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WIRED's Women issue features actor and comedian Patti Harrison portraying Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in a satirical cover shoot commenting on Silicon Valley's male-dominated leadership. In an accompanying interview, Harrison discusses the concept, her comedic approach, and her own strained relationship with tech platforms after leaving Twitter.
Xiaomi has released MiMo-V2.6 Pro and a lighter Flash variant as open-weight omnimodal AI models handling text, images, video and code. The company says Pro tops open-source rankings on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, trailing only closed models like Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and it showcased a feature called Vibe World that turns prompts into interactive 3D games, Blender assets or robotic arm controls.
The White House began streaming a continuous YouTube channel replaying President Trump's speeches, bill signings, and other public appearances, dubbed 'Trump TV' by officials. Digital strategy chief Kaelan Dorr described it as airing Trump's 'greatest hits, unfiltered,' claiming media outlets misreported his administration's achievements. The launch came days after CNN, MS Now, and Politico were barred from White House press access.
Data Center Watch, a research initiative from 10a Labs, reports that 45 large-scale data center projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed in the second quarter due to community pushback. The group tracked 843 opposition groups across 49 states, with only Hawaii lacking any organized resistance, and noted 30 state legislatures have introduced or passed measures on data center siting, power and water use.
Screen Burn, the Scotland-based studio behind Silent Hill: Townfall, confirmed that the game's fictional town of St. Amelia draws heavily on St. Monans, a real coastal village near Edinburgh. A CNET writer visited the actual location, finding it a cheerful tourist spot with cafes and old harbor boats, in stark contrast to the fog-shrouded, empty streets depicted in the game's trailer.
An account from Apple's early retail leadership describes how Steve Jobs discouraged staff from using the term 'customer,' pushing instead for language and service practices centered on building relationships rather than transactions. The approach, paired with the physical Apple Store experience, is credited with cultivating unusually strong brand loyalty over the years.
Verda, a Finland-based AI cloud infrastructure company, closed an oversubscribed $189 million Series B round led by Emergence Capital, with backing from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi, and several angel investors. The round pushes Verda's total funding past $450 million in combined equity and debt, and values the company at unicorn status, making it one of Europe's newest billion-dollar startups.
Google has started sending automated texts to Google Messages users through the app's business chat feature, promoting new app features like RCS photo and video quality. The messages appear as a verified conversation from 'Google Messages' but only allow pre-set replies, not user responses. Users can opt out by declining a prompt that appears before the texts begin, or unsubscribe later if they've already accepted.
A new leak attributed to Korean and Weibo sources outlines memory and storage tiers for Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S27 lineup. The base S27 and S27 Plus start at 12GB RAM with 256GB storage, while the S27 Ultra tops out at 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. The leak also claims Samsung will move to faster UFS 5.1 storage and LPDDR6 memory on the Ultra and Pro models, a step up from the UFS 4.0 and LPDDR5X found in the Galaxy S26 Ultra.
Khosla Ventures has recruited Tal Broda, who spent two years at OpenAI, to work on infrastructure investing. Broda will provide technical expertise to companies in Khosla's early-stage startup portfolio.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing agreements for existing, smaller data center facilities with roughly 20-30 MW of capacity in the UK, Nordic countries and the US, according to a CNBC report citing sources familiar with the talks. This comes even as both companies have already committed tens of billions of dollars toward massive gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure projects, including Anthropic's $45 billion Nscale deal and OpenAI's expanding Stargate commitments.
The Austrian Academy of Science, working with French AI lab Mistral and tech firm Sail Reply, has released Apollo, described as the first large language model built specifically for Ancient Greek. Trained on roughly 600 million words from manuscripts, papyri and inscriptions, it will be offered free to scholars through a chatbot interface to help them locate relevant fragments and reconstruct damaged texts.