social media news - NewsLocker

AI money watch: five funding rounds that matter today

08-07-2026 23:54 via thenextweb.com

A busy 24 hours for AI and deep-tech money, from a $300m quantum bet to Paris voice AI and Europe’s energy startups. Here are the rounds worth knowing. The cash keeps flowing into AI and deep tech. The past day alone brought a $300m quantum raise, a fresh billion-dollar AI-agent valuation, and European bets on […]
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Meta’s new AI option allows remixes of public IG posts

08-07-2026 23:44 via socialmediatoday.com

The company’s updated image generation model lets users tag profiles and import visuals into its artificial intelligence visual creation tools.

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Irish drone delivery startup Manna is building a 1,000-person US factory in Tulsa to take on Zipline and Wing

08-07-2026 23:34 via thenextweb.com

Manna Aero, the Ireland-based autonomous drone delivery startup, is setting up a US operations and manufacturing centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that will employ about 1,000 people over the next several years. Construction is underway, with manufacturing expected to begin in about a year. The expansion is fuelled by the $50 million in venture capital Manna […]
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Google’s SynthID watermark just debunked its first high-profile deepfake: a hoax image of Mitch McConnell

08-07-2026 23:05 via thenextweb.com

Google’s SynthID watermarking system scored its first high-profile real-world win this week after Snopes used it to debunk an AI-generated image of Senator Mitch McConnell that had gone viral on Reddit and X. The image, which appeared to show McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in extreme distress, was confirmed as AI-generated after […]
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Google adds AI-powered Video Remix option

08-07-2026 22:46 via socialmediatoday.com

The option, available in Google Photo, allows users to generate stylized, realistic elements using the company’s Gemini Omni artificial intelligence tool.

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HubSpot tried to feed its AI with customer data. The revolt took four days

08-07-2026 22:28 via thenextweb.com

HubSpot has scrapped a plan to use its customers’ data for a new AI feature, just four days after announcing it. The CRM firm changed its terms on 1 July to pool customer data, including contact and employer details, for a tool that finds sales leads, The Information reported. It opted users in by default. […]
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Squeezed on land, Samsung wants to put data centres out to sea

08-07-2026 22:16 via thenextweb.com

As data centres run into unhappy neighbours and water limits on land, Samsung wants to float them offshore. Samsung Heavy Industries plans to launch its first floating data centre by 2028, Seoul Economic Daily reported. It would be a purpose-built barge parked near the coast. The design is specific. Rather than convert an old ship, […]
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Nvidia teams up with chip rival d-Matrix instead of fighting it

08-07-2026 22:07 via thenextweb.com

Nvidia has found a new way to handle its chip rivals: work with them. The GPU giant is combining its hardware with inference chips from the startup d-Matrix, The Information reported. The two will ship a joint system to run AI models. The AI-cloud firm Parasail will be its first customer, with the system due […]
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A £35bn plan to fill the UK with 14 mini nuclear reactors

08-07-2026 22:01 via thenextweb.com

A Polish billionaire has laid out plans to build a fleet of small nuclear reactors across Britain, at an estimated £35bn, TechRadar reported. Michał Sołowow’s firm, SGE, says it wants to install 14 GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors on three UK sites. It is targeting first power in 2034. The numbers are large. Together the […]
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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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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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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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Apple loses its EU court challenge over gatekeeper status under the DMA

08-07-2026 14:19 via thenextweb.com

Apple has spent two years arguing that Europe’s digital rulebook should not apply to it in quite the way Brussels insists. On Wednesday, the EU’s General Court told it, in effect, that it does. The court threw out Apple’s challenge to being labelled a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, the designation that ties the […]
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Russia tries to jam Starlink to counter Ukraine’s long-range drones

08-07-2026 14:14 via thenextweb.com

The war in Ukraine has become, among other things, a fight over signals. Russian forces are now trying to jam Elon Musk’s Starlink network to blunt the cheap long-range drones that have reshaped the conflict, according to Ukrainian drone commanders and pilots who spoke to Reuters. The tool they describe has a name. Ukrainian crews […]
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‘GitLost’: researchers tricked GitHub’s AI agent into leaking private repos

08-07-2026 14:03 via thenextweb.com

Researchers tricked GitHub’s AI coding agent into leaking private repositories with nothing but a politely worded issue. The flaw, named GitLost, has no code fix, and GitHub has yet to even document it. GitHub’s new AI agent can be talked into handing over your private code. Security firm Noma Labs found a way to make […]
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MiniMax is building China’s biggest AI model yet, and plans to open-source it

08-07-2026 13:51 via thenextweb.com

MiniMax plans its biggest model yet, a 2.7-trillion-parameter system it intends to open-source, The Information reports. It would be the largest Chinese model on the market, and another squeeze on US labs’ margins. China’s open-model push has a new heavyweight on the way. MiniMax plans a large language model with 2.7 trillion parameters, The Information […]
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SpaceXAI and Cursor could ship their first joint AI model as soon as today

08-07-2026 13:34 via thenextweb.com

SpaceXAI and Cursor could ship their first jointly built AI model as soon as Wednesday, according to The Information. An internal memo pits it against Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Elon Musk’s freshly renamed AI company is about to test itself against the frontier. SpaceXAI and Cursor plan to launch their first jointly developed […]
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“It can literally kill your company”: n8n’s case for model-agnostic AI

08-07-2026 13:29 via thenextweb.com

Asked where his company sits in the AI stack, Jan Oberhauser reached for a car. The models, the n8n founder told a fireside audience at the Raise Summit in Paris this week, are the engine. Everything else, the vehicle, the streets, the rules that let the engine actually take you somewhere, is the part he is […]
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Londoners fight a Brick Lane datacentre, and it is not even for AI

08-07-2026 13:24 via thenextweb.com

Residents in east London are fighting a datacentre planned for Brick Lane, saying the site should hold homes, not servers. The twist: it would serve high-frequency trading, not AI. Britain’s datacentre backlash has reached the heart of east London. Residents around Brick Lane oppose a plan for the old Truman Brewery site. It would put […]
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SambaNova raises fresh funding at an $11bn valuation as the Nvidia-alternative trade heats up

08-07-2026 12:56 via thenextweb.com

SambaNova has raised fresh funding at an $11bn valuation, according to Bloomberg, capping a run in which the AI chip startup has roughly quintupled its worth in a matter of months. The figure is up from the roughly $10bn valuation reported when the round was first taking shape in late June. The speed of the […]
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UK tech secretary backs driverless cars as Burnham’s team gets cold feet

08-07-2026 12:47 via thenextweb.com

Britain’s tech secretary backs driverless cars and British AI startups. The likely next prime minister’s team has doubts, and her own job is on the line. Liz Kendall wants Britain to back its own AI companies before someone else does. In a Sifted podcast, Kendall, the UK’s science and technology secretary, made a pointed case […]
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Amazon’s secret ‘Moonraker’ project pushes Alexa into the AI-agent race

08-07-2026 12:33 via thenextweb.com

Amazon has an agentic upgrade for Alexa in the works, codenamed Moonraker. Internal documents show it is also one of the priciest bets in the Alexa+ overhaul. Amazon wants Alexa to act, not just answer. The company has a previously unreported project, codenamed Moonraker, that would let Alexa handle complex, multistep tasks, Business Insider reports, […]
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UiPath’s Dines: not hiring juniors is a mistake

08-07-2026 12:10 via thenextweb.com

At the Raise summit in Paris, two enterprise leaders asked why AI agents keep stalling in pilots. Their fix starts with people, not models. Most enterprises stall. Their AI agents run in pilots and never reach production. That was the blunt diagnosis from Daniel Dines, chief executive of UiPath. He spoke at the RAISE CxO […]
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