Meta’s Cheap API Is a Utilization Strategy
Meta has raised $62 billion of debt since 2022 and prices its new model API at about 25% of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s. Iris manufacturing, a 1GW Canadian data center and a 14GW compute-power target put the discount inside a multiyear capacity plan.
Meta’s Stack Sets the API Price
Meta has raised $62B of debt since 2022 while pricing Muse Spark 1.1 at roughly one-quarter of OpenAI and Anthropic rates. Behind the API sit Iris silicon, a $9B Canadian data center and a 14GW compute target.
Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1, capable of more advanced coding and a “step-change” from the first generation, available to US developers via a public API preview
Muse Spark 1.1 is available to US developers through a public API preview.
OpenAI broadly releases GPT-5.6, and launches ChatGPT Work, an AI agent that can gather context across apps and files to create documents, on macOS and Windows
- Sol is the most powerful version, while Luna is designed for speed. … - A new “ultra” mode within Sol allows the system …
The EU Parliament advances a bill letting tech companies scan for CSAM, reviving a proposal rejected in March, with an exemption for E2EE services like WhatsApp
Top-level pressure and obscure procedures breathe new life into a controversial proposal to allow scanning for online child sexual abuse material.
Fidji Simo says she has decided to leave her full-time role at OpenAI and transition to being a part-time adviser after her medical condition worsened
The head of artificial general intelligence won't return from extended medical leave, a major leadership change as the AI giant prepares to go public
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh names Marc Andreessen and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to lead a task force on the economic impact of new technologies, including AI
The billionaire investor will help shape how the Federal Reserve assesses a technology his firm has bet heavily on.
SK Hynix raises $26.5B in the largest ever US market debut by a foreign company, selling 177.9M ADRs for $149 each; the sale was more than 7x oversubscribed
SK Hynix Inc. raised $26.5 billion in its American depositary receipt offering, as the South Korean memory chipmaker powered through volatility …
Micron raises its US capex commitment to $250B through 2035, adding $50B for New York, Idaho, Virginia, and other projects, and invests $500M in GlobalWafers
Micron Technology Inc. plans to increase its spending on new plants in the US to $250 billion to help meet unprecedented demand …
Sources: Netflix executives are increasingly worried about declining engagement and are exploring adding live TV and bundling streaming services like Peacock
Streamer is rethinking some of its core strategies to compete with rivals — Top Netflix executives who gathered …
Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, is stepping down after six years; VP of legal Molly Abraham moves into his role with the title of general counsel
Coinbase (COIN.O)'s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal is stepping down after six years at the U.S. crypto giant where he fought off …
Bun's creator says he rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust using a Claude Fable 5 prerelease version in 11 days, noting it would've taken three engineers “about a year”
Disclosure: Bun was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025. I and others on the Bun team work at Anthropic.
Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is discussing raising new funds at a roughly $20B valuation, less than a year after raising money at a $10B valuation
Mercor, a startup that helps improve artificial intelligence models with rich specialized data, is discussing raising new funds …
Anthropic debuts a “reflection” dashboard in beta for Free, Pro, and Max users with memory turned on, to track their Claude activity over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months
Today we're introducing, in beta, a new way to reflect on and refine how you use Claude.
How the internet, smartphones, social media, and now generative AI are accelerating a drop in the reading of longer works like books
twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world's written works.
OpenAI launches GPT-Live, new voice models powering ChatGPT Voice and built on a full-duplex architecture, meaning they can listen and speak at the same time
1X says its humanoid robot Neo's five-fingered hands have tendon-style actuators that give it 25 degrees of freedom of movement, nearly the same as a human hand
The soft, weirdly sexualized home-chore robot has been given some very tactile hands. — Friendly home robots have been the dream of sci-fi for a long time.
GPT-5.6 Sol costs $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, GPT-5.6 Terra costs $2.50 and $15, and GPT-5.6 Luna costs $1 and $6
More intelligence from every token, stronger performance per dollar, and more capability on demand for your hardest work.
