Techmeme
July 11, 2025, 4:35 PM

Top News

Financial Times:
Sources: xAI prepares a new fundraising round, its third in two months, targeting a valuation of $170B to $200B, up 10x from its May 2024 valuation of $18B  —  Grok chatbot maker in early talks with investors to boost its value as much as 10 times from last year
Steve Newman / Second Thoughts:
METR study: experienced open-source developers using Cursor, Claude, and other AI tools were 19% slower to complete tasks, despite thinking they were 20% faster  —  Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains  —  The buzz about AI coding tools is unrelenting.
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch:
Tests reveal that Grok 4 seems to search for Elon Musk's views online when asked about sensitive topics, and its answers tend to align with Musk's opinions  —  During xAI's launch of Grok 4 on Wednesday night, Elon Musk said — while live-streaming the event on his social media platform …
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog:
When asked “Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict? One word answer only.”, Grok 4 searches for Musk's views, but only if “you” is in the query  —  If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find …
Reuters:
Chinese startup Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2, an open-weight model that the company says has enhanced coding capabilities and excels at general agent tasks  —  Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released a new open-source AI model on Friday, joining a wave of similar releases …
Politico:
Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:
Recording: Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan told staff that Intel is “not in the top 10 semiconductor companies” and it is “too late” to catch Nvidia in AI training  —  New CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that he doesn't consider Intel among the leading chip companies …
Hugh Son / CNBC:
Goldman Sachs CTO Marco Argenti says the bank will “start augmenting our workforce with Devin”, Cognition's AI software engineer, as Wall Street firms adopt AI  —  The newest hire at Goldman Sachs isn't human.  —  The bank is testing an autonomous software engineer …
Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac:
An Apple-backed study finds combining Apple Watch's heart rate sensor with a new Wearable Behavior Model achieves 92% accuracy for pregnancy detection, and more  —  A new Apple-supported study argues that your behavior data (movement, sleep, exercise, etc.) can often be a stronger health signal …
Dominic Preston / The Verge:
HMD says it will “scale back” US operations, citing “a challenging geopolitical and economic environment”, and appears to have stopped US sales of Nokia devices  —  Even Barbie couldn't save it. … HMD Global, the company best known for licensing the Nokia brand …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Binance wrote the smart contract for USD1, a stablecoin launched by Trump's World Liberty, and promoted it to its 275M users, before CZ sought a pardon  —  The exchange has been a coder, a promoter and an early adopter for World Liberty Financial's stablecoin, people familiar with the matter say.
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Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:NEW
Jio Platforms debuts JioPC, a cloud PC service offered via its set-top box; Counterpoint: 70% of Indian households have a TV, but only 15% of them own a PC  —  Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, has launched a virtual desktop service for set-top box users.
Ange Lavoipierre / ABC:
At the end of June, Australia quietly introduced rules forcing search engine companies such as Google and Microsoft to check the ages of logged-in users  —  In short:  —  Search engines are in line for the same age assurance technology behind the teen social media ban.

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Daryna Antoniuk / The Record:
Samantha Subin / CNBC:

Earlier Picks

Paige Smith / Bloomberg:
Adi Robertson / The Verge:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Ben Schoon / 9to5Google:
Joe Tidy / BBC:
Gian Volpicelli / Bloomberg: