Tech Brew Ride Home

OpenAI paused its Astra model over cyber capabilities it can't rule out, while Zvi picked apart the Hugging Face timeline. Zuck went open-weight with a 6,500-word manifesto, iPhone 18 Pro parts got pricier, and AI agents took students' quizzes.

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OpenAI puts the brakes on a new model because it's supposedly too powerful (The Verge)

Zvi Mowshowitz walks the timeline: OpenAI's agents found an Artifactory zero-day on June 26 that went unnoticed until a July 4 outage, and training continued from there (Don't Worry About The Vase)

Meta releases Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model, and plans to launch an open-weight version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, in the coming weeks (The Wall Street Journal)

The iPhone 18 Pro will cost Apple 38% more in parts – but there's some good news (9to5Mac)

Online course cheating has accelerated from chatbot-written essays to agents executing commands like "log in and complete my quiz"; major AI tools didn't refuse (The New York Times)

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A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $942M over harms to kids, with a trillion-dollar trial next. ByteDance started pretraining a 10T-parameter model, AMD bought Taalas to etch weights into silicon, and OpenAI's 2027 gadget leaked.

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Meta Ordered to Pay $942 Million to Address Harm to Kids From Social Media (The Wall Street Journal)

Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (Financial Times)

AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon with the promise to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum (The Register)

Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality and will likely cost $300+ (Bloomberg)

Longreads

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 (The New York Times)

David Imel: you could be taking way better photos on your phone (The Verge)

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Meta jumped into the coding-agent race with Muse Code, priced to undercut everyone. OpenAI revealed its rogue agents ran a secret message board to swap exploits, Rockstar dated a GTA VI look, and Google's brain drain got messier.

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Meta releases Muse Code in beta, a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding-focused model priced at $1.25/1M input and $4.25/1M output tokens (CNBC)

Meta says its Muse Spark 1.1 model exploited a vulnerability in another third-party service during cybersecurity testing, after evaluations firm Irregular caused the misconfiguration (The Information)

OpenAI says the Hugging Face breach involved AI agents creating an internal message board, unnoticed by humans, where they shared exploits and planned the hacks (Wired)

Rockstar says it will show an "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI on August 27, premiering on Netflix at 3pm ET before streaming on YouTube at 9pm ET (The Verge)

Sources: Demis Hassabis had been drifting away from Google DeepMind CEO day-to-day duties for at least a year and struggled to get satisfaction out of the role (Semafor)

Sources: Google researchers are frustrated over compute access as Cloud sells TPUs to rivals like Anthropic, amid an exodus that now includes all eight "Attention Is All You Need" authors (CNBC)

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Google shook up its AI leadership, kicking Demis Hassabis upstairs while Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat left to found Discovery Loop. SpaceX's first earnings spooked investors, a UK-tested AI agent went rogue, and Disney let TikTok fans into Disney+.

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Google just announced a major shakeup of its top AI leadership (The Verge)

SpaceX reports Q2 revenue up 92% YoY to $7.8B, vs. $6.81B est., AI operating loss of $1.26B, vs. $2.39B est., says capex in Q3 and Q4 will remain similar to Q2 (Bloomberg)

An AI agent went rogue during UK safety tests, creating fake identities and launching social engineering attacks unprompted (The Decoder)

Disney announces a global deal with TikTok to bring "thoughtfully curated" fan-created short-form videos based on Disney's IP to Disney+'s vertical Verts feed (The New York Times)

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OpenAI took Apple's trade-secrets lawsuit to the court of public opinion, receipts and all. Bending Spoons bought Airtable, Anthropic inked a $10B Norway compute deal, the US eyed polysilicon tariffs, and Microsoft told engineers tokenmaxxing was over.

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OpenAI drags Apple's lawsuit into the court of public opinion (The Verge)

Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing the US software company at $1.285B, set to close by 2026's end, its first post-IPO deal (Reuters)

Bending Spoons buys Airtable at an implied equity value of ~$2.25B, five years after a $735M round valued the no-code company at $11.7B; Airtable's ARR is now ~$480M (Silicon Republic)

Sources: Anthropic agreed to a $10B deal for computing capacity in Norway from Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup Volta Infra, which says the deal is for six years (Bloomberg)

Sources: the US is preparing to set a price floor and impose tariffs on polysilicon, a material critical to chips, later this month, in a bid to counter China (Reuters)

Sources: Beijing is growing concerned about the cyber capabilities of Mythos and other US-developed frontier AI models and their potential as offensive weapons (Bloomberg)

White House to host AI companies Tuesday to review new model-testing framework (CNBC)

Internal email: Microsoft introduces token budget limits for employees' AI use, saying "tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for" (404 Media)

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