An early, unofficial leak of NVIDIA's upcoming DLSS 5 technology has surfaced, showing its neural rendering applied to games like Control and Skyrim. The AI-altered faces look strangely aged or overly realistic while clashing with untouched, lower-poly bodies and stiff animations, producing an uncanny visual mismatch. Testing also showed a steep performance cost, with Control's frame rate reportedly dropping from 71 fps to 35 fps at 4K on an RTX 5070 Ti when Neural Rendering was enabled.
New business formations reached record levels in 2025, with over 548,000 launched in June alone and nearly 3.5 million in the first half of the year. Rather than concentrating in traditional hubs like Silicon Valley or New York, much of this growth is occurring in states such as Wyoming, Oregon, Mississippi and North Dakota.
Nvidia is said to be closing in on a $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, the widely used hub for open-weight AI models, following its $6 billion deal with Poolside and Stripe's over $7 billion purchase of OpenRouter. Together the deals mark a surge of major capital flowing into companies built around freely distributed AI models rather than proprietary frontier systems.
An entrepreneur behind more than 22 companies at DRC Ventures argues that corporate values only matter when tested by hard trade-offs, not when displayed as slogans. He describes turning mission statements into operational filters that guide daily decisions on suppliers, partnerships and deals, even when a less principled option would be easier or more profitable.
A wave of polls and news reports indicates widespread American opposition to data centers, Flock surveillance cameras, and Meta's AI-equipped Ray-Ban glasses, which critics have nicknamed 'pervert glasses.' Recent events, including a grand jury declining to indict a man filmed damaging Flock equipment and protestors against data centers gaining online praise, underscore how deep and public this hostility has become.
A startup called Generation claims a combination of two generic drugs can reverse aging effects, citing informal reports from a small group of participants describing benefits like improved vision, better grip strength, and increased libido. The company plans a larger trial of 100+ people, but is already distributing the drug to others before any rigorous evidence confirms its effectiveness. The trial will be overseen by alternative-medicine practitioners, including a doctor previously linked to promoting FDA-discredited covid-19 treatments.
A valuation framework called the Financial Truth Ladder, developed by TEOL Capital, describes how institutional buyers actually assess a business before assigning it a price. Rather than starting with EBITDA multiples, buyers first test whether the company's financials, earnings, and cash flow can be trusted, then examine owner dependency and future predictability. Each of the five questions either builds buyer confidence or introduces doubt that affects the final offer.
WIRED announced a livestream Q&A on September 10 where a panel of its reporters will field reader questions about the growing controversy surrounding AI data centers. Readers can submit questions in the comments, with the event covering political, environmental, and business angles on the issue.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, is said to be raising fresh capital that would value the company at roughly $74 billion. The funds are intended to support research and development along with an expansion of its computing infrastructure.
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
Amazon has announced it will close Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its long-running marketplace connecting businesses with a distributed workforce for microtasks, effective September 30. The platform allowed companies to outsource work like data validation, content moderation, and survey collection to human workers worldwide, tasks often too subjective or complex for automation.
Stripe has acquired Clerky, an online legal services platform used by startups and their attorneys to handle routine formation and financing paperwork. Clerky says it will keep its existing team and focus after joining Stripe, continuing to serve the same startup and attorney customer base. The company reports its startups account for 23% of Silicon Valley seed and pre-seed financings and have collectively raised over $140 billion in venture capital.
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