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For the longest time, the tech industrys unofficial motto was if the product is free, you are the product. Most of us just accepted it. But after a decade of data scandals, tracking revelations, and privacy blunders, that logic is starting to feel dated. Weve hit a tipping point. A quiet but powerful shift is [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta has launched Pocket across the United States. The app it is based on shut down the same day. Pocket had been testing quietly in Brazil since July. It is now available to everyone in the US. Pocket lets people type a prompt and get back a small interactive thing, which Meta calls a gizmo. [] This story continues at The Next Web

Meta is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year buying access to AI models through Microsofts cloud. The company runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified. That makes Meta one of Microsofts largest AI customers. Both companies declined [] This story continues at The Next Web

Mastercard transactions were declined across Australia on Saturday afternoon after what the company describes as a scheduled system update, with more than 1,900 outage reports logged by mid-afternoon. Mastercard says the problem is resolved and all systems are working normally. Mastercard payments stopped working across Australia on Saturday afternoon. A scheduled system update caused Mastercard [] This story continues at The Next Web

Alibaba says its Qwen models have passed 3 billion downloads, making them the most used open-weight family in the world. The Hugging Face report published a day earlier counts 2,045 million for Qwen this year, and 151,448 derivatives against Alibabas claim of more than 300,000. Alibaba says its Qwen models have passed 3 billion downloads, [] This story continues at The Next Web

Sam Altman told a summit of tech interns that two years of college was the exact right amount of time for him and that four years may be more than the world now requires. He made the case to an audience whose entry-level pipeline is already being closed by AI. Sam Altman thinks a degree [] This story continues at The Next Web

Dongfengs Voyah launched the Passion S electric SUV on Friday after promoting it with a stunt in which the car drove a full loop around a tunnel ceiling in Wuhan. Prices start at 229,900 yuan, about $33,800, for a car with 800V charging and Huaweis latest driver assistance. Dongfengs premium brand Voyah launched an electric [] This story continues at The Next Web

AMD has raised $4.75bn in its biggest ever US dollar bond offering, sold in four tranches with maturities from three to ten years. It held $13.1bn in cash against $3.2bn of debt at the end of June, and has committed up to $5bn to Anthropic. AMD has raised $4.75bn in the largest dollar bond sale [] This story continues at The Next Web

Michael Martina reported the draft for Reuters on 14 August, citing a US official and an internal document. The letter goes to the 35 signatories of an American AI Opportunity Statement from June. Its message is that countries must choose. The wording is blunt for a diplomatic text. To be part of everything is to [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anthropic published the Risk Report on 14 August, covering the period to 15 July. Axios got the company on the record and led on the misalignment rating, as did most of the coverage. Anthropic raised its estimate of catastrophic harm from misalignment in high-stakes settings. It now calls that risk low, up from very low [] This story continues at The Next Web

Anissa Gardizy reported the cut for The Wall Street Journal on 14 August. Under the new proposed terms Nvidia would initially backstop only half of the 10GW project, and it would decide about the rest later. A deal could be signed as soon as this weekend. The Journal says Nvidia made the change to address [] This story continues at The Next Web

Robert Ferris put the question to forecasters and executives for CNBC on 15 August. The average American car is now 12.8 years old, on Mobility Globals figures. A new one costs close to $50,000, and nobody selling software-defined vehicles will say they last that long. Sam Fiorani forecasts vehicles for AutoForecastSolutions, and he gave the [] This story continues at The Next Web

Code in the latest Uber iOS app refers to adding a tween aged 10 to 12 to an Uber Family profile, with a trusted adult contact and the option to require a grown-up at pickup. Uber says it is not a live product and that its only teen offering remains 13 to 17. Uber is [] This story continues at The Next Web

Sundar Pichai announced on Tuesday that the Gemini app had passed a billion monthly users. He called it our fastest growing product ever and the 14th Google product to hit the mark, alongside Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Chrome, Play and YouTube. His post has been seen more than 1.5 million times. Google published the engagement [] This story continues at The Next Web

Gallups State of the Global Workplace report shows employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, with disengagement costing the global economy an estimated $10 trillion annually. Research also shows that engagement is closely tied to how employees experience their workplace relationships. Gallups workplace research found that highly engaged teams achieve [] This story continues at The Next Web

Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on Tuesday. It is a 30 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with three billion active at any moment. The architecture is a hybrid of Mamba-2, MoE and attention layers, with a one million token context window. The weights are on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The licence is the part that matters. [] This story continues at The Next Web

Jaguar has published the first interior images of the Type 01, the electric grand tourer that will end a two-year gap in which it stopped selling new cars in the UK. The car is revealed in New York on October 6, after a delay from late 2025 and an expected price of around 100,000. Jaguar [] This story continues at The Next Web

PitchBook published its Q2 US VC Valuations report on 10 August. Megadeals took 87.5% of the dollars deployed in the first half of 2026. PitchBook defines those as rounds of $100m or more. AI is the primary driver of that concentration, though the figure describes deal size rather than sector. The AI premium is real [] This story continues at The Next Web

Zoom has patched three memory corruption flaws in its annotation feature that allowed any meeting participant to run code on another attendees device with no interaction. The fixes shipped in June and July 2026, roughly two months before the research was made public. Zoom has patched three flaws in the annotation tools used during screen [] This story continues at The Next Web

The long legal reckoning over social media and childhood is about to have its biggest day in court. Meta goes on trial this week against a coalition of 29 US states that accuse it of deliberately engineering Facebook and Instagram to addict children, in what amounts to the most consequential test yet of a sprawling [] This story continues at The Next Web

GetIntel published its AI Software Index on Wednesday. The study asked roughly 80 buyer-phrased questions in each of 126 software categories, covering 1,825 brands. The questions went to the live ChatGPT and Gemini consumer apps rather than the developer APIs. That produced 9,978 usable answers, all collected on 6 August. The headline result is a [] This story continues at The Next Web

New energy vehicles took a record 65.1% of Chinese passenger car sales in July, but NEV volumes fell about 2% year on year, a seventh straight monthly decline, while the total market dropped 18%. Geelys Xingyuan was the bestseller and BYDs best performer managed only fifth over six months. Electric and hybrid cars took 65.1% [] This story continues at The Next Web