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June 18, 2026, 10:50 PM
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| Hugo Lowell / Wired: |
New book: Trump mocked Zuckerberg and Bezos by showing associates their fawning texts, saying they were “kissing my ass”; Musk called it “First-class groveling” — “You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys,” NYT reporters Maggie Haberman …
More: New York Times, Implicator.ai, New York Magazine, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Raw Story, Legal Insurrection, Mediaite, The Gateway Pundit, and Fox News
X: @dkthomp, @hugolowell, @wajahatali, @hugolowell, @stanveuger, @mollyjongfast, @therickwilson, @jimstewartson, and @mpolymer
| Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC: |
Intel's stock jumps 10.64% after Trump said “Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America”; INTC is up 520%+ in the past year — Intel's stock rose 10% on Thursday, after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal …
More: AppleInsider, Tom's Hardware, Silicon Valley Business …, SiliconANGLE, New York Times, Ukrainian National News, Semafor, MarketWatch, International Business Times, PC Gamer, Reuters, Barchart.com, Axios, Forbes Middle East, Washington Examiner, Motley Fool, The Daily Caller, Portland Business Journal, Hindustan Times, Cult of Mac, Watcher Guru, Pulse 2.0, Digital Trends, Yahoo Finance, Blockonomi, UPI, JusttheNews.com, Benzinga, Coinpaper, iPhone in Canada, Scripps News, The Hill, Sherwood News, Livemint, Business Insider, 9to5Mac, Proactive, Barron's Online, Mercury News, Wall Street Journal, and TechSpot
X: @rapidresponse47, @patrickmoorhead, @jimcramer, @dnystedt, @aleabitoreddit, @scottlincicome, @rogoswami, @mgsiegler, @jimcramer, @stevehou, @benbajarin, @divestech, and @jukan05. Truth Social: @realDonaldTrump …. Forums: r/StockMarket
| Zack Zwiezen / Kotaku: |
Rockstar Games announces that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will go live on June 25; TTWO closed up 4.93% — If you were worried about another delay, you can probably stop worrying … Some of you might roll your eyes at the seeming certainty of that statement, and understandably so.
More: VideoCardz.com, Engadget, TechRadar, MobileSyrup, Washington Times, Insider Gaming, Bloomberg, Digital Trends, PCMag, Wall Street Journal, iPhone in Canada, IGN, Benzinga, Thurrott, Neowin, Türkiye Today, Gameranx, The Next Web, Moneycontrol, Digital Foundry, UPI, Comic Book, Tech4Gamers, ScreenRant, Digit, The Game Post, GamingBolt, Polygon.com, Dexerto, Push Square, TheGamer, 80 Level, and Gamereactor UK
| Artificial Analysis: |
GLM-5.2 is the leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, scoring 51, only behind Fable 5's 60, Opus 4.8's 56, and GPT-5.5's 55 — Z ai's GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scoring 51 and it sits on the Pareto frontier of Intelligence vs Cost per Task
More: Implicator.ai, Decrypt, Blockchain.News, WinBuzzer, Pulse 2.0, and Artificial Analysis
X: @designarena, @rasbt, @jeremyphoward, @artificialanlys, @arena, @teortaxestex, @teortaxestex, @omercheema, @elonmusk, @jietang, @artificialanlys, @zackkorman, @hosseeb, @alexfinn, and @elonmusk. Forums: Hacker News
| Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch: |
Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction — Waymo has recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it figures out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones.
More: San Francisco Chronicle, Automotive News, Fast Company, New York Post, Motor1.com, PCMag, CNET, Austin American-Statesman, CNBC, CBS News, Daily Mail, The Economic Times, NBC Bay Area, Simply Wall St, How-To Geek, campaignlive.com, Carscoops, Digital Trends, Barron's Online, Automotive World, Gizmodo, Watcher Guru, Bloomberg, EV, InsideEVs, Dow Jones Newswires, The Next Web, Wired, Fox Business, ABC7, and CleanTechnica
| Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac: |
Apple opens iOS to alternative app marketplaces in Brazil and changes App Store commission structure following a settlement with competition watchdog CADE — Starting today, app developers will be able to distribute apps through alternative app marketplaces in Brazil, as part of a broader set … | Ben Weiss / Fortune: |
Sources: APEC, a derivatives exchange founded by the 22-year-old son of pro-crypto Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, raised $30M led by Lux at a $300M valuation — The 22-year-old son of a crypto-friendly senator plans to launch his own exchange for a type of derivative popularized by digital asset traders.
