Media

AI News Brief: Google announced on Friday that users will soon be able to remove the visible watermark from AI-generated content, including images, videos, and songs, though this won’t affect the hidden SynthID watermark or the metadata tied to the C2PA standard. Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini, posted on X that the toggle will apply to the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models, with the option to turn off the visible watermark…

AI News Brief: Mesh is the personal relationship management and CRM tool Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired last year, and it’s now available on Android. Users can privately visualize and track their personal and professional connections, add notes to contacts, and set reminders for when to reach out.

AI news brief: Thrive Holdings closed a new $2 billion funding round at a $12 billion valuation, with investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital, first reported by The New York Times. Thrive Holdings operates like an ‘AI-era private equity firm,’ buying up traditional businesses like accounting firms and embedding AI workflows into them…

AI News Brief: TSMC, packaging/testing, and AI server supply chain momentum remain the main focus, with the AI infrastructure investment boom keeping upstream semiconductor demand strong. At the Ai4 conference, three heavyweight AI researchers—Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel laureate), Fei-Fei Li (World Labs CEO and co-founder), and Andrew Ng (Coursera co-founder)—weighed in publicly on the open-source AI debate.

AI news brief: Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, is reportedly in talks with investors for a new funding round that could push its valuation sharply higher. The company raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation just this past May, and according to Bloomberg, sources say that if it hits a $1 billion annualized revenue (ARR) threshold, the new round could value it at $40 billion or more.

AI News Brief: Anthropic recently announced it’s adding a watermarking mechanism to Claude’s output, embedding invisible codes into editorial text generated by the chatbot to mark the content as AI-generated. The new policy is meant to comply with the EU AI Act’s Transparency Code, which requires tech companies to label AI-generated or AI-edited content in a way that’s machine-readable,…

AI news brief: 63% of Gemini users talk to the assistant directly through voice, showing voice has become the mainstream way to interact; Google also revealed Gemini generates over 150 million images daily. See the original article for details.

AI News Flash: ChatGPT has officially launched its Linux desktop app in preview, extending ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex to Linux and closing a long-standing gap that previously left Windows and macOS as the only supported platforms. OpenAI says Linux has consistently been the most-requested platform for its desktop apps, and this launch g…

AI News Brief: Discovered Materials, a startup co-founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, just raised a $9 million seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners right after graduating from Y Combinator, with participation from Peak XV Partners and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar.

AI news brief: Anthropic has announced it’s dialing back manual approval requirements in Claude Code — starting August 14th, auto mode will become the default setting for Pro, Max, and Team accounts. Auto mode first launched in beta back in March, billed as a balance between speed and control. Once enabled, Claude Code won’t prompt for human approval at every step — it’ll just execute actions directly, unless that action is judged ‘irreversible, destructive, or targeting something outside the user’s environment.’