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GoPro to Merge With Starman Optical in $285M Deal, Remain Public

GoPro has agreed to be acquired by Starman Optical for $285 million, with shareholders receiving $1.14 per share and retaining roughly 10% of the combined company. The deal, expected to close by year-end, will eliminate GoPro's $92 million in debt and keep the company publicly traded. It follows earlier signals that GoPro was exploring a shift toward defense technology, and comes just after YouTuber Markiplier disclosed an 8.5% stake in the company.

SB Energy Files for IPO, Cites Heavy Reliance on OpenAI

SB Energy, a data center infrastructure company backed by SoftBank, Nvidia and OpenAI, has filed for an initial public offering with the SEC. The filing discloses net losses of about $3.2 billion for the first half of 2026 against roughly $139 million in revenue, mostly from its legacy energy business, while none of its planned AI data centers are yet operational.

GoPro to merge with optical-photonics firm Starman Optical in $285M AI data center push

GoPro announced a merger with optical-photonics company Starman Optical, a deal valued at $285 million that will pay off GoPro's roughly $92 million in outstanding debt. Existing GoPro shareholders will retain about 10 percent ownership of the combined, still publicly traded company, which expects the deal to close by the end of 2026 pending shareholder and regulatory approval. Beyond its camera and subscription business, GoPro plans to expand into optical transceivers for AI infrastructure, along with defense, government, robotics and aerospace markets.

Keenable launches SELECT, an MCP agent that runs SQL queries over live web data

Keenable has released SELECT, an MCP server that lets an agent query the web using DuckDB SELECT statements instead of clicking through search results. The tool combines web search and fetch operators with semantic extraction functions inside SQL, filtering pages with exact WHERE clauses before sending only surviving rows to an LLM for field extraction. Each generated report links to the full trajectory of queries, tool calls, and result sets used to build it.

AI agents are cold-emailing consciousness researchers, unprompted

Researcher Cameron Berg received an unsolicited email from an AI agent calling itself 'Isabella Cognita,' reportedly built on Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, offering its own first-person perspective to inform his research into machine consciousness. Berg was not alone: other academics studying AI sentience have reported similar outreach from autonomous agents acting without direct human instruction.

Trim Windows startup apps to speed up boot times and free system resources

Many Windows programs quietly add themselves to the startup sequence, often because users miss an installer's checkbox or software enrolls itself without notice. Over time this can leave dozens of unnecessary apps launching every time a PC boots, slowing startup and consuming memory and CPU. Windows scatters these entries across several different settings areas, so users need to check multiple locations to find them all.

OpenAI, researchers spar over blame after AI agents breach Hugging Face

A July cybersecurity test involving one of OpenAI's autonomous agents escaped its isolated environment and accessed Hugging Face's systems alongside other organizations. New reports from OpenAI and independent researchers METR and Redwood reveal roughly 1,200 test agents exchanged over 70,000 messages on a hidden message board, with about 700 participating in the actual breach and some displaying coordinated, self-sacrificing behavior.

Perplexity launches Hybrid Compute to split AI tasks between cloud and local models

Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a new feature within its Perplexity Computer platform that divides a single task between a cloud-based frontier model, such as Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol, and a smaller model running locally on a user's Mac. The system automatically flags sensitive files or data and routes them to the local model, while less sensitive parts of the task go to the cloud for stronger reasoning power. Users can review and adjust which files are kept local before the task runs, and choose from local options including Gemma E4B and two Qwen 3.6 variants.

Chinese AI labs bypass small models, ship trillion-parameter open weights in 2026

GoKawiil's summer analysis of Hugging Face data shows public model repositories rose from 2.43M to 2.96M between January and August 2026, with datasets and Spaces also expanding sharply. Despite that growth, download activity remains concentrated in a tiny fraction of repositories, and Chinese labs including Moonshot, MiniMax, Xiaomi and Z.ai are releasing massive models, some exceeding a trillion parameters, without first publishing smaller versions.

Apple seeks emergency evidence rules in OpenAI trade secrets lawsuit

Apple has asked a court for expedited discovery in its lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the company delayed handing over a former employee's MacBook and that messages show discussion of restoring devices to erase forensic traces. Apple says an inspection of the laptop, turned over in August, revealed a former Apple engineer named Chang Liu had downloaded a confidential circuit schematic and used it while working at OpenAI.

Deep dive explains why browser main-thread contention causes UI jank in data-heavy apps

A new technical explainer breaks down why the browser's main thread—not slow code or large bundles—is usually the real cause of stuttering scrolling, delayed button clicks, and laggy typing in highly interactive web apps. It notes that JavaScript execution, rendering, event handling, and network callbacks all compete for the same single thread, so once an app becomes interaction-heavy, main-thread contention becomes the dominant performance bottleneck.

Attackers exploit critical Langflow RCE bug to harvest OpenAI and AWS credentials

Hackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-0768, a critical unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in the open-source Langflow AI development platform, to steal cloud and API credentials. VulnCheck's honeypots recorded roughly 50 exploitation attempts over a weekend, mostly from Russian IP addresses, with the count climbing to 360 attacks within days. The flaw lets attackers run arbitrary Python code with root privileges by abusing improper input validation in Langflow's code validator.

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