Indian startup Airbound has closed a $37 million Series A round led by Greenoaks, with backing from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed and Humba Ventures, bringing its total funding to nearly $50 million less than a year after an $8.65 million seed round. The company is developing lightweight, tail-sitter drones that take off and land vertically, aiming to carry cargo more cheaply than trucks by minimizing the aircraft's own weight relative to payload.
SiFive unveiled the BigSky SF-2U870, a 2U rack server built around 32 of its P870-D cores running at 2.2GHz, paired with 256GB of DDR5-5600 memory and 64 lanes of PCIe 5.0. The system supports double-wide GPUs up to 450W, includes networking and storage options, and is compliant with the RVA23 profile, enabling it to run Ubuntu 26.04 without modification.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to unveil the AirPods 5 as soon as its expected September 9 event, alongside a foldable iPhone, iPhone 18 Pro models, and updated Apple Watches. The new earbuds will reportedly come in two versions—a standard model and one with active noise cancellation—replacing the entry-level AirPods last updated in 2024.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple may release an updated Mac mini within days, ahead of the anticipated September event for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra. The refresh follows persistent supply shortages and rising demand tied to users running AI models locally, with Apple said to have tested both M5 and M6 chip variants.
Thomson Reuters unveiled Thomson, its first proprietary large language model, which it built by fine-tuning an open-source base rather than training from scratch. The company says it spent roughly $40 million on the project, using its own legal, tax and news archives from Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters alongside hundreds of subject-matter experts to specialize the model for professional work.
OpenAI will restore a five-hour usage limit for Codex and ChatGPT Work on Plus subscriptions starting tomorrow, according to engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux. The cap had been temporarily suspended for several weeks, leaving only a weekly limit in place, but is now returning alongside that weekly cap. Pro subscribers on the $100 and $200 tiers will remain exempt from the five-hour restriction for the coming months.
In a new essay, Paul Graham says Y Combinator's decades of experience selecting founders show that the best preparation for startup success is deep technical or creative skill, not a formal entrepreneurship curriculum. He argues universities should keep teaching subjects like computer science, engineering and molecular biology, since founders succeed by building products customers want, not by studying management or finance.
During and after World War II, the Museum of Modern Art worked closely with U.S. government agencies to spread American modern art abroad, framing it as proof of Western creative freedom against fascism and communism. Nelson Rockefeller, who led MoMA while also serving in Roosevelt's administration, helped direct dozens of government-funded exhibitions across Latin America, and later CIA officer Thomas Braden oversaw covert cultural funding that supported showcasing artists like Jackson Pollock internationally.
Deadline reports that Tom Selleck has signed on as a guest star for Apple TV's still-untitled comedy series led by Elizabeth Banks, though his role hasn't been disclosed. The show, created by Liz Heldens and Matt Ward and produced by 20th Television, already features Ted Danson, Hamish Linklater, Rob Delaney, Michelle Buteau, Simu Liu, Jared Goldstein and Spencer Moss. The plot follows Banks' character Heidi as she navigates a post-divorce life while getting entangled in her father's retirement-community romance.
Flock Safety's network of AI-powered surveillance cameras has expanded rapidly across US cities and towns, but communities from both political sides are now organizing against it. Critics cite privacy concerns, lack of oversight, and fears about how police and other agencies use the collected data.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued subpoenas to banks that handled trading and funding for Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, according to the New York Times. The probe comes after the fund lost billions in value following a late-July slump in AI stocks, though regulators have not accused the firm of any wrongdoing. Situational Awareness says it will fully cooperate with regulators, calling such scrutiny normal for high-profile funds.
At Hot Chips 2026, IBM unveiled an early look at a future mainframe processor featuring 11 IBM Z cores on a 2-nanometer process, clocked above 5.7 GHz, capable of natively executing both z/Architecture and AArch64 instructions on the same cores without emulation. The chip will include specialized accelerators for AI fraud detection, I/O, compression, cryptography and sorting, plus a large cache hierarchy topping out near 3.5 GB of virtual L4 cache. IBM hasn't named the chip or its host system but expects it around 2028, likely powering a future z18-class mainframe.
GoKawiil