Techmeme
August 4, 2025, 7:55 PM

Top News

Cloudflare:
Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules and network blocks  —  We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine.  Although Perplexity initially crawls …
Olivia Solon / Bloomberg:
Spotify says it is updating prices across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific; an example email had a €1/month rise  —  Spotify Technology SA shares gained in premarket trading after the company announced it's raising premium subscription prices across many markets outside the US.
Mike Isaac / New York Times:
Silicon Valley has shifted from Web 2.0 to a new “hard tech”, AI-dominated era with fewer perks and a more serious mood, as startups use San Francisco as a base  —  In a scene in HBO's “Silicon Valley” in 2014, a character who had just sold his idea to a fictional tech company …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Elon Musk says Vine's video archive is being brought back, and xAI's newly launched Grok Imagine, available to X Premium+ subscribers, is “AI Vine”  —  Elon Musk says he's bringing back Vine — sort of.  The X owner announced over the weekend that the company discovered …
Ian Carlos Campbell / Engadget:
OpenAI says ChatGPT now offers “gentle reminders” to take breaks during long sessions, and it is building tools to better detect signs of emotional distress  —  OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will now remind users to take breaks if they're in a particularly long chat with AI.
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC:
OpenAI says it will hit 700M weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500M in March and up 4x YoY, and has 5M paying business users, up from June's 3M  —  OpenAI is set to hit 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500 million in March …
Natalie Lung / Bloomberg:
Lyft partners with Baidu to launch autonomous vehicles in Germany and the UK in 2026, pending regulatory approval; Lyft will deploy Baidu's sixth-gen robotaxis  —  Lyft Inc. said it's partnering with China's Baidu Inc. to launch autonomous vehicles in Europe starting next year …
Bloomberg:
Amazon denies it's closing its Wondery podcast studio but says it will break up its operations; source: ~110 people will lose their jobs because of the reorg  —  As podcasting becomes video-oriented, Amazon is shuffling Wondery into Audible and a new “creator services” team while cutting approximately 110 staff members
Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
Google unveils Kaggle Game Arena, a benchmarking platform where AI models compete head-to-head in strategic games, starting with a chess tournament this week  —  The world's top performing artificial intelligence models, including OpenAI's o3 and 04-mini, Google LLC's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash …
Fred Lambert / Electrek:
Transcripts from the trial over a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash: Tesla withheld crash‑snapshot data and took years to admit it existed or was relevant to the case  —  Tesla was caught withholding data, lying about it, and misdirecting authorities in the wrongful death case involving Autopilot that it lost this week.
Matt Kapko / CyberScoop:
CrowdStrike's 2025 Threat Hunting Report: 320+ investigations into North Korean operatives in remote IT jobs in the US, Europe, and elsewhere in the past year  —  Threat hunters saw North Korean operatives almost daily, reflecting a 220% year-over-year increase in activity, CrowdStrike said in a new report.
Samantha Subin / CNBC:
Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 48% YoY to $1B, vs. $940M expected, and boosts full-year outlook guidance to $4.14B-$4.15B, up from $3.89B-$3.90B  —  Palantir topped Wall Street's estimates Monday, surpassing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and hiking its full-year guidance.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch:
Google says Big Sleep, its vulnerability research tool “powered by Gemini”, found 20 flaws in various popular open-source software projects  —  Google's AI-powered bug hunter has just reported its first batch of security vulnerabilities.  —  Heather Adkins, Google's vice president …

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