Techmeme: With each successive era of AI, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model (SemiAnalysis)

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August 22, 2026, 2:30 AM

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Ashley Gold / Axios:

The US DOJ and TikTok reach a $400M settlement to resolve allegations TikTok violated COPPA; the DOJ filed the lawsuit in 2024 — The Justice Department and TikTok, along with parent company ByteDance, have reached a $400 million settlement to resolve allegations of violating children's online privacy laws …

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:

Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI — Apple Inc. is cutting jobs across teams responsible for the Siri digital assistant and the Vision Pro headset …

More: AppleInsider, Business Today, Macworld, Engadget, Digit, The Indian Express, TechCrunch, The Verge, Financial Express, Livemint, Appleosophy, MacRumors, Digital Trends, Seeking Alpha, Newsmax, MacTech.com, iThinkDifferent, iPhone in Canada, PYMNTS, Mashable, iClarified, and The Mac Observer

X: @markgurman, @markgurman, @markgurman, @tom_krikorian, @markgurman, @markgurman, @barrsm, and @jasondiamond. LinkedIn: Jeffrey Pearson. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to

Forums: r/VisionPro, r/apple, and MacRumors Forums

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac:

Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content

More: AppleInsider. Forums: r/VisionPro

New York Times:

Sources: Anthropic's bankers said the company could raise $100B+ in its IPO, which could value it at $2T, in recent discussions with potential investors — The offering could value the five-year-old A.I. start-up at $2 trillion, its bankers have told potential investors, which would exceed Elon Musk's SpaceX.

More: CNBC and Seoul Economic Daily

X: @srimuppidi, @firstadopter, @edzitron, @shaig, and @scottmstedman

Hayden Field / The Verge:

OpenAI President Greg Brockman's role has expanded significantly, giving him control over its product and scaling teams following a wave of executive departures — OpenAI has had a hell of a year. The company spent months battling former cofounder Elon Musk in a sensational jury trial …

X: @verge and @grahamstarr

Laura Bratton / The Information:

OpenAI's VP of sales in the Americas, Kaylin Voss, has resigned a week after Denise Dresser left, and is returning to Salesforce, where she was Slack's CRO

X: @amir and @benioff. Bluesky: @okane.fyi

Anzar Mehraj / Reuters:

OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months, to $4/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens — OpenAI said on Friday it is cutting the prices of its frontier GPT-5.6 Sol model for developers by more than 20% for the next three months …

More: RuntimeWire and The Decoder

X: @openai, @openai, @daniel_mac8, @kimmonismus, @fleetingbits, @thsottiaux, @jayagup10, @firstadopter, @openaidevs, and @deliprao

Chase DiFeliciantonio / Politico:

OpenAI says California should amend SB 53 to expand safeguards, including requiring monitoring of frontier models under training, following AI agent hacks — SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI urged its home state of California on Friday to “strengthen” its landmark AI law following recent autonomous hacks …

More: The Guardian, The Prompt, and Business Insider

X: @_nathancalvin and @quinnypig. LinkedIn: OpenAI Global Affairs

Claude:

Anthropic says Mythos 5 is now in public beta in Claude Security for Enterprise users, and it is working with providers to embed Mythos 5 in defensive tools — We're sharing an update on our efforts to help more teams use frontier capabilities for cyber defense.

More: The New Stack, MarkTechPost, Unite.AI, Cyber Security News, RuntimeWire, and The Decoder

X: @claudeai, @claudeai, @andrewcurran_, @illscience, @martin_casado, @lukeyoungblood, @_simonsmith, @claudeai, @dani_avila7, and @claudeai. LinkedIn: Mike Wilkes. Bluesky: @sungkim. Forums: Hacker News

Dina Bass / Bloomberg:

Anthropic hires Amir Salek, who ran Google's TPU business until 2022, to join its compute team as part of a push to develop its own chips — Anthropic PBC has hired Amir Salek, a founder of the custom chip program at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, as the AI lab lays the groundwork for a push into making its own semiconductors.

