Companies, products, and big moves
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The world's largest record company has stopped treating AI music companies purely as defendants — it just handed one of them a license to its catalog. Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs have signed a multi-year strategic agreement — ElevenLabs' first with a major label — that starts with a
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Amazon spent twelve months walling its catalog off from AI platforms — crawler blocks, a court order against Perplexity's shopping agent, product feeds cut from Google Shopping. On Thursday it announced the thing all that blocking was quietly building toward: its advertisers can now run ads inside ChatGPT. The
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A chip startup raises a massive round on the thesis that commodity memory can outpace HBM for running AI models, and a warehouse robotics company finally steps out of the shadows. Positron AI raised $875 million in a Series C round at a $5 billion valuation, doubling down on a
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Two moves this afternoon that say the same thing from opposite ends of the stack: AI is where the money and the compute are heading next. Amazon is letting its advertisers buy inventory inside ChatGPT, and Qualcomm is rebuilding its phone silicon around agents that never phone home. Amazon is
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Two infrastructure bets landed this morning: the payments industry agreed on how to tell a good shopping agent from a bad one, and the US Army bought navigation that doesn't need satellites. Ant International, Visa and Mastercard said Thursday they will build a common "Know Your Agent&
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Two stories about who actually controls the intelligence layer landed within hours of each other this morning: a European model lab wiring itself into the world's largest pools of enterprise data, and a Paris startup raising serious money to build an architecture that isn't a language
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A memory shortage is now setting the price of Chinese AI compute, and California just created the job of auditing AI. Both stories are about the same thing: inputs and oversight that nobody can source cheaply. Huawei has raised the indicated price of its Ascend 950DT accelerator to more than
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China's most-watched AI lab spent Wednesday doing two things that pull in opposite directions: quietly hiring the bankers for a Shanghai listing, and publicly retreating from the price increases it imposed three weeks ago. DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare an IPO on Shanghai's
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Two of the morning's stories come out of the same place: the bottleneck on agentic AI is no longer the model, it's knowing whether the model actually did the job. Alibaba is set to lead a $300 million round in UniPat AI at a $2.5
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Apple held its first iPhone event under CEO John Ternus on Wednesday and shipped the iPhone 18 Pro, the foldable iPhone Duo, AirPods 5, and two watches. Read the spec sheets and it looks like an ordinary S-year. Read what the silicon and the software actually do and one
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Two releases and one uncomfortable result about readers: a petabyte-scale map of every possible single-letter mutation, a $1.35 billion bet on running models in milliwatts, and new evidence that people can't tell AI fiction from human fiction — and rate it highest when they think a
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Two strands of the AI buildout surfaced this afternoon: OpenAI describing how far its silicon work with Samsung has actually gone, and a fresh challenge to the jobs story that countries are using to justify data centers. OpenAI says joint chip production and research is now the deepest part of