OpenAI merges Codex and ChatGPT desktop apps for Mac and Windows under a new ChatGPT desktop app, allowing users to switch between Codex, Chat, and Work
no need to leave your laptop cracked open!@theo:fwiw, I think that turning Codex into ChatGPT Desktop is a generational fumble@openaidevs:We're bringing Codex and ChatGPT together in one desktop app. ...
A Brown University professor suspected his class used AI to cheat after a take-home midterm averaged 96%, prompting an in-person final, which averaged 48.6%
Google says it will automatically add a disclosure to ads that are made with its AI advertising tools, expanding the disclosure beyond election ads to all ads
Google is rolling out a new feature aimed at helping people understand when an ad they're seeing was made using AI technology.
Apple reaches a deal with Broadcom worth $30B+ to make 15B+ chips in the US over the next five years, Apple's largest as part of its $600B US investment pledge
The FTC settles with John Deere over a 2025 right-to-repair lawsuit, requiring the company to provide farmers and shops with equipment and software for 10 years
SAP will make it easier for customers to switch to rival service providers or end contracts, averting a possible EU antitrust fine after a September 2025 probe
SAP (SAPG.DE), Europe's largest software maker, will make it easier for its customers to switch to rival service providers or end …
Microsoft President Brad Smith says the US now has AI “regulation without transparent or complete rules”, and adds that “without rules, businesses can't plan”
Microsoft President Brad Smith has weighed in on U.S. policy on AI, saying that the Trump administration's …
Meta announces its first data center in Canada, and 33rd overall; the 1GW facility in Alberta will cost Meta ~$9B and take two to three years to construct
SpaceXAI debuts Grok 4.5, its first model built in partnership with Cursor, designed to “handle difficult, long-running tasks” across finance, legal, and coding
PitchBook: US venture funding hit $412.7B in H1 2026, up 30% on all of 2025, with AI startup funding accounting for 86%, or $355.9B; Q2 saw seven $1B+ rounds
U.S. venture capital deal value hit $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than investors put to work in all of last year …
OpenAI is discontinuing ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone desktop browser, in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app
ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI's standalone desktop browser, is being sunset in favor of the new ChatGPT desktop app. — OpenAI released an all-new ChatGPT desktop app today …
Meta launches a Meta Model API, which Mark Zuckerberg says will have “aggressive and attractive” pricing at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models
its first paid AI modelMaria Deutscher /SiliconANGLE:Meta launches flagship Muse Spark 1.1 model with multi-agent upgradesHindustan Times:Meta challenges OpenAI with its first-ever paid AI API, debuti...
Anthropic, set to add usage-based billing for Fable 5 on July 12, aims to return the model to Claude's subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows”
Claude subscribers must soon pay usage-based fees to access Anthropic's best consumer AI model—a sign that the golden era of AI subscriptions is ending.
Leaked renders via Android Headlines show the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, Watch 9, and Watch Ultra 2; the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is likely the new wide foldable
OpenAI says it found widespread task issues in SWE-Bench Pro, estimates ~30% of tasks are broken, and retracts its earlier recommendation to adopt the benchmark
Character.AI launches three human-written, AI-generated microdramas, whose characters users can chat with, and aims to eventually let users make their own shows
Microdramas are such a rage these days that nearly every kind of company in the attention economy space — be they dedicated microdrama apps …
Sources: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is raising $10B at a $130B pre-money valuation, its first outside funding round, including $4B from Coatue and $2B from Bezos
Block agrees to pay $45M and offer live customer support for Cash App to settle claims by 46 US states that the company failed to protect users from fraud
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke's Entire launches a decentralized Git network to handle high coding agent traffic, with servers in the US, the EU, and Australia
MiniMax is looking to raise as much as $1.9B by selling 35.6M shares at ~$34 each and offering ~$830M in convertible bonds due 2027
Crypto VC firm Paradigm raised $1.2B, its fourth fund, to invest in areas outside of crypto, like AI and robotics; Paradigm had $11.9B in AUM at the end of 2025
Grok 4.5 is available in Grok Build, in Cursor, and from the SpaceXAI console, but not in the EU; it costs $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens
Today we are releasing Grok 4.5 together with SpaceXAI …Michael Nuñez /VentureBeat:SpaceX's Grok 4.5 launches at half the price of rivals — here's why that could rattle Anthropic and OpenAIVyom Ramani...
