Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Unprecedented hack of tech firm by AI model raises new safety concerns – The Washington Post
OpenAI and Hugging Face, the company hacked by the AI model, did not release full technical details from the incident that would allow outsiders to fully reconstruct what happened. Hugging Face said in a company blog post that it had fixed vulnerabilities exploited in the attack but was still working to assess whether customer data was affected.
Understanding the AI economy
Google is launching the first iteration of the AI & Economy ATLAS (Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study), an ongoing, large-scale, de-identified study of how people are using Google’s AI products and tools. ATLAS’s first dataset (v1.0) is built from 15 million aggregated and de-identified human-AI interactions across the Gemini App, AI Mode, and the Gemini API, which together are used by more than 1 billion people monthly. ATLAS v1.0 insights span more than 150 countries, 140 languages, 800 occupations, and 4,000 tasks; ATLAS is the most comprehensive look to date at how real people are using AI at scale.
(2021) Another perspective on the impact of the Absci IPO
As with any IPO, this event comes with the realization of the infrequent “liquidity event” for investors — and more importantly, often a wealth creation event for employees at the organization. So there have been any number of pontifications about the amount that will be returned to the community, as a whole.
Intel and AMD sign long-term server CPU deals with Chinese customers as prices jump over 40%, report claims — agreements purportedly guarantee purchase volumes for about a year without fixing prices | Tom’s Hardware
Intel said in March that it was pursuing long-term agreements with potential customers as server CPU demand spiked, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan telling analysts on the company’s April earnings call that demand “continues to run ahead of supply,” singling out Xeon server parts. Tan also cited a multi-year supply deal with Google among several long-term contracts signed in the first quarter, so the model now spans U.S. hyperscalers and Chinese channel buyers alike.
Travis Kalanick’s robotics company raises $1.7B, led by a16z | TechCrunch
Atoms is essentially a rebranded holding company created atop the project Kalanick has been working on since he resigned from Uber, a ghost kitchen play called Cloud Kitchens. When he revealed the new name in March, Kalanick announced he had acquired Pronto, the heavy industry automation company run by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski.
AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
It’s an extremely costly undertaking built on seemingly bottomless hype — and a mountain of debt. As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. That’s even more than the $1.35 trillion in debt the five companies officially reported in their financial data for the most recent quarter.
Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain – Here’s how to do it
Just have notebooks lying around, or on your person. Write grocery lists, doodles, notes on meetings, to-do lists, or stray ideas. Journal. Copy out good lines from books. Anything that has your mental focus will have a more enduring presence in your brain if you write it down.
How Willamette Week Does It: An Evening with the Newsroom
Join us for a deep dive into Willamette Week’s (WW) newsroom. Learn how the free, local, and independent news outlet approaches investigative journalism. Find out why certain stories are pursued and how our reporters uncover hidden truths.
OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI’s sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging Face, all so it could cheat on the test by stealing the answers.
The Rise And Rise Of Billion-Dollar-Plus Rounds
So far this year, 60% of global startup funding across stages — around $320 billion — went to rounds of $1 billion or more, per Crunchbase data. Such rounds were instrumental in pushing global funding for the first half of the year to record levels.
Developers abandon Claude for cheaper, open Kimi‑K3 – RuntimeWire
While the thread is anecdotal, it underscores a tangible trend: cost‑sensitive developers and businesses are reevaluating their AI stack in light of transparent pricing and self‑hostable models. As more firms expose their model weights and pricing structures, the competitive advantage of closed‑source, high‑margin services like Claude may erode, especially for workloads where raw token cost dominates.
calm technologies that excite me | abhigyan trips.
I believe that technology should be an enabler, not a subjugator. The tinkerers that love messing with dials and diving into code should continue to do so! But otherwise, technology should help you do a thing and then stand back as you hold the reins of your human experience.
Revino lands $4.8 million grant to expand reusable wine bottle program into California | kgw.com
An Oregon startup says its reusable bottles can cut carbon emissions by 85% and is working to grow consumer participation across the West Coast.
I’ve Changed My Mind. Early Stage Venture Funds of $100 Million or Less Should Hold Almost No Reserves for Follow-On. | by Hunter Walk | Jul, 2026 | Medium
In the year of our lord 2026, and having now lived in the early stage venture world for 13+ years, I’m calling bullshit on basically every piece of this.
Minimus Support, Customer Success, and SLA Commitments – Minimus
Minimus Enterprise includes dedicated support, contractual SLAs, technical enablement, and ongoing customer success guidance to help organizations get the most value from secure, minimal container images. From onboarding and implementation to vulnerability remediation and roadmap collaboration, Minimus works closely with Enterprise customers to support both day-to-day operations and long-term security goals.
Teaching an AI you’re not ‘the owner’ | Vibes DIY Blog
Ask a model to build an app and it quietly assumes one boss and a wall of permissions. That single default — buried in the system prompt — was making generated apps wrong by reflex. Here are the three moves it took to teach the generator that the default owner is just you.
