Startups & Ventures

❄️ Chinese ACs Gain AI with DeepSeek

Chinese manufacturers added the neural network DeepSeek to air conditioners. These devices now answer questions, give weather updates, and control music.

DeepSeek turns ordinary ACs into smart home assistants with interactive AI features.

Users get more than temperature control-a device responding to voice commands and delivering real-time info.

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🤖 Hackers Exploit LLM Hallucinations for Phishing

Unit 42 uncovered over 13,000 malicious URLs created by registering fake domains that large language models often hallucinate. These domains mimic real ones with patterns like name_download.com instead of.

This tactic, called Phantom Squatting, works like typosquatting but uses AI-generated fake URLs. The LLMs themselves suggest these phishing sites to users, removing the need for hackers to lure victims directly.

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🤖 Anthropic plans its own AI chip

Anthropic is in early talks with Samsung to develop a custom AI chip. The startup already uses AWS Trainium, Google TPU, and Nvidia GPU hardware but faces scaling challenges.

Anthropic builds AI models and needs more control over its infrastructure. Following OpenAI's lead, it aims to boost performance by designing dedicated silicon.

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🤖 Developer uses Codex for daily news digest

Each morning, an agent prints a personalized news summary from Codex for a developer, replacing the smartphone start to the day.

The digest covers unread messages, task lists, and surf forecasts, using AI to support a digital detox.

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🧑‍💻 GitHub Sells Repos on CD-ROM

GitHub now offers copies of repositories on CD-ROM.

Users can order physical copies to preserve code offline or for future use.

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Vibe-coders work on a $1 billion AI startup at 2 AM.

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🇨🇳 China launches 5-year AI education plan

The State Council set a five-year plan making AI literacy a core skill for all students starting around age 6. The curriculum will cover all school grades and extend into higher education.

This move is part of Xi Jinping's strategy to secure technological dominance and compete with the US. AI literacy is framed as a matter of national competitiveness and security.

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😐 xAI launches Voice Agent Builder

xAI introduced Voice Agent Builder, a platform to create voice agents that handle calls and tasks over the phone. Users describe agent behavior in plain language, upload documents, connect tools, and the agent manages calls with background noise, accents, interruptions, and complex queries in 25 languages.

The agents answer questions from uploaded documents, schedule meetings in Google Calendar or Outlook, check order status via APIs, search the internet for current info, and transfer calls to humans if needed. Each call is recorded with a transcript and action log.

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🌐 China hits 51.3 Tbps internet speed

Chinese researchers achieved 51.3 Tbps internet speed using hollow-core fiber optics, surpassing the default 100 Mbps by 513,000 times.

The hollow-core fiber transmits signals through an air channel instead of glass, reducing signal loss and boosting speed.

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🔍 Google Builds Data Center from Old Smartphones

Google and UC San Diego researchers are creating a data center using 2,000 recycled Pixel smartphones, launching this fall. They remove screens and batteries, using only the motherboards clustered into a computing platform.

The project runs a Linux server distro on Android hardware, turning each phone into a small server. Some smartphone cores outperform traditional server cores in benchmarks, but limited memory and I/O restrict tasks.

A 20-phone cluster handled 75+ students’ workloads faster than a standard AWS backend. The full cluster aims to deliver about 50 servers at a fraction of typical costs. Reliability remains a key concern since phones aren’t built for continuous heavy use.

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🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Science for research

Anthropic introduced Claude Science, an AI agent designed as an end-to-end research infrastructure. It handles literature search, data analysis, computation, visualization, and article preparation in one interface.

Claude Science comes with a built-in skill base and offers various visualizations and artifact displays. It is currently in beta and available as an app for MacOS and Linux.

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🍏 Cursor launches iOS app for AI coding agents

Cursor released a public beta of its iOS app, allowing users to run AI coding agents directly from their iPhones. You can pick a repository, start an agent, and even dictate tasks by voice.

The app sends notifications when the agent finishes, letting you review and merge code changes immediately. It supports all paid subscriptions, with a 75% discount on the Composer 2.5 model until July 5.

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🤖 Anthropic restores Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models

The US Commerce Department lifted export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, allowing access to resume this Wednesday. The rollout starts on Claude platforms and will expand to AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry.

Anthropic had to disable these models after Amazon researchers flagged a hacking risk. To fix this, they trained a new protective classifier that blocks the exploit over 99% of the time, redirecting blocked requests to Opus 4.8.

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🙀 OpenClaw Launches Native iOS App

OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent, has released a native app for iPhone and iPad. Previously accessed via Telegram on mobile, it now offers a dedicated client available on the App Store.

OpenClaw runs independently on Mac or PC, connects to APIs of any model like Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini, and executes tasks directly within the system.

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Ⓜ️ Meta’s Brain2Qwerty v2 reads silent typing

Meta’s Brain2Qwerty v2 reconstructs text typed silently from continuous brain signals without exact keypress timing, reaching 61% word accuracy on average and about 70% with top users.

It processes raw MEG data through an encoder, an Aligner detecting word boundaries and embeddings, then a large language model refines the output. The system costs millions and isn’t consumer-ready.

Accuracy remains low for practical use, but a near-perfect scaling law shows quality improves almost logarithmically with more data, with no saturation yet. Noninvasive thought reading may just need bigger datasets.

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🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, the most agentic Sonnet model. It plans actions, uses a browser and terminal, and handles tasks once needing larger models.

Sonnet 5 narrows the gap with Opus 4.8 at a lower cost. It completes complex tasks fully, unlike earlier Sonnet versions that stalled.

Testers say it writes tests to reproduce bugs, fixes code, and reverts changes to confirm issues without guidance. It also cuts false info, resists manipulation, and declines harmful requests better.

Sonnet 5 is now default on free and Pro plans and available on Max, Team, Enterprise, Claude Code, and API. Intro pricing lasts until August 31.

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🍏 Apple Plans Touchscreen MacBook on M5 Chips

Apple is preparing a touchscreen MacBook using current top-tier M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, skipping the M6 Pro and Max generations. The new 14- and 16-inch models are expected between late 2026 and early 2027.

The laptop will feature an OLED display, Dynamic Island interface from iPhone, and a refreshed chassis design. The M7 chip series is still in testing and likely to arrive by the end of 2027, with M7 Ultra possibly in 2028.

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🖥 Microsoft updates Excel Copilot for finance teams

Microsoft rolled out new features for Copilot in Excel aimed at financial teams. It now includes ready-made skills for common tasks, connections to six financial data sources, and full transparency of its actions.

Copilot uses templates to perform tasks like company valuation models or quarterly closes step-by-step instead of improvising. It pulls data directly from sources like CB Insights, PitchBook, FactSet, and S&P Global without manual input.

Before making changes, Copilot shows a detailed plan of affected cells and formulas. All edits are logged and marked as done by Copilot. The update is available for Microsoft 365 Copilot users on Windows, Mac, and browser.

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🤖 US Allows Anthropic Access to Mythos 5

The US government cleared Anthropic to expand access to Mythos 5 after a security review. The model was previously restricted due to concerns under the Trump administration.

Anthropic is now the first major AI lab to pass this government filter publicly. The exact security issues were not disclosed but have been resolved.

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