Amazon has announced that Mechanical Turk, its long-running crowdsourcing marketplace, will stop accepting new customers from July 30, 2026. Amazon Web Services described the decision as the result of careful consideration, confirming that existing customers may continue using the service but that no new features are planned, effectively placing the platform in a state of managed decline.…

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Patronus AI, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2023 by former Meta AI researchers Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian, has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Greenfield Partners, with participation from Notable Capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, and Samsung. The raise brings total funding to $70 million and follows revenue growth of fifteen-fold…

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Netris has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with a16z partner Guido Appenzellerjoining the company’s board. The network automation startup provides software that helps neocloud operators cut the time required to bring AI inference and training infrastructure to market, addressing a bottleneck that can leave expensive GPU clusters sitting…

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Midjourney is seeking to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose their internal use of generative AI as part of ongoing copyright litigation, arguing that the studios may be engaged in the same practices they are suing the startup for. The three studios sued Midjourney in 2025, alleging that its AI models could generate…

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Insider Brief Runpod has raised $100 million in a growth round led by Summit Partners, reaching a $1 billion valuation, with the capital earmarked for platform development, team expansion, and broader global access for the more than one million developers already building on the platform. Unlike platforms that have converged on hosted inference alone, Runpod…

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Milan-based startup Compri has closed a €3.2 million seed round led by Picus Capital, with participation from Shapers, Italian Founders Fund, and DFF Ventures, bringing total funding to over €5 million. The company was founded by Edoardo Arbizzi and Edoardo Gava. Compri’s AI platform is designed to address one of manufacturing’s most persistently underdigitised functions.…

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Alibaba will ban employees from using Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code from July 10, classifying it as high-risk software and directing staff to use the company’s own Qoder tool instead, according to multiple reports. The decision follows the surfacing of a Reddit post alleging that a version of Claude Code had been secretly configured…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. When Meta’s Muse Spark landed in April, the read was “not great, but back in the game.” Three months later, Alexandr Wang says its successor is already running even with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. The frontier isn’t standing still while ‘Watermelon’ trains,…

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Look past the data-center megadeals and the bubble headlines, because something quieter happened this week: AI actually delivered. A Nobel laureate joined the AI-for-science push, the open-model frontier got cheaper again, and the first hard evidence landed that an AI tutor can beat the classroom. These are the wins that did not make the noise.

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An AI companion sounds dystopian, but it has become a common thread in the wider conversation about the perils of generative AI. What it refers to is essentially a conversational agent built to sustain an ongoing, personal relationship with a user, with the memory and steady persona that keep it consistent from one session to…

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