Web design news

• Synchrony wants your Amazon and Walmart store cards inside ChatGPT

  17-08-2026 18:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  Synchrony Financial, which issues store credit cards for Amazon, Walmart and Lowe’s, is working with OpenAI so shoppers can buy inside ChatGPT using those cards. Its chief strategy officer says general-purpose cards will take six to twelve months and store-specific cards longer. Synchrony Financial wants its cards inside ChatGPT. The issuer behind store cards for […]
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• ByteDance signs a copyright pact with Hollywood’s MPA to rein in its Seedance AI video tool

  17-08-2026 18:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  The TikTok owner has agreed a pact with the Motion Picture Association, the trade body for the major US studios, to tighten copyright protections on its AI image and video generators, ending, at least officially, a standoff that began when the studios accused the company of building a machine for wholesale infringement. The agreement covers […]
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• Jeff Gundlach says making AI chips an asset class looks like a market top

  17-08-2026 18:46 via thenextweb.com
  
  Jeff Gundlach has criticised Nvidia’s plan with six asset managers to mobilise more than $500bn for AI infrastructure, asking why assets of unknown life are collateral for long-term debt. Mark Cuban compared chips as an asset class to crypto. Jeff Gundlach thinks Wall Street has told on itself. “Assets of unknown life as collateral for […]
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• Groq closes $350M Series A at $3.5bn evaluation and Nvidia joins the round

  17-08-2026 18:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  Groq, the AI-inference chip company that spent the better part of a decade pitching itself as the scrappy alternative to Nvidia, has raised fresh money at a valuation that quietly concedes how much has changed. The company announced on Monday that they took in $350m at a $3.5bn valuation, roughly half the $6.9bn it commanded […]
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• Deutsche Telekom buys Macquarie’s Polish fibre and TV assets in a €1bn bet on convergence

  17-08-2026 18:06 via thenextweb.com
  
  Deutsche Telekom has agreed to buy two of Poland’s best-known fibre businesses, Fiberhost and INEA, from the Australian investment group Macquarie, in a deal worth roughly €1bn and aimed squarely at the country’s scramble to bundle mobile, broadband, and television into a single monthly bill. The German operator confirmed on Monday that its local arm, […]
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• Azerbaijan wants to become a tech hub as its startups raised $2.6m last year

  17-08-2026 17:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  Every petrostate eventually discovers that the oil will not last forever, and Azerbaijan has reached the stage of the story where the government starts talking about technology. Hydrocarbons once made up roughly 75% of the country’s economic output and 90% of its exports, according to the IMF, which is a comfortable arrangement right up until […]
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• Instagram blocked the search terms. Its algorithm serves the videos anyway

  17-08-2026 17:46 via thenextweb.com
  
  The genre is simple enough to describe. A man wearing camera glasses walks up to a woman in the street. He delivers a line and films her reaction without asking. The clip goes to Instagram, tagged as shot on Meta glasses. The woman is now content. Some of these videos have millions of views. Adam […]
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• The Supreme Court will not help Verizon recover $47mn over location data

  17-08-2026 17:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  The US Supreme Court has refused Verizon’s request to amend a June ruling so it could pursue a refund of the $47mn it paid over selling access to customer location data. AT&T, whose case is procedurally different, can still seek reimbursement of its $57mn. Verizon will not get back the $47mn it paid over customer […]
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• Alphabet takes its AI debt spree Down Under with a first Australian dollar bond

  17-08-2026 17:38 via thenextweb.com
  
  Alphabet is preparing to sell its first bond denominated in Australian dollars, a modest-sounding piece of financial housekeeping that says a good deal about how the AI build-out is now being paid for. According to bookrunner messages reported by Reuters, the Google parent has hired ANZ, Deutsche Bank, RBC Capital Markets, and TD Securities to […]
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• Unitree, China’s humanoid robot champion, lists in Shanghai on 19 August after record demand

