Apps & Smartphones news

• Entire launches a distributed Git network built for AI coding agents

  08-07-2026 15:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Entire, the developer-platform startup founded by former GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke, has launched a preview of a distributed Git network built for the age of AI coding agents. The pitch is to spread code hosting across regions rather than lean on a single central provider. The reasoning is a familiar strain in the agent […]
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• Venus Aerospace raises $91M to build its ‘detonation’ rocket engine

  08-07-2026 21:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Texas startup has raised $91m to build a rocket engine most of the industry once wrote off as too hard. Venus Aerospace announced a $91m Series B to develop its Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine, or RDRE. Mercury Fund led the round. The backers read like a defence roll-call. Lockheed Martin Ventures joined, alongside MESH, […]
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• A tritium ‘nuclear battery’ just reached orbit for the first time

  08-07-2026 21:29 via thenextweb.com
  
  The nuclear age has quietly reached commercial spaceflight. City Labs, a Miami firm, has launched BOHR, which it calls the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and the first nuclear CubeSat. The craft is about the size of a softball. It flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare on 7 July, alongside 80 other payloads, the […]
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• Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle

  08-07-2026 21:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  The smart-glasses backlash has reached the courtroom. From 20 July, New York will ban recording eyewear from every one of its 1,240 courts. It is the first US state to go that far. An internal memo from the New York State Unified Court System sets out the rule, first reported by Syracuse.com. The ban is […]
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• Musk’s SpaceXAI ships ‘Opus-class’ Grok 4.5 to undercut OpenAI and Anthropic

  08-07-2026 20:42 via thenextweb.com
  
  SpaceXAI has launched Grok 4.5, its most capable model yet. It is the company’s first release since going public and buying the AI coding startup Cursor. This is the joint model the two firms had raced to ship. Elon Musk aimed it squarely at coding and agentic work, not casual chat. “It is an Opus-class […]
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• Meta’s AI campus flushed a rare bacterium into Cheyenne’s water. The city hit back

  08-07-2026 20:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Meta contractor flushed a rare, potentially deadly bacterium into Cheyenne’s wastewater system. The Wyoming city has now suspended all data centre discharge, a fresh flashpoint in the fight over AI’s thirst for water. Officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, have stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data centres. The trigger was a contractor building Meta’s new AI […]
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• This AI startup pays $1.7M a year in rent so staff will work 72-hour weeks

  08-07-2026 20:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  Tech loves a perk, but few go this far. Rilla, an AI startup that makes coaching software for sales teams, spends about $1.7m a year on housing stipends so staff can live near its New York office, Fortune reports. The trade-off is a 72-hour week. Employees who live within a 10-minute bike ride of the […]
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• Fi’s new collar taps Starlink’s direct-to-cell to track dogs off the grid

  08-07-2026 20:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Smart-collar maker Fi is putting Starlink in a dog collar. Its new Fi Ultra taps SpaceX’s direct-to-cell satellites. A bolting dog stays trackable even where phone towers cannot reach. The next device to run on satellites is not a phone. It is a dog collar. Fi, a smart-collar startup, is launching the Fi Ultra. It […]
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• Palmer Luckey: US universities are falling behind China’s, and it shows

  08-07-2026 19:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  Palmer Luckey has a blunt warning about the US-China tech race: America is losing the classroom. The Anduril founder argues that US universities have stopped teaching engineers how to build. That, he says, hands China a lead well beyond cheap labour. He made the comments in a conversation with the Hoover Institution, highlighted by Fortune. […]
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• OpenAI’s new GPT-Live lets ChatGPT listen and speak at the same time

  08-07-2026 19:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI wants you to talk to ChatGPT, not type at it. On 8 July it launched GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models. The company says they make talking to AI feel much closer to a real conversation. Two versions, GPT-Live-1 and a smaller GPT-Live-1 mini, reach ChatGPT users worldwide from today. The headline change […]
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• ElevenLabs’ CEO on hitting ~$600m revenue and outrunning the AI labs

  08-07-2026 19:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  The ALL-IN Podcast took its live show to the Louvre this week for the RAISE Summit. It put ElevenLabs co-founder and chief executive Mati Staniszewski in the hot seat. Host Jason Calacanis opened where it stings: revenue, competition, and whether a voice startup can outlast OpenAI and Anthropic. “It’s the best time to be building,” […]
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• Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool to rival Cursor and Claude Code

  08-07-2026 19:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  Perplexity wants a piece of the AI coding boom. The San Francisco search startup has built an internal coding tool, codenamed “Teammate,” and may launch it publicly later, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Its own engineers have used the tool since May. The company made its name with an AI search […]
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• Mark Cuban thinks Lovable and Replit can outlast the AI labs

  08-07-2026 18:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  At RAISE Summit in Paris on Wednesday, “Shark Tank” investor Mark Cuban made the case for AI coding tools like Lovable and Replit, Business Insider reports. They can hold their own against the big AI labs, he argued. The reason: they now bundle services a raw language model does not. Cuban is a Lovable investor, […]
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• France’s ZML wants to break Nvidia lock-in with free cross-chip AI software

  08-07-2026 18:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Paris startup wants to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI, not with a new chip, but with software. ZML has released a free tool that runs open-source models fast across Nvidia, AMD, Google, Apple and Intel silicon alike. Nvidia still rules AI hardware, but its walls keep thinning. ZML, a Paris startup backed by AI […]
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• One symlink trick breaks 6 top AI coding agents, from Amazon

  08-07-2026 18:23 via thenextweb.com
  
  Security firm Wiz found one old Unix trick that breaks six popular AI coding assistants, from Amazon Q to Cursor. A booby-trapped repository can walk an agent past its own safety prompt. The payoff is a planted key that hands an attacker the developer’s machine. An ancient bug just tripped up the newest tools. Researchers […]
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• Only 6% of UK managers think Gen Z is work-ready. 45% of Gen Z disagree

