Larry Dignan

Meta released Muse Code in beta. Muse Code is a coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2. The company also offered a lower priced "contributor" tier for Muse Spark 1.2.

Demis Hassabis will step down as Google DeepMind CEO to become its chair and add the title of Alphabet chief scientist. The move comes amid a shakeup at Google DeepMind where four top execs are leaving to form Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on key industry breakthroughs.

In a note to staff, Hassabis said:

"We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."

On Uber's second quarter earnings call, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said the company is wrangling its token budget for AI. Uber earlier this year said it blew through its entire AI budget in four months. So much for tokenmaxxing.

Krishnamurthy said the company now has its AI vanity metrics under control. He said:

"On AI, we are optimizing token spend by setting better defaults for different use cases, moving certain tasks to lower-cost or open-weight models, and letting employees more clearly understand and manage their spend. As a result, cost per token has declined over the past several months, even as adoption has continued to increase, allowing us to keep overall AI spend broadly stable."

Mistral launched Shieldstral, a 3B open-weights multimodal safety classifier model designed for moderation and policy-adaptive Q&A. The model is released under Apache 2.0.

Update: I posted the takeaways from the earnings call here.

SpaceX reported its second quarter results, its first since launching its IPO. The company reported a net loss of $541 million on revenue of $7.8 billion, up 92% from a year ago. The company said it is looking to close its Cursor acquisition in the third quarter.

• SpaceXAI, Meta puts pricing squeeze on Anthropic, OpenAI
• SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5
• SpaceX buys Cursor
• SpaceX's worth $2 trillion: Do you believe in space data centers, xAI's potential?
• Google to rent 110,000 Nvidia GPUs from SpaceX

The company said that it ended the quarter with 12 million Starlink subscribers. SpaceX said its AI revenue ws $2.6 billion, largely due to revenue from cloud computing deals. In addition, SpaceX said it is working to design the Starmind AI1 satellite with Nvidia. Each Starmind satellite will include Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs.

Here's a look at the details.

Bending Spoons, a technology rollup that owns AOL, Brightcove, Eventbright, Vimeo and others, said it has acquired Airtable in a deal valued at $1.285 billion. Bending Spoons recently went public at $29 a share. Shares are currently at about $36.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered a moratorium on the approval of data center projects until the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas can perform audits on proposed data centers trying to connect to the state's electric grid.

The Texas Tribune has the backstory.

Here's the problem that has Abbott saying "Texas must come first."

ERCOT is currently considering approximately over 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid, more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand for ERCOT. Approximately 90 percent of the new power requests are data centers. That unprecedented load growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid.

It is one thing to announce an AI data center project. It’s another thing to build it and connect it to the grid.

OpenAI has responded to Apple’s lawsuit over IP theft and posted messages exchanged between employees of the two companies (heavily redacted so they are essentially useless).

The gist via OpenAI’s blog post:

“Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. Apple also claimed they had a discussion with our General Counsel, which they now concede never happened. But they again hide the fact that they never raised the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time, and that they in fact told us that they were “resolving any issues”. We then heard nothing for five months until they sued. In their latest filing, Apple tries hard to spin this sequence of events, but you can just read the emails for yourself here⁠.”

This battle is playing out about the way I thought and these lawyer love letters are just getting started. Here’s what I wrote in Notebook July 12.

Apple is suing OpenAI over IP theft and trade secrets and its lawsuit revolves mostly around former employee Tang Tan, who worked on the iPhone. This case is going to be covered extensively and Sam Altman and Elon Musk are exchanging jabs. The big takeaway is that OpenAI's hardware ambitions can be delayed no matter how the case turns out. Discovery should be interesting. Keep in mind that this court battle will take time to play out. Settlement? Unlikely. Will this be entertaining? Definitely. We'll see how this plays out, but for now it's just a lot of noise.

TopTal's quarterly report on technology, design, finance and services hiring is showing an uptick. In the company's second quarter report, Toptal reported the following:

• Demand for experienced remote and hybrid technology and professional services personnel rose 8.9% in the second quarter compared to a year ago.
• Technology layoffs were up 5% from a year ago.
• Market strength scores were strongest for data science experts, up 14% from a year ago; finance consultants, up 42%; product managers, up 27%, and project managers, up 14%.

TopTal's data set is based on the Toptal Talent Network, which includes 30,000 professionals, and is focused on hybrid and remote roles.

Visa said it will acquire BioCatch, which provides behavioral-first multi-signal fraud detection systems. BioCatch uses AI and machine learning to analyze keystrokes, touch gestures and device handling to help detect fraud.

Persistent Systems said first quarter revenue was up 16% from a year ago to $452.4 million. The company said it had record quarterly total contract value of $1.15 billion.

Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-Max and said it will also release the open weights behind the model. On benchmarks, Qwen 3.8-Max is competitive with frontier models and Moonshot's Kimi K3.