Techmeme
August 20, 2026, 6:21 PM

Top News

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Douglas Gillison / Reuters:
Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on internal US military information, making $8M overall with a 97.2% average win rate and attracting copycat bets  —  More than 150 wallets on Polymarket International may have traded on inside U.S. military information, attracting copycat bets …
Vlad Fedorov / The GitHub Blog:
GitHub says its 7+ hour August 17 outage was caused by a capacity failure when peak traffic overwhelmed an infrastructure component in a Central US data center  —  An update on the August 17 outage and the steps we're taking to improve reliability.  —  On August 17, GitHub experienced an outage that lasted 7 hours and 47 minutes.
Qianer Liu / The Information:
Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules  —  Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an AI chip specially tailored for Chinese customers by the end of the year …
Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal:
Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, its largest yet, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and tokens are the central currency for businesses  —  The Stripe deal for OpenRouter, founded by an NFT entrepreneur, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models
Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg:
Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from third parties like Nvidia  —  Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo has built a custom chip that the company said will improve the performance of its robotaxis …
Google:
Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years  —  From outer space to underwater, here's how developers are bringing a positive impact with our open models.
Luz Ding / Bloomberg:
Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$39.64B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.54B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s profit plunged more than 75% after the Chinese company ratcheted up quarterly capital spending …
Alexander Gladstone / Wall Street Journal:
A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants objected, seeking assurance their info would be removed  —  The flight attendants want assurance that their confidential information will be removed from the sale of the defunct airline's digital records
Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter:
Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal  —  “When Liberty first invested in Charter more than a decade ago, we saw an opportunity to build scale behind a great management team and operating model," said John Malone.
Michael Martina / Reuters:
How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military  —  China's Unitree Robotics - among the world's biggest producers of humanoid and quadruped robots - based designs …

Sponsor Posts

Command Line:
Bringing local models and sandboxed tools to Windows and GitHub Copilot  —  GitHub Copilot will soon determine when a task is best handled by on-device AI and when it needs cloud-scale models.
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Zoho:
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IDrive:
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Featured Podcasts

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More News

Hugo Lowell / Wired:
Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:
Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
Bloomberg:
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