Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
AI 2040: Plan A
In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.
Asked to build platform infrastructure, the agent picked a vibe | Vibes DIY Blog
There’s exactly one gap, and its shape is telling. A vibe backend can’t run the codegen pipeline — building apps is the platform’s job, not an app’s. So that step became a deliberately thin CI lane: a cron workflow driving the public vibes-diy CLI — the same one any user scripts — to generate and publish each requested app, verify it actually serves, and write the result back.
Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
Today, the European Commission preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act for the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook. The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms’ highly personalised recommender systems.
PitchBook: US venture funding hits $412.7B in first half as AI deals dominate – SiliconANGLE
U.S. venture capital deal value hit $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than investors put to work in all of last year — and a small cluster of giant artificial intelligence rounds accounted for almost the entire jump.
Good Tools Are Invisible – gingerBill
That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great.
Write code like a human will maintain it
Write code like a human will maintain it. LLMs are sponges that soak up everything you do and repeat it back to you. So make sure it’s good.
(2017) Well, well, well… Uncorked partners with adidas to rethink wellness tracking – Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community
There was a time when you couldn’t swing a wearable without someone releasing a new fitness tracking app. But, regardless of how many iterations of the concept were released, they all seemed to do basically the same thing: count steps. And maybe count calories. So when Portland’s Uncorked Studios started approaching a new solution with adidas, they cut to the core of the issue.
OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs – Ars Technica
OpenAI is facing calls for “serious sanctions” after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles.
To truly act in the public interest, we need to fully understand the hopes and concerns the public has about this new technology. As part of our new initiative on hard questions, we’re taking further steps to understand people’s views and questions on a variety of AI-related topics, and transparently chart our progress toward our public benefit goals.
To truly act in the public interest, we need to fully understand the hopes and concerns the public has about this new technology. As part of our new initiative on hard questions, we’re taking further steps to understand people’s views and questions on a variety of AI-related topics, and transparently chart our progress toward our public benefit goals.
Why better-off cities and towns see more benefits from data centers than rural regions
As scholars of how technological change and innovation shape business strategy, we set out to produce rigorous research so that policymakers can make better decisions for their communities despite the emotions on both sides. What we found was that data center development can boost growth and jobs – but these benefits are most pronounced when the local economy is more urban and developed. In fact, it turns out that the local economy around a data center matters more than the facility itself.
Ways to think about token pricing — Benedict Evans
Clearly, the situation today is transitory. On the supply side, a trillion dollars or more of data centre capex is coming down the pipe (and plenty more semiconductor capex behind that), inference efficiency continues to improve very quickly, and new models are far more (or far less!) efficient in their token use. On the demand side, although the market has been capacity-constrained since 2022, the crunch in the first half of this year has been driven by sudden product-market fit in really just one use case, software development, and that’s actually a pretty small field (imagine if we had product-market fit for a consumer use case with hundreds of millions of DAUs – today’s infrastructure couldn’t support it at any price).
Introducing Plan A – by Scott Alexander – Astral Codex Ten
What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country’s finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn’t that a problem?
Can AI answer the $3 trillion question? | TechCrunch
Someone minding that gap is Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo, the giant asset manager. In a recent note, he points out that the hyperscalers — Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — are all predicting massive accelerations in their free-cash flow in 2028. That is, they expect to see the payback from all those chips they bought.
Oregon’s Economic Landscape: Risks, Opportunities & The Road Ahead – City Club of Portland
Our panel will discuss their views of the fundamentals of Oregon’s economy and both the difficulties and opportunities for our shared future. Topics covered will include tax and regulatory challenges, the high cost of living, and the need for family-wage jobs and business prosperity. In the larger context of changes in global and national commerce, the conversation will ask: what roads can Oregon take?
Oregon’s Fairchild Moment — Oregon Venture Fund
One of the report’s central messages is that Oregon’s future shouldn’t depend solely on attracting the next mega fab. Instead, the opportunity is to build a broader semiconductor ecosystem, one that spans chip design, advanced packaging, photonics, equipment, and materials.
More Oregon startup news
