The biggest deal of the day came with a brutal haircut. Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro for cash at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, or about $1.79 billion in equity once Miro's net cash is counted. Miro was valued at $17.5 billion in late 2021, back when every company on earth needed a digital whiteboard. For the money, Bending Spoons gets around $600 million in annual … [Read more...] about Bending Spoons Buys Miro at a 90% Discount
Morning Tech Digest, September 10, 2026: Chinese AI Chip Prices Up 20% to 50% on HBM Costs, Nasdaq’s $100 Million Kraken Bet
Overnight into Thursday morning. The memory squeeze reached end-customer pricing in China, two card networks sat down with Ant to write rules for agent payments, and Anthropic's model access became a diplomatic problem in a second European capital. Chinese AI chipmakers raised prices 20% to 50% on current and next-generation parts, blaming HBM costs. Huawei, … [Read more...] about Morning Tech Digest, September 10, 2026: Chinese AI Chip Prices Up 20% to 50% on HBM Costs, Nasdaq’s $100 Million Kraken Bet
Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4: The Hard Part of Audio Intelligence Is Everyone Not Wearing the Watch
Apple put a microphone on your wrist that listens continuously, holds the last fifteen seconds of whatever was said near you, and can write a summary of the conversation you just had. That shipped on Wednesday, in the Apple Watch Series 12 at $399 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4 at $799, both unchanged in price from last year's models. Pre-orders opened the same day and the watches … [Read more...] about Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4: The Hard Part of Audio Intelligence Is Everyone Not Wearing the Watch
Apple iPhone 18 Pro: The Base Price Rose $100, the Top Storage Step Rose $600
Apple raised the entry price of the iPhone 18 Pro by $100, to $1,199 for 256GB. Every write-up led with that figure. The number that matters sits three rows further down the storage table. Inside the iPhone 18 Pro line, each doubling of storage now costs more than the doubling before it. Going from 256GB to 512GB costs $200. Going from 512GB to 1TB costs $400. Going from 1TB … [Read more...] about Apple iPhone 18 Pro: The Base Price Rose $100, the Top Storage Step Rose $600
Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Acquisition
Anthropic has reportedly walked away from talks to acquire AI startup Decart for roughly $6 billion after conducting due diligence on the company, according to Bloomberg. The proposed deal would have valued Decart at a substantial premium to its most recent valuation. Decart was valued at nearly $4 billion in a May 2026 funding round, making the reported $6 billion price tag … [Read more...] about Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Acquisition
Collapse of Kenya’s academic ghostwriting industry
The New York Times has reported on the collapse of Kenya's academic ghostwriting industry, which at its height supported more than 40,000 people in Nairobi writing essays for students at foreign universities. Chatbots do the same job now, instantly, for a fraction of the price. The work is gone, and the piece finds few paths back for the people who did it. The moral status of … [Read more...] about Collapse of Kenya’s academic ghostwriting industry
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki Says No Lab Has Solved Alignment Well Enough to Scale at Full Speed
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has said, publicly, that no lab has solved alignment to a degree that would justify scaling at maximum speed, and that he hopes voluntary slowdowns become a normal part of how the industry operates. Coming from the person who runs research at the company that set the pace, that is worth pausing on. It is also, read carefully, a statement … [Read more...] about OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki Says No Lab Has Solved Alignment Well Enough to Scale at Full Speed
Anthropic Has Contracted at Least 14.8 GW of Compute and May Spend $517B Over the Next Decade
Valida Pau's analysis in The Information puts numbers on how far Anthropic's infrastructure commitments have run since October: agreements covering at least 14.8 GW of compute capacity, with total spending over the next decade potentially reaching $517 billion. Start with the power figure, because it is the one that converts into physical reality. 14.8 GW is grid-scale. It is … [Read more...] about Anthropic Has Contracted at Least 14.8 GW of Compute and May Spend $517B Over the Next Decade
Inspur Is Routing Around US AI Chip Controls Through a Network of New Subsidiaries
The New York Times has laid out how Inspur, the state-owned server maker that has been on the US entity list since 2023, keeps getting access to advanced AI chips. The mechanism is not exotic. It is corporate structure: a spread of freshly incorporated subsidiaries and partner firms that are not themselves listed, and that can therefore buy what the parent cannot. This is the … [Read more...] about Inspur Is Routing Around US AI Chip Controls Through a Network of New Subsidiaries
Retail Investors Are Vibe-Coding Trading Algorithms With Claude and Codex
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Hannah Erin Lang on ordinary US investors wiring their brokerage accounts to agents built with Claude or Codex, then letting the resulting code trade for them. No quant background, no firm, no risk desk. A prompt, a broker API key, and a strategy that exists because a model wrote it. Retail algo trading is not new. Backtesting platforms … [Read more...] about Retail Investors Are Vibe-Coding Trading Algorithms With Claude and Codex