notion, Figma and more, but OpenAI’s own study found 98% internal Codex use vs. 17% of org subscribers and under 1% of individual subscribers.
🚨 OpenAI + Hugging Face drew an Alabama subpoena after OpenAI said an unreleased guardrail-free cyber model escaped an isolated test and hit Hugging Face plus other targets during evaluation.
🧠 Meta reportedly plans to launch its consumer AI agent platform “Hatch” in coming weeks and is targeting October for a new model called Watermelon.
🛡️ OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and 100+ others signed a cyber-defense warning, saying hospitals, water systems and internet infrastructure may have only months to prepare for more capable AI-enabled attacks.
🧪 Inherent, a London AI lab from DeepMind alumni, says its Faraday research agent beat larger OpenAI/Anthropic systems at replicating papers while running on a 27B-parameter Qwen model.
🕵️ Ox Alpha is the mystery model of the moment: a free OpenRouter “stealth model” for coding and agentic work has people guessing Z.ai/GLM, Microsoft MAI, or something stranger in a trench coat.
🎙️ Google Gemini Live is getting voice-driven agents, Daily Brief, and app actions, but the real story is consumer AI’s clutter problem: every helpful mode now wants its own little nametag.
🧭 The Information framed the AI majors as land-grabbers in each other’s yards: xAI renting compute, Meta moving into enterprise agents, Anthropic exploring chips, Amazon pushing Trainium, and OpenAI working with Broadcom.
🦆 Microduck is Hugging Face/Pollen’s $399 open-source robot, a very visual physical-AI palate cleanser.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🤗 Hugging Face has reportedly been approached about a sale at $13B+, a spicy number for the open-source AI model hub/community that suddenly looks very strategic. The Information says Nvidia agreed to buy the open-model hub for $12.9B.
📰 Flipboard bought Graze, a tiny Bluesky/AT Protocol feed-builder that has delivered 41B posts to 12M people and splits contextual ad revenue with curators.
Fundraising
👓 Legato, an AI hearing-glasses startup from Bose and smart-eyewear veterans, emerged with $12M to tackle mild-to-moderate hearing loss through normal-looking frames.
Partnerships
🏗️ Anthropic signed a roughly $45B compute rental deal with Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company, using Nvidia Vera Rubin systems starting in late 2027.
🔎 Nvidia + Perplexity talks are reportedly circling a $30B+ valuation round, another bead on Jensen Huang’s “invest in everything that consumes GPUs” necklace.
🧱 AWS and Nvidia are deepening the chip embrace: AWS plans to deploy 2M additional Nvidia GPUs and integrate Vera CPUs, Nemotron models, networking, and robotics tech.
🤝 Salesforce and Anthropic launched Claudeforce, starting with a Claude plugin containing 37 prebuilt sales skills for live pipeline context and governed Salesforce actions.
This betting trend is getting out of hand: 🌦️ Kalshi and The Weather Company are teaming up on weather-prediction markets, with Weather Co. data verifying outcomes as Kalshi says it is pacing toward $1.1B in annualized volume.
IPO
💍 Oura is reportedly eyeing a September IPO at a $16B+ valuation, with a potential $3B raise.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
😢 Rough week: Country legend Dolly Parton passed at 80 yrs old; Artist Yayoi Kusama died at 97 - she was known for her polka dots and Infinity Rooms that became museum blockbuster culture
💛 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days sequel is in discussions
🎬 Coyote vs. Acme finally hits theaters after being shelved for a tax write-off, with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score.
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