Friday, 21 August 2026
Starcloud raises $250M as launches tighten
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Starcloud's orbital AI data centers, running Nvidia H100s in space, raised a $250M Series A extension at a $2.3B valuation as SpaceX plans to retire Falcon 9.
ChatGPT can now read and send your iMessages
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
OpenAI's new Apple Messages plugin lets ChatGPT Work and Codex users search, summarize, draft, and send iMessage, SMS, and RCS texts on Apple silicon Macs.
Google adds reader controls to Search
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Google shipped an embeddable Preferred Sources button for publishers, natural-language Discover controls, and audio briefings to give readers more say.
Google launches a Gemini hub for students
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Google's new Student Hub bundles study notebooks, flashcards, and Deep Research in Gemini Live, plus a free year of AI Pro (US) or AI Plus (140+ countries).
Mistral launches Agentic Search for RAG
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Mistral's Agentic Search gives models five tools to iteratively navigate documents, lifting FinanceBench accuracy from 27% to 86% and cutting latency 40%.
Liquid AI speeds up LFM2.5 with draft models
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Liquid AI released DSpark speculative-decoding draft checkpoints for LFM2.5, cutting function-calling latency 57% and lifting GPU throughput up to 3.18x.
Creators face backlash for AI brand deals
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
YouTubers Matti Haapoja and Sam Kolder drew fan criticism for promoting AI video tool Higgsfield's Seedance 2.5 after PR-pitch screenshots surfaced.
Google buys Spirit's bankruptcy data for AI
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Google agreed to pay $10M for Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy-estate data, including 100M emails and 175,000+ employee records, pending court approval to train AI.
Pew: a third of the post-ChatGPT web is AI
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Pew Research found 35% of pages published since ChatGPT's 2022 launch show significant AI-authorship signs, versus 10% across a broader recent sample.
Grok Lite briefly sent gibberish to users
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
A subset of Grok.com users got nonsensical output this week; xAI called it a rare temporary generation glitch and said starting a new chat usually clears it.
Data shows OpenAI closing gap with Anthropic
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
New usage data indicates OpenAI is narrowing Anthropic's lead among business users, an enterprise segment Anthropic has led for the past year.
AI data supplier Micro1 hits $500M run rate
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Micro1, which supplies training and RL eval data to AI labs via contracted domain experts, grew its gross run rate from $100M to $500M in 8 months.
Stampli cuts launch time 68% with ChatGPT
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
Fintech Stampli used Codex and ChatGPT Work to compress about 243 hours of go-to-market production into roughly 77 hours for its Deep Finance product launch.
OpenAI launches a team to study power and AI
Archive item — written before sources were shown.
OpenAI's new Strategic Futures team and AI Futures blog will study how transformative AI could reshape governance and power, via papers and podcasts.