Business and investment

CFO at OpenAI shares lessons from building an AI-native finance department

Sarah Friar, CFO at OpenAI, describes five lessons from building an AI-native finance department – automated forecasting, stronger controls and measurement of ROI in AI.

Sudolabs aims to achieve unicorn status following investment from Eldridge

According to Živě.cz, Sudolabs and Eldridge aim to bring Sudolabs to unicorn status within a few years. Its revenue is said to be growing by 60 to 70 % year on year. Following the sale of a half stake, the company plans to expand its team in Czechia as well.

New: Eldridge and Sudolabs are targeting unicorn status within a few years.; Revenue at Sudolabs is growing by 60 to 70 % year on year.; Sudolabs has shifted from selling developer hours to implementing AI at large companies.

Google DeepMind reportedly losing its independence, founder Demis Hassabis heading for departure

According to reporting by The Guardian and Pathfounders, DeepMind is losing its independence and becoming part of Google. Founder Demis Hassabis is reportedly set to leave in the coming months, Koray Kavukcuoglu is taking over operational leadership without the title of CEO, Gemini development is moving to the Bay Area, and Sergey is gaining influence…

Head of The Browser Company: AI agents are technology, not a product people want

Josh Miller, head of The Browser Company, claims that hardly anyone outside the tech community uses AI agents. OpenAI reports about 10 million weekly users of Codex and ChatGPT Work, and similar figures reportedly apply to Claude Code and Cowork from Anthropic – compared with a billion chatbot users.

DeepMind changes leadership: Demis Hassabis steps away from operations, replaced by Koray Kavukcuoglu, following the departure of the founders of the startup Discovery Loop

Demis Hassabis stepped down from operational leadership at DeepMind, and Koray Kavukcuoglu became the new leader; researchers from reinforcement learning teams continue to leave the company. This follows the departure of Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, who founded the startup Discovery Loop.

New: Demis Hassabis is stepping away from operations at DeepMind; Koray Kavukcuoglu is becoming the new leader of DeepMind and the remaining co-leader of Gemini; More senior talent in reinforcement learning is leaving DeepMind

The "Summer Club" brand trip held by OpenAI drew criticism over AI energy use, jobs and targeting women

OpenAI held its first influencer brand trip, "Summer Club", at the Wildflower Farms resort. Critics attacked the energy consumption of AI, the threat of job losses and the predominance of young women among those invited. Reaction videos received over 500 thousand views.

Anthropic signs six-year deal worth 10 billion dollars with cloud startup Volta

Anthropic has secured 133 MW of compute capacity from startup Volta Infra for six years for 10 billion dollars. The capacity will run on Nvidia Vera Rubin chips in a Norwegian data center operated by Bitdeer.

Apple seeks a preliminary injunction against OpenAI in a case involving alleged trade secret theft

Apple has filed a request for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI and claims that additional former employees may have passed confidential information about unreleased products to OpenAI. OpenAI denies the allegations.

Snap bans purely AI-generated videos from Spotlight recommendations

Starting in August 2026, Snap is excluding purely AI-generated videos from recommendations in the Spotlight section. Videos edited using the built-in AI tools in Snapchat remain permitted, but will carry transparency labels.

Part of an overview of multiple AI topics; only this event has been covered.

Reddit leadership criticizes Google AI Overviews over declining referral traffic

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized Google AI Overviews for providing insufficient value to websites compared with traditional links. Reddit is considering terminating a licensing agreement with Google worth 60 million dollars, and other publishers are considering a similar move.

Chinese AI researchers from Moonshot, DeepSeek, Minimax and Z.ai are moving expert discussion to the platform X

According to Wired, employees and co-founders of the Chinese AI companies Moonshot, DeepSeek, Minimax and Z.ai are increasingly discussing model development on the platform X because, in their view, Chinese networks such as Zhihu do not support high-quality technical discussion.

OpenAI cuts prices for GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra models, says optimization of its own infrastructure by Sol made this possible

From 30 July, OpenAI reduced the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 % (to 0.20 $/1.20 $ per million tokens) and Terra by 20 %. According to the company, the cuts stem from savings achieved by optimizing infrastructure with Sol; commentators point to pressure from low-cost competitors.

Reddit reports a strong quarter, but a mention of the impact of AI on search traffic unsettled investors

Reddit increased second-quarter revenue by 61 % to 805 million dollars and profit by 183 % to 253 million, yet shares fell by more than 10 % after the results were released due to concerns about the impact of AI summaries in search on traffic.

Tim Cook hints at a possible paid iCloud Plus plan for heavy use of AI features

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said on a call with investors that the company is considering expanding iCloud Plus plans for users with higher usage of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. No specific plan or price has been announced yet.

Former researcher at OpenAI launches training data startup, argues that scaling AI alone is not enough

Andrew Ho, who left OpenAI after eight months, launched a startup to create specialized training data for bioinformatics and laboratory work. In his view, targeted data collection will require over 100 billion dollars because scaling models alone will not solve the generalization problem.

Nscale buys Anyscale for 1.65 billion dollars, expands its AI infrastructure layer

British AI neocloud company Nscale is buying the startup Anyscale, the creator of an AI scaling platform built on the Ray framework, for 1.65 billion dollars according to a Bloomberg report. Anyscale will retain its own brand, and approximately 200 employees will move to Nscale.

The economics of enterprise GPUs: why utilization matters, not fleet size

A blog on Hugging Face compares the economics of enterprise GPUs to airline fleets: costs accrue continuously, while revenue is generated only during computation. The difference between companies comes down to hardware utilization, not the amount of hardware – even expensive clusters often remain unused outside peak periods.

Study: demand for enterprise AI deployment specialists is rising sharply, with few elite experts available

According to a study by Christian & Timbers, demand for so-called forward-deployed engineers (specialists in enterprise AI deployment) will increase by 2 100 % this year, while there are only about 2 000 elite experts capable of demonstrating a return on investment in the USA. OpenAI and Anthropic are therefore establishing their own deployment…

TechCrunch announced the AI Stage program for the Disrupt 2026 conference

TechCrunch published the AI Stage program for the Disrupt 2026 conference (13–15 October, San Francisco), with panels on AI product pricing, AI agent security and the new “GTM engineer” role.

Thinking Machines co-founder Lilian Weng leaves for health reasons and returns to OpenAI

Lilian Weng left Thinking Machines, the company she co-founded, for health reasons and is returning to OpenAI, where she will lead a team focused on accelerating internal research, including work on recursive AI self-improvement.