More: The Motley Fool. X: @andrewcurran_, @eliebakouch, @mzuhair123, and @dinabass

Rashika Singh / Reuters:

Nvidia makes a minority investment in Cloverleaf, which works with utilities and energy providers to secure infrastructure for data center sites — Nvidia (NVDA.O) has made a minority investment in privately held Cloverleaf Infrastructure to develop infrastructure to power AI data center projects across …

More: TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, The Information, Motley Fool, Cloverleaf Infrastructure, The Daily Caller, The Register, Bisnow, Blockonomi, DatacenterDynamics, and Quartz

Bloomberg:

DeepSeek unveils an experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model, saying it nears the performance of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on multimodal agentic tests — DeepSeek unveiled an experimental AI model that can understand visual prompts, saying the tool nears the performance of an advanced model by US rival Anthropic PBC.

More: SiliconANGLE, Digit, StrictlyVC, The Decoder, Techstrong.ai, CoinGape, Proactive, and Caixin Global

X: @deepseek_ai, @deepseek_ai, @thdxr, @openrouter, @tphuang, @kimmonismus, @teortaxestex, @zephyr_z9, @zizhpan, @deepseek_ai, @deepseek_ai, and @teortaxestex. Forums: r/hermesagent

Madison McLauchlan / BetaKit:

Helcim, a payments processor for SMBs, raised a CA$53M Series C led by Business Development Bank of Canada's Growth Venture Fund at a CA$250M valuation — Calgary company reaches $250-million valuation, hopes to grow after Moneris sells to US private equity.

More: Helcim and Globe and Mail

Sebastian Herrera / Fortune:

Amazon raises prices for its Echo smart speakers, Fire TV line, Kindle devices, and eero mesh networking systems to offset increases in memory and storage costs — Amazon has raised prices for several of its first-party devices, including its Echo smart speakers and Fire TV line …

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:

Rundoo, a provider of AI-powered business operations software for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures — Rundoo Inc., the creator of an artificial intelligence-native system-of-record for independent supply stores, said today it has closed …

More: citybiz, Rundoo, Rundoo, Silicon Valley Business …, Hardware Retailing, and FinSMEs. X: @rundooai

Sui-Lee Wee / New York Times:

Following abandoned IPO attempts in NYC and London, Shein is struggling to grow as it nears a Hong Kong listing at a fraction of its peak valuation of $100B — Facing pressure in the United States and Europe, Shein is struggling to find new ways to grow ahead of its much-delayed initial public offering.

More: Puck and Dow Jones Newswires

SemiAnalysis:

With each successive era of AI, from early scaling, to reasoning, to agentic, open models have taken half as long to catch up to the first closed model — Comparing open vs. closed models across the eras of frontier models, Is the gap narrowing? — ∙ Paid

X: @semianalysis_

Wall Street Journal:

How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability — State governors, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, slowing development of the facilities as anger over AI spreads

More: PCMag, Financial Times, The Algorithmic Bridge, The Decoder, CNBC, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Axios, Heatmap News, DatacenterDynamics, Spotlight PA, and Washington Post

X: @robinsonmeyer, @jasminewsun, @theojaffee, @chamath, @luke_metro, @reprashida, @buccocapital, @tm_brown, @rondesantis, and @governorshapiro

Forums: r/antiai and r/politics

Omarchy News:

DHH launches Omacom Foundation, a non-profit supporting his Omarchy Linux distro, with $8M in funding from Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, others — It's time to dream big. Omarchy Quattro has given people a chance to experience what the malleable computer of the future looks like, and they like it (a lot!).

X: @dhh, @dhh, @jasonfried, @dhh, @dwr, @jasonfried, @jason, @bradgessler, @jack, @dhh, @jaredpalmer, @eastdakota, @dhh, and @dhh. LinkedIn: Kevin Evans

Forums: Hacker News and r/linux

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Walmart, which has long resisted contactless Tap to Pay payments, says its stores will get the tech, which supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, by the end of 2026 — Apparently, hell has frozen over. Walmart on Friday said it will finally accept payments via both Apple Pay and Google Pay at its stores …

More: Walmart Inc., Google, 9to5Mac, ZDNET, MacRumors, Business Insider, Neowin, Mashable, Chrome Unboxed, 9to5Mac, Android Central, SammyGuru, CNET, Pocket-lint, BGR, AppleInsider, Fast Company, Quartz, Phandroid, Hindustan Times, Inc.com, Axios, WeRSM, PCMag, Spokesman.com, How-To Geek, KTLA, iDrop News, PYMNTS, The Mac Observer, Modern Retail, Dexerto, MakeUseOf, iClarified, The Verge, Android Authority, 9to5Google, Appleosophy, CBS News, Barchart.com, Daring Fireball, MacTech.com, and Droid Life

X: @walmart. LinkedIn: Ed Hernandez, Drew Nagle, and Amanda Aguilar

Bluesky: @caseym.org and @harrymccracken.com. Mastodon: @Moltz@mastodon.social

Forums: r/AppleWallet, r/googlenews, and Slashdot

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From Mediagazer

Jennifer Jacobs / CBS News:

Sources: the Pentagon fired Stars and Stripes' publisher, EIC, and a Middle East reporter for insubordination; the publisher earlier announced his retirement

Gene Maddaus / Variety:

Sources: Paramount reps are expected to meet Monday with the California AG's office to discuss a possible settlement of the antitrust suit blocking the WBD deal

Dominic Patten / Deadline:

Chris Aronson, ex-president of domestic theatrical distribution at Paramount, sues the company, claiming breach of contract and age discrimination

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Katie Roof / Business Insider:

Sources: Devoted Health, which uses AI to help coordinate medical care for those enrolled in Medicare Advantage, is raising new funding at a $25B valuation

X: @katie_roof

Terry Chen / NVIDIA Technical Blog:

Nvidia says its general-purpose coding agent system AVO scored 100% across all 25 environments in the ARC-AGI-3 public set, completing all 183 levels

More: TechCrunch, RuntimeWire, Wccftech, and The New Stack

X: @nvidiaai, @fakepsyho, @nvidiaai, @deryatr_, @jfpuget, @angaisb_, @alexocheema, and @lyalindotcom. LinkedIn: Bing Xu. Bluesky: @timkellogg.me

Forums: Hacker News, r/accelerate, and r/NVDA_Stock

Bailey Lipschultz / Bloomberg:

Sources: London-based AI infrastructure startup Nscale is seeking to raise as much as $3B in its US IPO, which could take place as soon as September

More: SiliconANGLE, PYMNTS, and Seeking Alpha

Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch:

Sources: the US Department of Energy is investigating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the US

More: Gizmodo. Bluesky: @okane.fyi

Jamie John / Financial Times:

Filings: Apple paid Ireland $17B in taxes in 2025, 40% of its $43B in global corporate income tax total, after an EU court ordered it to pay €13B in back taxes

More: MacRumors, Reuters, AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, iPhone in Canada, MacTech.com, iClarified, Irish Independent, The Irish Times, Irish Examiner, and Business Post

Forums: r/apple and MacRumors Forums

Financial Times:

A Dutch regulator fines Uber €825M for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without informing them, in the second largest fine under GDPR

More: Reuters, DutchNews.nl, Insurance Business, Forbes Middle East, Quartz, Nairametrics, Associated Press, Bloomberg, and RTÉ

X: @jason_kint, @jamesfarrar, and @podehaye. Bluesky: @carnage4life

Forums: r/europe, r/technology, r/uberdrivers, r/worldnews, r/news, and r/uberdrivers

Tim Fernholz / TechCrunch:

Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $250M extension, at a $2.3B valuation, to its March $170M Series A; source: Nvidia invested $25M

More: Reuters, SpaceNews, The American Bazaar, SiliconANGLE, Pulse 2.0, Business Wire, GeekWire, Unite.AI, RuntimeWire, Finimize, VC News Daily, and Dow Jones Newswires

X: @philipjohnston. LinkedIn: Philip Johnston. Bluesky: @timfernholz.com. Forums: r/space

Reuters:

Kakao plans to spin off its chat app-based platform business into a company tentatively named KakaoAI and relist it on the Korea Exchange on January 27, 2027

More: Tech in Asia, Korea JoongAng Daily, and The Asia Business Daily

Earlier Picks

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:

Patreon announces new and overhauled features, including recommendation algorithm changes aimed at making it easier for smaller creators to get discovered

More: Simon Owens's Media Newsletter, Music Ally, and Digital Music News. Mastodon: @Theeo123@mastodon.social