More: The Crypto Times, Wall Street Journal, Inc.com, and The Block
| Juby Babu / Reuters: |
Intel names former SK Hynix CEO Seok-Hee Lee as EVP of Intel Foundry; Naga Chandrasekaran will lead front-end technology development and front-end manufacturing — Intel (INTC.O) on Thursday named Seok-Hee Lee executive vice president of its contract chip-manufacturing division as it sharpens focus on its advanced packaging business.
More: Benzinga, Intel, The American Bazaar, and Yahoo Finance
X: @intel, @asheaw, @christophauto, and @stocksavvyshay
| Mark Bergen / Bloomberg: |
Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis says the company is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips for use in third-party data centers — Amazon.com Inc. is in talks to sell its custom-made artificial intelligence chips for use in other companies' data centers, a key expansion of its efforts to cut into Nvidia Corp.'s dominance.
More: Yahoo Finance, Motley Fool, Livemint, The Tech Portal, CNBC, TechCrunch, and Benzinga
| Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch: |
Snap plans to spin off an internal generative AI video team into Dotmo, a new company focused on AI models for interactive gaming experiences, citing high costs — Snap will be spinning off an internal generative AI video team into a separate company. The new company — dubbed Dotmo …
More: RuntimeWire
| Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch: |
Appfigures: daily downloads of major VPN apps in India rose 49% on June 16 after India announced its Telegram ban; Proton and Turbo recorded largest increases — As India cut off access to messaging app Telegram for a week over concerns about exam-related fraud, users turned to virtual private networks …
More: TechRadar and BleepingComputer
X: @davidgpeterson, @protonvpn, @10xravi, @aditi_muses, @aditi_muses, and @madmanweb
| Financial Times: |
Sources: SpaceX plans to raise $20B in a bond sale as soon as next week; the funds would be used to pay back a $20B bridge loan taken out after the xAI merger — AI and rocket group is tapping debt markets after raising $86bn in stock market debut — SpaceX is planning to raise $20bn … | Yueqi Yang / The Information: |
Sources: Kalshi is generating $2B+ in annualized revenue, up about three times from November, and has held informal talks with banks about an eventual IPO — Prediction market Kalshi is generating more than $2 billion in annualized revenue, up about three times from November … | Angel Au-Yeung / Wall Street Journal: |
AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation — Baseten, part of a growing Silicon Valley ecosystem offering services to enable low-cost AI models, is raising $1.5 billion in a new round| Financial Times: |
Doc: SpaceX says the EU's plan to reserve satellite spectrum for European operators risks disrupting connectivity, including for emergency services in Ukraine — Elon Musk's group hits out at proposal by bloc to reserve part of spectrum band for European operators| Nate Raymond / Reuters: |
A US circuit court overturned an injunction against Ohio, allowing the state to implement a law forcing platforms to seek parental consent if a user is under-16 — A U.S. appeals court on Thursday cleared the way for Ohio to implement a law that requires social media companies … | Bloomberg: |
Sources: Meta is under contract to buy roughly 1.6 GW of computing capacity from Crusoe across two data centers in Texas and Missouri — Meta Platforms Inc. has secured new agreements to get AI computing power from data center developer Crusoe, bolstering the infrastructure it needs to support …
More: The Information, San Francisco Examiner, Reuters, and DatacenterDynamics
X: @alex, @edzitron, and @kakashiii111
| Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer: |
An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, 30% to 50% of engineers on core teams reassigned to data labeling, and more — Hi - t For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year.| Politico: |
Sources: the White House and Anthropic are working on a framework that would assess the severity of AI security flaws, a sign that negotiations are progressing — The attempt to create a standardized method to evaluate this and future such incidents underscores how the administration is racing …
More: Washington Post, The Elec, and New York Post
| Financial Times: |
A profile of Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, who has become one of Silicon Valley's top power brokers as she helps oversee Meta's AI infrastructure push — Former Goldman Sachs executive explores financing once alien to Silicon Valley for $600bn infrastructure push.