Mistral launches Robostral Navigate, a hardware-agnostic robotics navigation model trained via simulation that uses a single camera and basic language prompts
Interpol and law enforcement agencies arrest 5,811 suspects and seize $293M in an operation combating social engineering scams and fraud across 97 countries
Cognition releases SWE-1.7, trained from Kimi K2.7 and available in Devin at 1,000 tokens/second, claiming it nears frontier-level intelligence at a lower cost
Prime Intellect, which helps companies build their own AI agents by offering computing power and specialized tools, raised a $130M Series A at a $1B valuation
PrismML says it ran a 27B-parameter Qwen 3.6 model on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior on-device model; sources: Apple talked with PrismML about its tech
Ollama, which helps developers run open-weight AI models locally, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Venture, following a $15M Series A led by Benchmark
Memo: Meta plans to start manufacturing its in-house AI chip, codenamed Iris, from September, as part of its plan to boost its computing power to 14GW in 2027
Databento, which sells financial data feeds, raised a $97M Series B led by NEA, taking its total funding to $127M, and says it is “profitable every month”
Nvidia lost ~$1T in market value in less than two months, dropping 16% from its May all-time-high, trading at 18x forward earnings, its lowest level since 2019
India scraps import duties on some parts used to make devices like phones until March 31, 2029, removing 7.5% and 5% levies, which might help Apple and Xiaomi
Israeli startup Alta, which develops an AI agent platform for marketing, sales, and business development teams, raised a $25M Series A led by IN Venture
Apple supplier Luxshare fell in its Hong Kong trading debut, closing down 1.6%, after raising ~$3.1B in the city's biggest listing in 2026 so far
China's Nexchip Semiconductor says it aims to raise around $890.37M in its Hong Kong share sale by offering 216.2M shares at ~$4.12/share, the top of its range
European startups raised $24B in Q2, up 66% YoY and the strongest quarter in four years; UK startups raised $10.4B, above Germany's $3.2B, and France's $2.4B
Meta prices Muse Spark 1.1 at $1.25/1M input tokens and $4.25/1M output tokens; Alexandr Wang says improving coding and agentic performance was a key focus
Ina Fried /Axios:
Sources: China plans to let some of its biggest AI companies buy a small number of Nvidia's H200 chips to offset a domestic computing shortage in recent months
Kraken Technology, which designs and builds autonomous maritime platforms, such as uncrewed subsurface vessels, raised a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation
Mercor acquires Deeptune, which builds reinforcement learning environments for AI agents, three months after CEO Brendan Foody backed Deeptune's $43M Series A
Lily Mae Lazarus /Fortune:
Sources: Sonos' layoffs include some top design and product executives, like VP of Design Dana Krieger; CEO Tom Conrad says the changes reduce management layers
The AI data center boom has led to surging demand for power transformers, with average lead times for orders, once measured in months, now stretching into years
Arkenstone Defense, which is building software to handle back-office work for defense tech startups, emerges from stealth with a $35M seed led by J2 Ventures
GM-backed Chinese autonomous driving company Momenta saw a muted trading debut in its Hong Kong IPO, up 2.8% to value the company at ~$9B, after raising $751M
Meta launches a Meta Model API, whose pricing Mark Zuckerberg says will be “aggressive and attractive” at ~25% of the cost of OpenAI and Anthropic models
In a crowded market for AI tools, Mark Zuckerberg wants to win on price. — Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a version …
Filing: Chinese AI model maker Z.ai is seeking to raise ~$4B from the sale of 19.8M shares at ~$202 to ~$216 each, after its Hong Kong stock soared 1,400%+ YTD
Shanghai-based GPU maker Iluvatar CoreX raised ~$902M in a Hong Kong share sale; the company's stock has soared 257% since its January IPO, which raised ~$473M
Filings: Grubhub parent Wonder is raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a $9B valuation; a source says founder Marc Lore indicated he will contribute $200M
OpenAI rolls out two versions of GPT-Live: GPT-Live-1, powering ChatGPT Voice for Go, Plus, and Pro users, and GPT-Live-1 mini, the default for free users
Sabrina Ortiz /The Deep View: