Munich-based nuclear fusion startup Proxima Fusion raised €411M led by trading firm XTX and UK-based East X at a €2.4B valuation, with participation from Google (Bloomberg)
Counterpoint: China smartphone sales fell 13% YoY during the 618 shopping festival as brands raised prices to offset memory costs; Honor fell 33% and Xiaomi 24% (Reuters)
Alibaba's Qwen models have made it an AI powerhouse, but the company has struggled to turn their global popularity into a profitable business (New York Times)
Shenzhen-based Even Realities, a startup that makes smart glasses without cameras, raised a $150M pre-Series B led by Meituan and Tencent (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
A draft report from the US Treasury Department is set to warn about the risks of the AI market, likening some key aspects to the dotcom crash in the early 2000s (Eric Katz/NOTUS)
Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 seem worse at tool calls than older models, likely due to post-training that assumes Claude Code-like harnesses as targets (Armin Ronacher/Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings)
Chainalysis: addresses linked to Iran, Russia, North Korea, and other US-sanctioned entities received $100B+ in crypto last year, almost 8x the amount in 2024 (Patricia Kowsmann/Wall Street Journal)