Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- Sources: Apple glasses may run full visionOS when paired with Mac and a lighter UI with iPhone; Apple may unveil M5 iPad, MacBook Pro, and Vision Pro this week (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
- How culture and regulations are shaping AI companion platforms worldwide, with US platforms primarily targeting men and Chinese platforms mainly targeting women (Zilan Qian/ChinaTalk)
- A profile of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, whose estimated 11% stake is now worth $1B+ following ICE's $2B investment, as its rivalry with Kalshi intensifies (Forbes)
- Qantas says 5.7M customer records stolen in a July breach of a third-party platform have been released online, and it is assessing the extent of the exposure (Jason Gale/Bloomberg)
- Foundation Health, which develops an AI assistant to automate patient communication and prior authorization workflows for pharmacies, raised a $20M Series A (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)
- 1Password founders sold a $75M stake as part of a $100M secondary sale, valuing the company at $6.8B, the same valuation as its $620M Series C in January 2022 (Jeff Stone/Bloomberg)
- Sources: xAI is building world models for use in gaming and robotics, and has hired two AI researchers, Zeeshan Patel and Ethan He, from Nvidia to work on them (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)
- New evidence shows the Aisuru botnet, which outpaces all other IoT-based botnets, is drawing most of its firepower from hacked IoT devices hosted on US ISPs (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)
- Google adds Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, aka Nano Banana, to Search's AI Mode and Google Lens, on Android in the US for those with an account opted into Search Lab (Abner Li/9to5Google)
- Sources: Securitize, a blockchain company that tokenizes investments, is in talks to go public via a SPAC started by Cantor Fitzgerald at a $1B+ valuation (Bloomberg)
- AMD's SVP of AI Vamsi Boppana says the company's AI software, designed with input from OpenAI, helped secure the multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
- SEMI: US chip fab investment to outpace China, Taiwan, and South Korea from 2027, driven by AI demand and US policies, rising from $21B in 2025 to $43B in 2028 (Nikkei Asia)
- Interviews with security researchers about AI's potential for large-scale destruction, as experts remain divided and global regulatory frameworks lag (Stephen Witt/New York Times)
- Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Andrew Tulloch has left to join Meta; he reportedly declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B+ package in August (Wall Street Journal)
- Indonesia's film industry is embracing AI tools to produce Hollywood-style movies at a significantly lower cost; the average local film budget is about $602,500 (Linda Yulisman/Rest of World)
- Apple discontinues Clips, a video editing app it launched in 2017, removing it from the App Store for new users, and says Clips will no longer be updated (Eric Slivka/MacRumors)
- Analysis: in 2025, tech companies have raised about $157B in the US bond markets, up 70% from last year, as debt seeps into every corner of the AI economy (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)
- A look at Figure AI's new robot, Figure 03, which the company claims will be its first mass-producible humanoid capable of domestic chores and industrial labor (Billy Perrigo/Time)
- An index of Chinese chip stocks is outperforming global peers, surging 50% since the end of June, amid rising investor caution about soaring valuations (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)
- Thoughts on The Curve conference, where prominent figures debated about AI progress, and why automating research engineers is plausible within years (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects)