40% of companies heavily using AI say inflation actually helped their business this year… only 12% of non-AI adopters say the same. That contrast turned up everywhere in Mercury's survey of 1,500 early-stage founders & builders: the companies leveraging AI the most are raising more, hiring differently, and reporting a different macroeconomic picture.

Read Mercury's new report to explore:

• The 31-point confidence gap between heavy AI adopters and everyone else
• What startups spend on AI each month
• What junior hiring looks like at AI-forward companies and beyond

Plus more on how founders are spending, raising, and hiring in 2026. Read the report.

Apple is set to introduce its foldable iPhone at a launch event on or around September 9. Samsung has stolen some of the thunder from the launch by introducing a similar design, but that just reinforces that the new form factor is a winner. Apple's device reportedly excels as a camera viewfinder, but it lacks a telephoto camera, which could be an issue for early adopters spending over $2,000. The design also relies on Touch ID rather than Face ID.

Some of Nvidia's biggest customers have been told that the price of the AI servers containing its flagship Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell chips is going up by more than 15% due to the soaring costs of memory chips. The price hikes will go into effect early next year. The increases will depend on the generation of Nvidia chips and the memory configurations. Nvidia has also raised prices for its gaming-oriented PC graphics cards.

Amazon's all-electric toaster-shaped Zoox taxis are the first robotaxis offering rides on the roads without standard driver features like a dashboard or pedals. They can drive in either direction and hold up to four passengers sitting facing each other. Amazon has started rolling out the vehicles across San Francisco and Las Vegas. Tesla's Cybercab lacks a steering wheel and pedals, but it has not received the same regulatory approval as Zoox to begin offering rides to the public.

The opening day of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday saw Chinese humanoid robots break records set by humans, including Usain Bolt's 100-meter sprint world record. More than 2,000 humanoid robots participated in the event. There were 51 events and more than 1,000 competitions, including running, table tennis, and soccer. While the games showcased humanoid robots' rapidly evolving abilities, experts say it will still take time to achieve mass real-world deployment and that these robots are mostly still used for demonstrations, performances, and research.

Kent C. Dodds built Kody, and he's taking it apart live with Serge from Sentry:

• the agentic loops powering kody.codes
• Cursor automations
• Sentry webhooks + Seer
• what's next for Kody

Bring questions. They're answering them live. Register free

A lot of the tedium it used to take to get a tricky optimization working is now gone. Many optimizations that were previously too risky to try make sense to try out now. AI drastically reduces the cost of optimization. It can turn days or weeks of work into a trivial loop.

The updated roadmap for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) sets the direction for protocol work over the coming months. It is organized into five priority areas: agentic messaging primitives, HTTP-native transport unification and hardening, agent identity and enterprise-ready security, improved primitives, and improved SDK developer experience. Specification Enhancement Proposals that fall within these priority areas get expedited review and have the best chance of acceptance.

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When Moore's Law was in full effect, it didn't make sense to ruthlessly optimize code, as a new CPU would arrive in 18 months that would double performance. Developers only started to have to think about parallelization, architecture, memory locality, etc, after Moore's Law started slowing down in the mid-2000s. Prior to Fable, it felt like a waste to spend too much time improving coding harnesses or context strategies, as a new model would arrive at the same price or cheaper in just a few months that would cover most of the problem. Fable is incredible, but the cost is so high that developers are now starting to think about what work should go where and optimizing their harnesses to provide weaker models with sufficient context to perform well.

New news is coming out so fast that it seems crazy for a founder not to be fully plugged in. Being online can help build a presence and keep people as informed as possible. Posting frequently can help drive inbound interest. Tech Twitter can provide a view of emerging consensus, but few immediately actionable insights. It's important to actively maintain cognitive security and cognitive hygiene, as spending too much time online can be dangerous.

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A good coding harness can help improve code quality dramatically.

The front end is less risky to just hand to an agent, so many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agents handle it unsupervised.

Finding problems comes from staying engaged with people's work long enough to see what no single request can show you.

Nvidia will invest $1 billion in AI startup Poolside at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion and will pay $6 billion to license Poolside's technology and hire the bulk of its engineers.

AI enables developers to pick less common languages and work with much harder technologies.

Table/game selection is just as important as execution, especially in markets.

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SpaceX has been hunting for a spectrum that works well in cities and dense areas for its wireless network. It is considering buying competitors to acquire the spectrum or competing at a government auction set for next year. The company has expressed interest in building its own terrestrial networks and has demonstrated a prototype mobile handset to some investors. Entering into the mobile market is capital intensive, so SpaceX could ultimately choose not to follow through on these plans.

OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue in July exceeded the company's entire second quarter. The growth was driven by the release of the company's GPT-5.6 series of models and ChatGPT Work, as well as growing adoption of Codex. OpenAI is under pressure to justify its $852 billion valuation as it prepares for its IPO. It has been racing to bring in new users to generate the revenue needed to help support its infrastructure spending plans.

DoorDash has received permission from the FAA to deliver packages by drone at altitudes below 400 feet. The drones will be built in the company's in-house robotics unit, DoorDash Labs. DoorDash Air aims to cater to any merchant, anywhere. The company will release more information later this year on its drones and how its drone program will fit into DoorDash's broader ecosystem.

China has accelerated its deployment of civilian and military hardware into orbit. The country's growing constellations of satellites could help it track events on Earth in real time and in greater detail than ever before. This has raised concerns among US officials, who see China's growing array of space-based capabilities as a quest to displace the US as the pre-eminent space power. Western analysts say that China is leading the world in research in sensors and satellite positioning technologies.

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Prompts are dependencies. Changing them can shift downstream behavior with no warning, no failing build, and no obvious signal in the request pipeline. Treat prompts exactly like any other artifact that can change production behavior. Test them, give them a gate, and default that gate to blocking until proven otherwise.

AI labs are moving faster than ever. However, capability is only half of the picture. Optimizing the cost per successful task makes models more affordable and less costly to serve. This article discusses techniques adopted in frontier labs to make API applications more efficient. It covers what happens when requests are sent to an AI agent, how the harness layer cuts repeated work, and more.

A new class of entrepreneurs is launching and running new million-dollar companies on their own. AI's ability to handle various administrative tasks makes it useful for launching solo businesses in many fields. The effect of one-person businesses on the labor market remains to be seen. While many people are worried AI will limit employment opportunities, these solo operators show how the technology can also open new doors.

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Labs do not want to spend greater and greater shares of compute on inference. The point of inference revenue is to convince investors to spend more money to buy more compute to train bigger models. Spending too much on compute on inference signals that progress has stalled because it's not worth investing more in training. Labs believe that their models will continue to get better, so this only means that compute will get more expensive.

WhiteFiber validated 111.2 Tbps across 83km of dark fiber, within 8% of the physical speed of light. Two geographically separated sites. One logical AI supercluster. See the data

The data center boom is pulling skilled trade workers into remote locations with some of the highest pay and bonuses the industry has ever seen.

numbat provides endpoint visibility into AI agent activity with local detection, optional pre-action blocking, and forensic reconstruction.

It may be awkward and weird and strange, but it's usually worth the shot to send a cold email.

Open-weight models are already being built into critical systems in the US.

Chinese founders face more pressure and liability, which results in more competent and ruthless companies, but also creates incentives for more froth and fraud.

There is a consistent pattern of OpenAI's alignment strategies working less well than Anthropic's.

Apple is preparing a new push into the smart home category with a wave of home products. It will start with a hub device built around the new Siri AI assistant. Apple is also preparing to release a new TV set-top box and a refreshed HomePod mini. All three devices are nearly ready to launch. Apple is also working on a higher-end, robotic version of the home hub and an advanced in-home security camera.

Claude Mythos Preview found flaws in a watered-down version of an algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a ubiquitous protocol that protects web traffic, wireless networks, data storage, and many other technologies. Anthropic claims the assault was 200 to 1,000 times faster than what previous human research had managed to do. The attack was devised almost entirely autonomously - the model needed aid as it originally believed the problem was impossible. Claude Mythos Preview worked on the problem for about a week before engineering its attack, and two human researchers worked for nearly a month to verify that the method appeared correct.

Tau's humanoid service is now available in San Francisco. Access is initially invite-only. The service costs $30 per hour. Each humanoid will be jointly controlled by a human operator and AI. Video of the robot in action is available in the article.

Organoids are clumps of human cells that show some type of organ-specific function. In theory, they seem like a good tool for drug discovery, but the reality is that the technology is still not reliable enough. There are many people working to fix the issues with organoids, but they are still methods in progress. Organoids have not dramatically altered medicine yet, but they have already been used for some unarguably useful things.

Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention. The real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context. Subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the orchestrator's working memory, offloading reasoning it doesn't need to hold onto. Doing this well means giving the orchestrator explicit ground rules for when and how to delegate.

MCP 2026-07-28 is the largest update to the protocol since launch. It is now easier to deploy and scale remote servers. MCP is now stateless, so it can be deployed on serverless and edge infrastructure, or scaled horizontally behind any load balancer. There is now a formal path to extend the protocol.

Anthropic has drawn criticism after releasing tools on the market that compete with those offered by partner companies. For example, Claude Design directly competes with offerings from partner design company Figma. Anthropic's data retention policies have also been criticized, but the company has pledged it won't use conversation data from Fable and Mythos - but not other models - to train new models. Researchers are calling for more transparency in AI systems.

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As AI continues to improve, the question isn't whether superintelligence will exist, but who will have access to it. The technology could be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or it could be used to empower everyone. The notion that AI is such a threat that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn't led to safe or positive outcomes.

You're on track to close your first enterprise customer, but they're asking about SAML, SCIM, and OIDC. This PropelAuth blog answers the 7 most common enterprise SSO questions. Read the blog

Strong engineers think clearly all the time, even if their highest speed isn't that fast.

Kalshi and Polymarket now offer wagers on whether the FDA will approve medicines and whether drug trials will succeed.

DoorDash uses LLMs offline to enrich a knowledge graph, Instacart uses them at the query understanding layer, and Uber Eats fine-tuned a model into the embedding backbone of two-tower retrieval.

Harnesses influence cost, quality, and accuracy, and have more impact on performance than the models.

Apple Upgrade offers 12- and 24-month leasing options for the iPhone and Apple Watch, and 24- and 36-month terms for Mac and iPad.

The FCC is blocking new imports of foreign-made humanoid robots and grid inverters on national-security grounds.

Amazon plans to launch 5,105 low-Earth orbiting satellites to build on top of Globalstar's existing network of only a few dozen satellites, which it acquired in an $11.6 billion deal a few months ago. The network will power both voice and mobile data. Amazon has yet to release pricing for its service. In the US, the satellites will use Globalstar's radio spectrum in the 1.6/2.4GHz bands, and orbit between 510 km and 580 km in altitude.

OpenAI is close to leasing a $500 billion data center in southern Ohio. The company is in talks with Nvidia for a $250 billion financial backstop for the project. The US government is still talking to other potential tenants. The deal will not be final until Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agrees to it.

A Shanghai-based company has started mass producing immersion deep ultraviolet lithography tools. The unnamed firm aims to make about five DUV machines this year and is targeting about 20 next year. Production is still at an early stage. DUV machines are less advanced than ASML's sophisticated extreme ultraviolet lithography tools. ASML has been banned from exporting its tools to China.

Frontier LLMs were trained on text data from the internet. There's no equivalent source of physical data for robotics. All attempts to solve and get to physical AGI involve working through this data bottleneck. Progress is being made on many fronts, but nobody knows how much data is enough.

Seal is an open standard for proving any file is real. It creates sealed artifacts that can be verified by anyone. A seal proves integrity, time, and the issuing certificate. Seals are anchored to a public ledger that can be checked by anyone, forever.

Octane is a React replacement UI library with improved developer ergonomics. It is incredibly efficient and is designed to stay close to the speed of hand-written DOM code. Developers write with the React API they already know, and Octane's compiler removes the virtual DOM, Suspense waterfalls, rules-of-hooks bookkeeping, and hand-maintained dependency arrays before the app ships.

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Nvidia has made a substantial investment into Safe Superintelligence, a company started by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. The investment is part of a long-term partnership and will involve Safe Superintelligence receiving access to large amounts of Nvidia's flagship GPUs. Safe Superintelligence had previously been relying primarily on chips made by Google. Nvidia made the investment after getting a rare glimpse into the state of the startup's research, which has so far been kept secret.

It appears that Comcast is selling Peacock to YouTube without actually selling Peacock to YouTube. All of Peacock's content will be included in YouTube Premium subscriptions in the US starting early next year. The partnership will allow Peacock's content to be monetized through advertising. Netflix may also be exploring a Peacock add-on option.

Fine-tune your first model in 15 minutes with Crusoe Serverless Fine-Tuning. Pick from a curated library of top open models. Billing stops when they stop improving. Get started →

X is rolling out Premium and Premium+ subscribers in the US, enabling them to instantly send, receive, or request money from others on the platform without fees or limits.

Cheap and abundant compute has made it possible to test software in ways we couldn't before.

Ultimately, what matters most is solving the right problems, not your productivity setup.

Maintaining your options has a cost.

Nvidia is the largest publisher of open AI models in the world.

The scarcest resource in open source is the motivation of the maintainers.

Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weights model yet. Baseten is serving it from day 0.

🏆 #1 open model on Artificial Analysis

💻 #1 on Frontend Code Arena, ahead of every closed model

💸 Significantly more affordable than Fable 5

⚡ ~2x faster time-to-first-token on short prompts via custom kernels

Once model weights are released, Try Kimi K3 on our Model APIs or join our executive briefing online tomorrow.

Baseten also has the fastest performance in the industry for GLM-5.2 on third-party benchmarks and real-world production usage.

Read how we built the world's fastest API for GLM-5.2

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Built by the team benchmarking every major model launch, Gray Swan simulates enterprise environments and hits them with an automated red-teaming agent trained on threats that haven't been published yet. See how secure you are →

A team based in China modified AlphaFold to help identify what parts of a gene-editing protein enable mistakes. They then modified these areas to reduce problematic off-target effects. Producing gene-editing systems tailored to prevent known off-target events is useful for fine-tuning protein-DNA interactions, which could have applications beyond gene editing.

This post provides a high-level overview of how AI models learn new skills and behaviors.

Waymo plans to offer robotaxis in its own app starting in January, and its contract with Uber ends in May.

Nvidia is in talks to provide a roughly $250 billion backstop for OpenAI as part of a massive data-center project. The guarantee will help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt project that Softbank's energy subsidiary is developing. Nvidia's backing allows the data center developer to raise debt at more favorable terms. Under the deal, Nvidia would guarantee a series of financing vehicles intended to make lenders feel more confident that funding behind the project is secure.

Automatic programming, when done well, means to assume the role of Linus, with the AI agents assuming the role of the different maintainers of the different subsystems.

The Isochrones API calculates the area that a person can reach from a specific origin point within a set amount of time. An isochrone accounts for actual road network travel times to create a polygon that represents true reachability. The API can be useful for delivery logistics, finding properties within a set distance from a landmark, and urban planning.

Relays are services that proxy traffic to US models, often at a deep discount.

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AI is more of an economically useful commodity than a supremely intelligent being that will make humanity subservient. Several leaders in the AI industry have recently come out in support of open-weight models. If these leaders believed that AI was going to become conscious and take over the world, they likely wouldn't be as openly pro-diffusion.

There are many collaborations between SpaceX and Tesla, so it makes sense to merge the companies the more they overlap.

AI will revolutionize productivity by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers.