X: @jasonmiller
| Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: |
Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in talks to raise $300M from Jeff Bezos and others at a $2B+ valuation — General Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time …
More: The Next Web
| Ashley Gold / Axios: |
Former Trump AI adviser Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to lead a new team called Strategic Futures, focused on frontier AI policy and internal governance — Dean Ball, who helped shape the Trump administration's early policies on AI, is heading to OpenAI, he told Axios exclusively.
More: Politico, Hyperdimensional, TechCrunch, and The Information
| Richard Lawler / The Verge: |
Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort — The AI image generator says this side project will be ‘in many ways superior to even MRI machines.’
More: Midjourney, The Register, Bloomberg, Business Wire, Engadget, PYMNTS, Latent.Space, Decrypt, Core Memory, TBPN, Business Insider, Inc, Business Today, iPhone in Canada, PetaPixel, Gizmodo, Tech Times, The Decoder, Mashable, The Next Web, The Neuron, The Information, and RuntimeWire
X: @midjourney, @midjourney, @nickfloats, @iterintellectus, @_sholtodouglas, @sebastiancaliri, @nickadobos, @nickfloats, @nikitabier, @camwiese, @tszzl, @jgebbia, @deryatr_, @scobleizer, @pdhsu, @arian_ghashghai, @mgrczyk, @akristoffersen0, @deanwball, @pitdesi, @joshdefonzo, @tobi, @micsolana, @deryatr_, @j_g_allen, @steipete, @slatestarcodex, @davidsholz, @davidsholz, @heavenlytoad, @davidsholz, @davidsholz, @shaunmmaguire, @braydondymm, @davidsholz, @fchollet, @davidsholz, @elonmusk, @jefftangx, @_sholtodouglas, @zeffmax, @victortaelin, @gabriel1, @davidsholz, @tocelot, @davidsholz, @kimmonismus, @nevadasanchez, @gregisenberg, @shivon, @midjourney, @nickmmark, @pronounced_kyle, @mwcvitkovic, @deedydas, @david_c_garrett, @rampcapitalllc, @pitdesi, @daniellefong, @erictopol, @butterflynetinc, @avichal, @eastdakota, @growing_daniel, @ccatalini, @autismcapital, @davemorin, @autismcapital, @chrissgpt, and @markgurman
LinkedIn: Carlos Rodrigues and Maria Burpee
Bluesky: @sungkim, @aerialeverything …, @iamstan.dev, @ernie.tedium.co, and @philpax.me. Threads: @ericflo. Mastodon: @yiningkarlli@mastodon …
Forums: Hacker News, Hacker News, r/doctorsUK, r/BetterOffline, and r/midjourney
| Kerry Flynn / Axios: |
Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI agents that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $675M valuation — Gradial, a Seattle-based startup that deploys AI agents to automate enterprise marketing workflows, has raised $65 million in Series C funding …
More: SiliconANGLE, Gradial, The Next Web, FinSMEs, and GeekWire
| Galit Altstein / Bloomberg: |
Dream, co-founded by ex-NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio with a focus on protecting critical infrastructure, raised $260M at a $3B valuation, up from $1B in 2025 — Dream, an Israeli artificial intelligence company that provides AI and cybersecurity services to governments and critical infrastructure operators …
More: Dream, Business Insider, SiliconANGLE, Ventureburn, The Times of Israel, RuntimeWire, FinSMEs, Reuters, Tech Funding News, Globes, SecurityWeek, PYMNTS, The Next Web, and Finimize
LinkedIn: Christopher Walsh and Eytan Buchman
| Natalia Kniazhevich / Bloomberg: |
Prem AI, a Swiss startup that lets hedge funds and law firms run AI models on their own infrastructure, is raising a $100M Series A, targeting a $500M valuation — Prem AI, a Swiss startup that helps companies including hedge funds and law firms run artificial intelligence models …
More: Pulse 2.0, Tech Funding News, RuntimeWire, Startup.eu, The Next Web, and Washington Technology
| Anhata Rooprai / Reuters: |
Accenture says it will buy a majority stake in Dragos and fully acquire runZero and NetRise in a combined deal for the cybersecurity startups valued at $4.18B — Consultancy firm Accenture (ACN.N) said on Thursday it will buy a majority stake in Dragos and fully acquire runZero and NetRise in a combined deal valued at $4.18 billion.Sponsor Posts
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