August 05, 2025

DeepMind thinks its new Genie 3 world model presents a stepping stone toward AGI: Google DeepMind has revealed Genie 3, its latest foundation world model that the AI lab says presents a crucial stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence.  Read More

ElevenLabs launches an AI music generator, which it claims is cleared for commercial use: The AI audio-generation unicorn ElevenLabs announced the launch of a new model that allows users to generate music that's cleared for commercial use. Read More

Hacker used a voice phishing attack to steal Cisco customers' personal information: Cisco disclosed a data breach including customer names, organization names, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of Cisco.com users. Read More

Get your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders over three action-packed days at Disrupt 2025 this October. Boost your visibility, spark meaningful connections, and position your company at the forefront of innovation. Don't wait. Secure your exhibit space before your competitor beats you to it.

Uzbekistan's first unicorn, Uzum, leaps to a $1.5B valuation: Uzbekistan's Uzum has raised $65.5 million in a new funding round co-led by China's Tencent and the New York- and London-based VR Capital, with participation from U.S.-based FinSight Capital. Read More

AI-powered fintech Alaan raises $48M, one of the largest Series A rounds in MENA: Alaan has raised $48 million in a Series A funding round led by Peak XV Partners with participation from others like founders of 885 Capital, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Pioneer Fund. Read More

Roku launches Howdy, a $2.99 ad-free streaming service: The service features a library of nearly 10,000 hours of content from Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, and FilmRise, alongside select Roku Original titles. Read More

Google says its AI-based bug hunter found 20 security vulnerabilities: The discoveries by an AI-based bug hunter are significant, as it shows these tools are starting to get real results, even if they still need a human. Read More

Jury rules Meta violated California privacy laws by quietly collecting Flo users' menstrual health data: The class-action suit was brought by users of period tracking app, Flo, who alleged that the tech giant collected private menstrual health data without users' consent and used it for ad-tracking purposes. Read More

Deck turns the entire web into your integration layer with one secure API that reads and writes across 100k+ portals. From bills to payroll systems, if a user can do it in a browser, Deck can automate it.

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping: Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages. Read More

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