Google has sent one of its advanced chips into space for the first time, with a prototype orbital compute satellite built by Planet Labs lifting off aboard a SpaceX rocket from California. The mission will test whether a Google Tensor Processing Unit can operate in orbit, including drawing a kilowatt of continuous power, staying cool…

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Insider Brief RobCo has surpassed a $1 billion valuation in a transaction that brought in new investment and allowed some long-standing employees to sell part of their holdings, doubling the industrial robotics startup’s valuation in nine months. Existing investors Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new investors including Cherry Ventures and…

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AI cybersecurity company Armadin has secured $255.5 million in a Series B round that values it at more than $2.5 billion, bringing its total funding to $445 million. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with new investors Bain Capital Ventures and Redpoint joining existing backers including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures…

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Amazon Web Services is making two notable moves, ending the use of nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on data center projects while releasing an open source AI decision model aimed at cheaper, faster agent automation. AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a blog post that the company no longer signs NDAs with the agencies it works with…

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Marketing firm Graphite has found that frontier AI models continue to rely on distinctive phrases and sentence patterns, identifying 13,000 phrases that appear at least twice as often in AI writing as in human prose. Researchers used 10,000 articles published before ChatGPT’s release as a human control group, then had various models rewrite those articles from summaries…

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President Donald Trump has created a new Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal AI efforts, capping a week in which top tech executives signed a White House safety pledge and new reporting described his reliance on Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot. In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump said the task force will coordinate the government’s work…

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Insider Brief Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson will participate as an individual consultant in Mitre-led Project Meridian, a Department of War initiative examining emerging technologies and military capabilities over the next 10 to 20 years. The 120-day study will assess technologies including AI, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology and recommend ways to develop, test…

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Shopify has introduced Canvas, a site-building tool that lets merchants create their online stores by chatting with Sidekick, the company’s AI agent. Previously, Shopify’s no-code builder required merchants to rearrange theme sections and blocks, with deeper customizations demanding code edits or a developer. With Canvas, merchants describe what they want and see changes appear in…

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AI startup Photon has secured $4.5 million in seed funding co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HSG, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman and angel investors. The company says it has attracted more than 40,000 developer sign-ups and grown revenue tenfold in four months, with churn below 3% and messaging volume up fivefold…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 7,038 new readers. September was a month of OpenAI cataloguing its own problems — misbehaving models, rogue agents, a shelved launch. Now, one of the people writing those safety reports is out the door. David Robinson…

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