Companies, products, and big moves
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China's model race keeps moving from leaderboards into hardware people actually buy: a cockpit agent and a same-week model update — while Scott Aaronson reports the labs may now be holding back what their models solve. BYD's next-generation smart cockpit runs on Alibaba's
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The quiet part of the model race is happening on handsets, and vivo just laid out its full hand at its 2026 developer conference. Two of today's other stories point the same way: memory, not compute, is the industry's binding constraint, and the biggest brain map
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Two stories about what the AI race is actually buying: one company raising four times its own valuation to cover a compute bill it can't pass to users, and one chip vendor trying to make that bill smaller. Plus a paper showing what structural search finds when it
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Two infrastructure stories today: the ambition inside Huawei's compute business finally goes on the record, and a security vendor puts a hard number on whether detection rules actually fire. Huawei's supervisory board chairman Guo Ping told new employees that the company's target in ICT
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Two stories today: the enterprise coding-agent market repriced again, and South Korea's chip giants started signing students before they graduate. Factory raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than tripling the $1.5 billion mark it took in April — a five-month reprice that says
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The frontier's price keeps rising while its exit keeps slipping. Two stories from the same afternoon, one about money and one about method. OpenAI has held early conversations with large investors about another private round that would value the company at roughly $1.2 trillion, the Financial Times
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Two funding stories about AI leaving the screen: a manufacturing data platform that reads engineering drawings, and a drone autonomy company chasing a $20 billion price for pilots that never sit in the cockpit. CADDi raised $114 million in a Series D that values the Tokyo- and Chicago-headquartered company
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The AI build-out has a fuel problem, and a new forecast finally puts a number on it. Separately, a security firm went shopping for an inference vendor and walked out with admin rights. US data centers are on track to add 15 billion cubic feet per day of natural
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Two stories from today worth your time: Salesforce arguing that its own interface is the thing standing between customers and its data, and Huawei's chairman saying out loud what his compute business is aiming at. Salesforce opened Dreamforce by launching AIforce, a layer that pushes the company'
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Meta says its own AI silicon is ready — and a Chinese driving-chip maker says the same about its scale. Meta plans to put MTIA 450 — its third-generation custom accelerator, codenamed Arke — into data centers in the first half of 2027, with MTIA 500 (Astrid) finishing design work in
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Two stories on the same question this afternoon: what happens to frontier-lab pricing when the enterprise stack stops renting reasoning by the token. Plus a security layer for the robot fleet. Salesforce debuted Koa, a reasoning model it built with Nvidia on top of the open-weight Nemotron base,
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Two infrastructure stories this afternoon — one about robots that stop needing fenced-off floors, one about data centers that stop needing years of construction. Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid engineered to work next to people without physical barriers, and the bet is that certification, not capability, is what