  17-08-2026 17:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou company that has done more than anyone else to turn Chinese humanoid robots into a spectator sport, is due to begin trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August, according to Reuters. The listing makes it the first general-purpose humanoid maker to go public on the mainland, and it arrives having […]
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• The AI maths breakthroughs everyone quotes are counterexamples, not proofs

  17-08-2026 16:58 via thenextweb.com
  
  A counterexample and a proof are not the same kind of achievement. A proof shows that something is always true. A counterexample shows that something claimed to be always true is not, by producing one object where it fails. Both settle a question. They ask different things of whoever finds them. One demands an argument […]
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• Uber is partnering with drone-delivery firm Zipline and targets a million drone deliveries a day

  17-08-2026 16:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  Uber, the ride-hailing giant said on Monday that it is teaming up with Zipline, the autonomous drone-delivery firm, to fly Uber Eats orders to customers across the United States, sweetened by an undisclosed strategic investment. It is a striking vote of confidence in a company that has spent the past year busily pivoting from hospital drops […]
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• Nvidia puts $1.5bn into SoftBank’s SB Energy to power OpenAI’s Ohio data centre

  17-08-2026 16:31 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia has agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the US power and infrastructure developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, in a deal that hands the chipmaker up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at an Ohio campus being built for OpenAI. It is the latest move in a familiar pattern, one in […]
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• Nvidia is not backing OpenAI’s rent. It is backing the buildings

  17-08-2026 16:31 via thenextweb.com
  
  A residual value guarantee is a promise about an object, not about a tenant. Someone builds a thing. Someone else rents it. A third party promises the thing itself will still be worth a set amount. If the renter walks, the owner relets or sells. The guarantor covers only the shortfall. It is the structure […]
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• Gravis Robotics has raised a $200M Series A led by SoftBank

  17-08-2026 16:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  Gravis Robotics, an ETH Zurich spinout building software that lets excavators and diggers run themselves, has raised a $200m Series A led by SoftBank, a round it bills as the largest ever in construction robotics. The deal confirms reports that surfaced earlier that Masayoshi Son’s conglomerate was circling the young company. Gravis, founded in 2022 and […]
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• Dutch contractor rules just changed, and the bill is backdated

  17-08-2026 15:23 via thenextweb.com
  
  Somewhere in Amsterdam there is a developer who has invoiced the same foreign company every month for three years. Same rate, same hours, same Slack channel, same standup at 09:30. Everyone involved has always called it a contractor relationship. As of January 2026, the Dutch Tax Administration is entitled to disagree, send the bill to […]
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• Serve Robotics partners with Grubhub, becoming the shared robot layer for US food delivery

  17-08-2026 14:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  Serve Robotics, the sidewalk-delivery company that spun out of Uber, has added Grubhub to its roster of partners, a move that quietly turns it into something close to the neutral plumbing of America’s food-delivery robot business. Through a deal with Wonder, Grubhub’s parent, Serve’s cooler-sized bots will start carrying takeaway orders placed on the Grubhub […]
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• Apple bows to Germany and rewrites its tracking-consent rules, ending a self-preferencing probe

  17-08-2026 14:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  The Bundeskartellamt found Apple held rival apps to a stricter consent standard than its own. The agreed fix, neutral prompts and no double hurdle, applies across almost all of the EU. Apple has agreed to overhaul the way its iPhones ask people for permission to be tracked, after Germany’s competition regulator concluded that the company […]
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• A Trump-backed crypto firm is helping sell the very Chinese AI his government is trying to block

  17-08-2026 13:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  A crypto venture backed by Donald Trump and his family is helping to bankroll a platform that resells artificial intelligence from Chinese companies the US government has blacklisted, an arrangement that sits awkwardly beside the administration’s own campaign to choke off China’s AI industry. Reuters reported on Monday that World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto […]
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• Told to book a gym class, an AI agent hacked the website instead, in Australia’s first known autonomous cyberattack

  17-08-2026 13:13 via thenextweb.com
  
  An Australian man asked his AI assistant to do something entirely mundane, book him into a gym class, and it answered by carrying out the country’s first known autonomous cyberattack. Given only the goal of securing a spot in a busy session, the agent went off-script, hunted down a flaw in the gym’s booking system, […]
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• A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens

  17-08-2026 12:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  In Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, the dense grid of universities and start-ups that likes to bill itself as China’s Silicon Valley, a small bar has found a neat way to distil the country’s artificial-intelligence boom into something you can actually drink. The AGI Bar, opened last summer by an independent developer named Song De, does not […]
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• Europe’s defence-AI champion Helsing is using Rakuten to break into Japan’s arms market

  17-08-2026 12:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Helsing, the Munich startup that has become Europe’s best-funded defence-AI company, is pushing into Asia, and it has found an unlikely guide. The German firm has enlisted Japan’s Rakuten, a name better known for e-commerce and mobile phones, to help broker the sale of its unmanned systems to Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Forces. At the centre […]
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• AI music has reached the charts, and the artists using it have stopped hiding it

  17-08-2026 11:55 via thenextweb.com
  
  The american rapper Tyga has admitted that artificial intelligence generated the retro synths on his new album, Timbaland has signed an entirely AI-created pop star, and a machine-assisted summer hit has already reached the Billboard Hot 100. Generative music has arrived in the mainstream, and the artists using it have largely stopped pretending otherwise. Tyga’s […]
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• SafePal breach leaks the addresses but not the crypto, which may be the bigger problem

  17-08-2026 10:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  SafePal, the Binance-backed maker of hardware and software crypto wallets, has disclosed a data breach affecting roughly 39,798 customers, all of whom placed orders between 2 March 2025 and 11 April 2026. The exposed records cover order information, namely names, physical addresses and contact details. It is the kind of leak that feels almost quaint […]
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• Alibaba sells its Lingxi games arm to fund an all-in bet on AI

  17-08-2026 10:25 via thenextweb.com
  
  The Chinese giant is offloading a profitable gaming studio to private equity so it can pour every spare yuan into Qwen and its data centres, though the buyers and sellers cannot agree on what the studio is worth. Alibaba is selling its gaming subsidiary, Lingxi Games, to the Asian private-equity firm Trustar Capital, in a […]
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• The US is about to make its allies pick a side in the AI cold war

  17-08-2026 10:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  Washington is preparing to hand its partners an ultimatum, and it is not a subtle one. According to a draft State Department letter reported by Reuters, the US is about to tell friendly nations they must choose between the American and Chinese artificial intelligence ecosystems, because belonging to both is no longer an option. The […]
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• Stripe reportedly acquires OpenRouter, the AI model router, for over $7bn

  17-08-2026 09:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Stripe has, according to Bloomberg, finalised a deal to buy OpenRouter for more than $7bn. The payments giant declined to comment, and the sum is not officially confirmed, but the reported number tells its own story about where the smart money in AI now thinks the durable profit lies. OpenRouter is what the industry calls […]
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• Anthropic’s near-$2tn IPO rests on a revenue forecast for 2028

  17-08-2026 08:59 via thenextweb.com
  
  According to a Reuters exclusive, the AI lab’s initial public offering hinges on an internal forecast that it will book between $190bn and $200bn of revenue in 2028, a previously unreported figure that bankers and investors are already leaning on to justify a price tag that could brush $2tn. The leap involved is the sort […]
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• Dario Amodei admits AI companies have not delivered on their promises

  16-08-2026 23:01 via thenextweb.com
  
  Dario Amodei wrote on X that the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that they have not yet delivered on their promises, and that only genuine breakthroughs will win public trust. It lands as Anthropic prepares a listing that backers expect to value it at $2trn. Dario Amodei has conceded the case […]
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• OpenAI’s new ChatGPT feature logs your keystrokes and stores them in plain text

  16-08-2026 17:35 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has launched Computer History, a ChatGPT feature that records clicks, keystrokes, keyboard shortcuts and app switches on macOS to build a searchable memory. The memory files are stored locally as unencrypted plain text, and the feature is not available in the EEA, Switzerland or the UK. OpenAI has given ChatGPT a record of what […]
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