  08-07-2026 18:06 via thenextweb.com
  
  Young workers and their bosses do not see the same person. Almost half of 18 to 24-year-olds, 45 per cent, believe they entered work with the skills to succeed. Just 6 per cent of UK managers agree, according to the Chartered Management Institute. The body polled more than 1,000 managers and 514 young people for […]
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• Your customers would rather use ChatGPT than your chatbot, Gartner finds

  08-07-2026 17:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Businesses spent big on AI to answer their customers. The customers had other ideas. People are approximately three times more likely to use a third-party GenAI tool, such as ChatGPT, than a company’s own chatbot to sort out a service problem, according to Gartner, Inc. The firm, a research and advisory company, surveyed 3,566 customers […]
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• NATO taps Accenture and Leonardo to build a €200M secure cloud backbone

  08-07-2026 17:41 via thenextweb.com
  
  NATO wants a cloud it can trust under fire. Its technology agency has signed a contract worth about €200 million with Accenture and Italy’s Leonardo to build one. Accenture announced the deal on Tuesday, struck at the NATO summit in Ankara. NATO calls the programme the Protected Business Network. It will give the Alliance a […]
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• Cloudflare spent a year blocking AI crawlers. Now it’s helping OpenAI index the web

  08-07-2026 17:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  Cloudflare has spent a year arming websites against AI crawlers. Now it wants to help one crawl better. The company said on Wednesday it is running a research pilot with OpenAI to test whether its network data can make AI search more accurate. Cloudflare sits in front of more than a fifth of the web. […]
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• AI’s hacking skills are outgrowing the tests built to measure them

  08-07-2026 16:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  The tools built to measure how dangerous AI can be have stopped working. Frontier models outpace the benchmarks meant to gauge their hacking skills, Axios reports. That leaves regulators and security teams half-blind to what these systems can really do. The timing bites. US federal agencies have until 1 August to stand up a classified […]
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• OpenAI buys Northslope to put its engineers inside your business

  08-07-2026 16:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI wants the work that once belonged to consultants. Its deployment arm has agreed to buy Northslope, an applied-AI firm, the company told Axios in an exclusive on Wednesday. It did not disclose terms, and the deal still needs regulatory clearance. The purchase marks its second in two months. The OpenAI Deployment Company launched in […]
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• RAISE Summit hit by power outage during keynote with Mozilla president and Mistral CEO

  08-07-2026 15:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch and Mozilla president Mark Surman were making the case for open-source AI’s reliability at RAISE Summit. Then the venue lost power, and their fireside chat finished almost in the dark. It was, in fairness, the perfect cue. Midway through a RAISE Summit fireside chat on open-source AI, the Master Stage lost […]
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• Iluvatar CoreX seeks to raise $850m as China’s AI-chip rally lifts its shares

  08-07-2026 15:29 via thenextweb.com
  
  A year ago, Iluvatar CoreX was a Shanghai chipmaker that sold mostly to the Chinese state. This week it is trying to raise about $850m from investors who cannot seem to get enough of it, according to Bloomberg, riding a share price that has more than tripled since January. The rally is really the whole […]
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• Apple puts a $30bn US-manufacturing flag on its Broadcom chip deal

  08-07-2026 15:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple is spending big to make chips at home. It has committed to a multi-year Broadcom deal worth more than $30 billion, Apple announced on Wednesday. That makes it Apple’s largest US manufacturing pledge to date. The scale is the story. The deal should yield more than 15 billion US-made chips and support hundreds of […]
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• China and the US are now warning against each other’s AI

  08-07-2026 15:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  The US-China AI split hardened this week. Beijing branded Anthropic’s Claude Code a security back-door, just as US lawmakers moved against American firms that lean on cheap Chinese models. China has told companies to drop Anthropic’s Claude Code. Its Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said its cybersecurity platform found the coding tool carries a […]
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• After 25 years of self-funding, Bezos opens Blue Origin at a $130bn valuation

  08-07-2026 14:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  Jeff Bezos is opening Blue Origin to outside money at last, in a round that values the rocket firm at $130 billion, CNBC reports. It follows Elon Musk’s record SpaceX IPO and pits the two space fortunes against each other again. Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company […]
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• France orders Meta back to talks with news publishers over content payments

  08-07-2026 14:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meta has been told to go back and talk to France’s newspapers about money. On Wednesday, the country’s competition regulator ordered the company to reopen negotiations with news publishers over payment for their content, after an earlier round of talks fell apart. The order comes with a stopwatch attached. The Autorité de la concurrence gave […]
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• Apple starts testing China’s state-backed memory chips, and Washington is watching

  08-07-2026 14:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple has begun testing memory chips from China’s state-backed CXMT for devices sold in China, the Financial Times reports. That puts it behind a supplier Washington has flagged as a security risk. Apple has turned to Chinese memory chips for its own devices. It has begun testing DRAM from state-backed ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), the […]
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• Allianz to cut up to 1,800 jobs as AI takes over call-centre work

  08-07-2026 14:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  The job that AI seems keenest to take is the one on the other end of the phone. Allianz, the German insurance giant, is preparing to cut as many as 1,800 roles in its travel arm as automated systems take over work that used to need a person, according to Reuters. The figures are oddly […]
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• Nomagic’s warehouse robots got an AI brain, and it halved the calls for human help

  08-07-2026 14:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nomagic, a Warsaw-based warehouse robotics firm, put a vision-language-action model into live customer operations. It says the model roughly halved the rate at which its robots stall for human help. Its new AI lab, run by a former Google DeepMind researcher, is betting on mastery before generality. A Polish robotics company has quietly done the […]
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