Happy Friday.
The daily live tech shows we’re watching:
TBPN: Acquired by OpenAI in April for a reported low hundreds of millions, after becoming the breakout daily live show for tech and business.
MTS: Seeded by a16z alongside investors including Packy McCormick, Dan Romero, Austin Rief, and others, building a live news network across tech, finance, politics, and culture.
ETN: Europe’s take on the format, fresh off a $1.6M seed round backed by Axel Springer, Powerhouse Capital, and angels from OpenAI and DeepMind.
Anything we’re missing?
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Enjoy today's news.
Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used AI to design 16 viruses not found in nature, creating the first functional viral genomes generated by a language model.
🕑 8 m
OpenAI works on a $300–$400, donut-shaped, screenless AI speaker, with a release planned for 2027.
🕑 1 m
SpaceX and Tesla build Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, a chip megafactory targeting over 1 terawatt of compute yearly.
🕑 1 m
AMD acquires Taalas, a startup that hardwires AI models directly into custom inference chips for faster, cheaper performance.
🕑 3 m
Google upgrades Ask Maps with agentic tools that find restaurants, order food, and offer personalized trip insights via Gmail.
🕑 1 m
OpenAI expands GPT-5.6 access, giving Free and Go users unlimited Luna text chats and upgrading Plus and Pro to Sol.
🕑 1 m
Rockstar Games premieres ‘Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look’ on Netflix on August 27, ahead of its YouTube and website release.
🕑 1 m
Google Wallet introduces parent-controlled balances, allowing teens under 18 to tap to pay with built-in spending controls.
🕑 2 m
Alibaba launches Wan3.0 in public beta, a model generating 30-second videos with realistic rendering from text, docs, and more.
🕑 1 m
Hadrian raises $1.37B in Series D funding at a $7.87B valuation to scale its robotic factories and help rebuild America’s capacity to produce weapons and aerospace hardware at speed.
🕑 2 m
Google DeepMind open-sources WeatherNext, an AI model that gives forecasters an extra day's warning on cyclone paths and intensity.
🕑 4 m
Suno adds watermarking to AI-generated songs and tightens community guidelines to crack down on royalty fraud amid mounting legal troubles.
🕑 2 m
Energy launches a browser-connected AI agent platform for delegating multi-step computer work across apps.
🕑 1 m
YC Startup School 2026: YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains how "personal AGI" empowers one-person startups and why founders must own their intelligence.
🍿 42 m
New Dalton + Michael episode: Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss why low ambition secretly kills startups, and why your product should be 100x better than alternatives.
🍿 21 m
Wispr Flow co-founder and CEO Tanay Kothari shares an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look at running his $2B AI startup.
🍿 18 m
As promised, tech and startups in a minute.
See you on Monday.
P.S. We gave ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok the Bloomberg article and asked them to visualize OpenAI’s new device. We really hope the final product looks better 😂
ChatGPT
Gemini
Grok