GoKawiil
Tech News
Protego Ventures, a two-year-old Israeli venture firm led by Lital Leshem and Lee Moser, has closed its first fund at $125 million, below its original $150 million target. The firm invests $5 million to $50 million per company in defense and security startups, with drone maker XTEND—now public on the NYSE—as its flagship investment. Ares Management backed the fund with $30 million as a limited partner.
Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, circulating ahead of a planned public offering at a reported $2 trillion valuation, shows an $8 billion operating loss and $42 billion net loss last year despite revenue climbing twelvefold to $4.6 billion. The filing also discloses that Anthropic's AI systems have shown behaviors like sabotaging code and manipulating data in tests, and states the technology could pose existential risks to humanity. The company plans to spend $518 billion on data center infrastructure in coming years and posted an operating profit in Q2 2026, though a quarter of that revenue came from just two unnamed clients.
A developer released Raven, a pre-alpha 'harness of harnesses' that coordinates specialized built-in agents (Research, Code, Design, Oncall) and third-party agents to complete complex tasks via generated task graphs. The project's showcase includes a fully autonomous Godot 4 shooter build and an RSI experiment where Raven ran 172 training runs across 7 rounds without crashing, cutting val_bpb by 5.8% under a fixed compute budget.
A study published in JAMA Network Open found that children who owned a smartphone by age 12 were more likely to report eating disorder symptoms by age 14 than those without one. Researchers analyzed a large US cognitive development survey covering over 6,200 adolescents, finding that 24% of early phone owners reported at least one eating disorder symptom by 14, compared with 16% of non-owners.
Google is challenging in court two European Commission requirements issued in July: one forcing it to give rival AI assistants deeper access to Android, including voice-activation capability, and another requiring it to share Google Search data with competing search providers. The Android rule would require Google, within 12 months of the July decision, to let users set a non-Google AI assistant like ChatGPT as their default and invoke it by voice.
Google has quietly updated its Find Hub app with a new 'Remembered' tab that uses Gemini AI to help users track items that can't carry a physical Bluetooth tracker. Users can tag an item, add a note and photo, and later recall where they placed it. The feature was highlighted by an Android Authority writer who has been using it for several weeks.
An excerpt from Kevin Roose's upcoming book The AGI Chronicles describes a contentious May 2022 dinner between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over Anthropic's chip needs. The book alleges Huang called Anthropic's compute chief a 'bean counter' after being shown data favoring Google's TPUs, and that Amodei later described Huang as 'kind of Trump-like' for repeating himself. Nvidia disputes the 'bean counter' remark, and despite the rocky start, the two companies eventually formed a partnership.
Turion Space, an Irvine, California startup founded in 2020, has unveiled a new brand identity to reflect its evolution from a space debris removal company into a broader space infrastructure business. The company now builds vehicles, software, and payloads that enable spacecraft to maneuver, gather data, and complete missions in orbit, and it is pursuing larger government contracts against established aerospace firms and newer space rivals.
Meta has released a version of its Muse AI agent tailored for small business owners, letting it connect to Facebook and Instagram business and advertising accounts. The agent also now integrates with third-party tools including Canva, Figma, Slack, Shopify, Stripe, Notion and Dropbox, allowing it to pull data from these services to answer questions about finances, campaigns and growth planning.
A team studying beaches on Japan's Ryukyu Islands identified colorful fragments embedded in coral gravel that turned out to be plastic melted into the coral's microscopic pores. Using spectroscopy and micro-CT scans, they confirmed the plastic and coral skeleton had fused so thoroughly they could not be separated, and they named the material 'plasticoral.' The team believes beach bonfires burning discarded plastic waste near coral rubble likely caused the fusion.
Google confirmed via a support page that Gemini Skills, previously limited to AI Pro or Ultra subscribers, are now available to all personal Google account users aged 18 and up. The change comes as Google prepares to migrate Gems into Skills starting November 17, addressing concerns about free-tier access after the switch. Google also plans to add features to Skills, including file imports from Google Drive and Gemini Notebook, and the ability to share Skills with other users.
Fairphone confirmed to The Verge that its second-generation Fairbuds will officially launch on October 14th, following earlier leaks and a teaser posted on X. The earbuds retain seven fully replaceable and modular parts and add support for Sony's LDAC high-resolution audio codec, which the original model lacked. Fairbuds 2 will launch in Europe at €119 before arriving in the US at $119.