Anthropic removed over 80% of Claude Code's system from its more advanced models. This post discusses how to apply the lessons its team learned from context engineering in Claude Code. The prompt is only a small part of the context Claude gets. The rest of the context is assembled from Skills, CLAUDE.md files, memory, and other sources. Context engineering has a big impact on the results generated when using Claude Code.

Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI claim some AI models are too dangerous to be developed in the open and must be tightly controlled for safety. The rest of the industry says that open source AI models must remain open for people to further develop technologies and build new businesses. China's rapid progress in open source AI models is escalating the fight. US officials are still debating whether to approach regulating Chinese open source models as a national security issue or issue a kind of blanket ban.

SpaceX's 13th Starship test flight ended in an intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean on Friday. The vehicle appeared to be in fine shape on landing. SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with its launch tower on the next test flight. The next steps for Starship are getting to orbit and returning the ship to the launch site, which will give SpaceX the capability to begin launching operational Starlink V3 satellites.

Seller is an early experimental app from Meta that aims to be to sellers what tools to edit videos were to content creators. It is free and will also be available in web browsers. The app has AI features that make selling items less of a hassle. Users can sign into Seller with their Facebook accounts, and listings are automatically synced.

Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter, a startup that helps developers choose between AI models. The talks are still ongoing and could fall apart. Industry experts estimate that the business could fetch about $10 billion in a sale. Stripe is separately pursuing a deal for PayPal.

ChatGPT Health is now available to all US-based users over 18. The feature helps users with health-related queries. Users can let the feature access data from apps and integrate medical records from hospital systems. While several studies have found that AI bots are not reliable for medical advice, this has not deterred AI companies from launching health-related features.

Unitree's GD01 is a transformable mecha robot. It can transport a pilot in its torso-mounted cockpit, walk on either two legs or four, and wield fists powerful enough to knock down walls. Standing 9 ft tall and weighing half a ton, it has heavy-duty mechanical hinges that connect titanium-alloy limbs to a protective carbon fiber casing. Pictures of the robot are available in the article.

SpaceX has started to turn away satellite operators seeking dedicated rides on its Falcon 9 rocket beyond 2028. The company has also stopped building some non-reusable components for the Falcon family. SpaceX has publicly stated that it intends to offramp its Falcon 9 rocket for Starship, but has not disclosed a timeline. The company is likely to still use the Falcon 9 for launches for the Department of Defense and NASA.

No amount of harness engineering or loopsmaxxing can solve what is fundamentally a model-training issue. Engineers are still stuck reading code. Companies can move 10x-100x faster by convincing themselves that the code doesn't matter anymore, but they could also embrace their constraints and just move 2x-3x faster, safely.

The field of formal verification and deterministic system testing is about to cross a chasm. There are not enough skilled practitioners in the field. Bug-catching tools, when used in conjunction with adversarial code reviews by an LLM and with language analyzers driven by pre-commit hooks, will be a key component in software factories. They will enable people/agents to deliver reliable software without the burden of having to learn this specialized knowledge.

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Optimizing the cost-to-outcome frontier in real world context means using the right model for each task, and optimizing the context, skills, tools, and agent harness around it. It's possible to take saturated frontier capabilities and deliver them at scale and at lower cost through models optimized for high-usage products, while continuing to use frontier models for frontier needs. The model is only one part of the hill-climbing system. Harness, memory, context, tools, skills, and user interactions all shape the evals and performance of these agentic systems.

Huawei is leading the way in reducing China's dependence on foreign AI chips. The company claims it has figured out workarounds for making near state-of-the-art silicon without leading-edge machinery. Huawei's deputy chairman attributes the company's progress to the restrictions the US has imposed on hardware exports. China still lags far behind the US, and chip-production capacity problems are preventing Chinese companies from deploying AI as quickly as they would like.

Canvas UI is an open source library of creative, framework-agnostic components drawn on canvas.

The 'frontier' moniker justifies capital spending to investors, who believe that the spending is the moat.

Google's research points to a future where the demand for highly skilled workers is accentuated rather than diminished.

SIMD is just about as easy as a for loop.

Download a dictation app and start talking.

Google has added a new video selfie option for account recovery.