Techmeme
August 7, 2026, 1:40 AM

Top News

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality and will likely cost $300+  —  A highly anticipated new device from OpenAI will have a unique look, complete with moving parts that help give it personality …
KOB 4:
New Mexico trial: a judge orders Meta to pay $567M and make changes for underage users after finding its platforms helped create a public nuisance harming teens  —  SANTA FE, N.M. - A Santa Fe judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million, and make changes for the user experience of juvenile accounts …
Carl Zimmer / New York Times:
Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans  —  Scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes.
Herb Scribner / Axios:
OpenAI updates the default model for free users to GPT-5.6 Luna, adds unlimited text chats for free users, rolls out an improved GPT-5.6 Sol version, and more  —  OpenAI on Thursday announced a series of changes that will upgrade ChatGPT for both paid and free users.
Tobias Mann / The Register:
AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon with the promise to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum  —  Early tech demos show model-specific integrated circuits churning out up to 17,000 tokens a second
Bloomberg:
Alphabet raises $25B in an investment-grade bond sale; sources say it attracted ~$115B of peak demand and that Alphabet plans to issue US debt twice per year  —  Alphabet Inc. sold $25 billion of investment-grade bonds after generous yield payouts helped secure one of the year's largest order books for AI-related debt.
Reuters:
SpaceX and Tesla plan to initially invest $16.8B to build Terafab in Grimes County, Texas; combined demand from SpaceX and Tesla is forecast to top 1 TW  —  Elon Musk's SpaceX <SPCX.O> and Tesla <TSLA.O> will initially invest $16.8 billion to build Terafab, an advanced AI semiconductor complex …
Financial Times:
Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5  —  TikTok owner training a model three times larger than Moonshot's Kimi K3  —  ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach …
More: Reuters
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
Victoria Turk / Wired:
Google DeepMind says its WeatherNext model can accurately predict a storm's track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data, and open sources the model  —  Its WeatherNext model, which will be open-sourced, can accurately predict both a storm's track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data.
Ram Iyer / TechCrunch:
Naïve, which provides infrastructure for AI agents to handle most business operations, raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus, bringing its total funding to $32M  —  Developers detest drudgery.  The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things.
Anna Tong / Forbes:
Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell AI training datasets to US labs and the government are also selling them to Chinese labs  —  The same Silicon Valley startups supplying OpenAI, Anthropic and the U.S. government are also selling AI training datasets …
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac:
OpenAI debuts Agent Plugins, an open standard for bundling skills and MCP servers, and says Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and Vercel are on its steering committee  —  OpenAI's GPT-5 turns one tomorrow, and the company is marking the week by looking beyond individual models.
Bloomberg:
Google centralizes its AI leadership at Mountain View in a bid to catch its rivals; Sebastian Borgeaud, who led a major AI coding effort, moved from the UK  —  Alphabet Inc.'s Google is concentrating its artificial intelligence leadership at its Mountain View, California …

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Zoho Books levels up with Apple Intelligence  —  The best accounting experience isn't really attainable if your software can't keep up with evolving technologies, is it?  That's why Zoho Books made sure to jump …
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
Invest Like the Best:
Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Sources:
Baseten's CEO on why every company will want to own its AI
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Training Data:
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies and their implications.
Subscribe to Training Data.
Uncapped with Jack Altman:
Andrew Feldman from Cerebras
Conversations with people I admire about things I'm genuinely interested in.
Subscribe to Uncapped with Jack Altman.
Acquired:
The Home Depot
Learn the playbooks that built the world's greatest companies - and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
Subscribe to Acquired.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 1:40 AM ET, August 7, 2026.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Earlier Picks

Artificial Analysis:
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: