AI News Brief: Discovery Loop is a new startup led by Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, who will serve as CEO, co-founded alongside three other top Google researchers: Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Brain co-founder and key AI researcher Quoc Le, and senior DeepMind research scientist Oriol Vinyals.
AI News Brief: Klaviyo has agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI customer service startup founded by serial entrepreneur Elias Torres, on undisclosed terms. Founded in 2023, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis before the acquisition.
AI news brief: Meta recently launched a new terminal-based coding agent called Muse Code, currently in beta, aimed at helping developers tackle complex engineering tasks in large software codebases. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a social media post that Muse Code can handle full software engineering tasks across large repositories, including planning changes, writing code, and verifying results. The tool installs with a single command…
AI news brief: Hark, the startup that raised $700M in a Series A this past May, launched its browser-use agent Hark Handoff today, positioning it as an efficient way to complete all kinds of tasks in a browser. The company says Handoff can operate smoothly on websites without official APIs, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable, and LinkedIn.
AI News Flash: Shopify said on its Q2 earnings call that AI search is delivering meaningful business growth for the company rather than replacing traditional Google search. President Harley Finkelstein said AI has become a ‘complement’ to search rather than a ‘replacement,’ benefiting long-tail e-commerce in particular, including the small and mid-sized merchants who make up the bulk of its customer base. In Q2, AI-driven traffic and orders grew threefold year-over-year; meanwhile…
AI News Brief: WindBorne Systems closed a $37 million Series B co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with participation from TransLink Capital, Lux Capital, and existing investors, valuing the company at $250 million post-money. Founded in 2019, the startup originally built its business around low-cost weather sensors and long-range balloons for data collection…
AI News Brief: This is a news summary, generated directly without tool lookups. A new report from SaferAI finds that GLM-5.2, the open-weight model from Z.ai, is closing in on frontier-level capability, but its safety measures still show clear gaps.
AI News Brief: Apple finally shipped Siri AI in the iOS 27 consumer beta released in July 2026, ending years of delays. The new assistant can understand personal context, tap into broad world knowledge to answer questions, and surface relevant info from your iPhone. Users can now have natural back-and-forth conversations with Siri, adjust how expressive and paced its voice responses are, and…
AI News Brief: OpenAI held its first-ever influencer brand trip, a ‘Summer Club’ event at a luxury resort in upstate New York over the weekend, inviting several content creators to attend. The itinerary included farm-to-table dinners, therapeutic activities like beekeeping, and lessons on how to get more out of OpenAI’s products, with one highlight being the newly launched ChatGPT Work, which helps users with tasks like drafting documents and presentations.
AI News Brief: Design Arena co-founder Grace Li says the company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, when a group of college friends were trying to get their own AI game engine working. The models could generate playable games, but none of them were actually fun, which got the team thinking about how to judge whether a game is enjoyable. They concluded human judgment can’t be replaced, so they set out to figure out how to collect real human feedback at scale, eventually…