Techmeme
August 7, 2026, 12:01 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, likely costing $300+  —  A highly anticipated new device from OpenAI will have a unique look, complete with moving parts that help give it personality …
Bloomberg:
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 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  —  In AMD's latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance …
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 …
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.
Anna Tong / Forbes:
Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell training datasets to US AI 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.
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.
Bloomberg:
Bloomberg:

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Artificial Analysis:
Andrew Webster / The Verge:
Colin Demarest / Axios:
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