Deals

Slate Auto Raised $650 Million to Build a Truck With No Speakers, No Color, and No Apologies

A Bezos-backed startup just secured $650M to sell you an EV pickup that ships without speakers, paint, or power windows. They call it disruption. I call it a car without a car.

AI

Fitbit’s New AI Health Coach Goes Global — and Starts Sounding Alarmingly Useful

Google’s Fitbit health coach just expanded globally, and the weird part is how practical it sounds. It’s mildly intrusive, subscription-shaped, and closer to a real hit than I expected.

Startups

Round Raised $6 Million to Automate Treasury — Finance Finally Found Its Cursor Phase

Round just raised a $6 million seed to automate treasury, payroll, and payments. It is impressively useful, mildly ominous, and exactly the kind of fintech adults secretly want.

AI

Anthropic Made an AI So Dangerous It Can’t Be Released. The British Have Scheduled a Meeting. In a Fortnight.

Anthropic built a hacking AI that terrifies governments on two continents. The UK’s response: urgent discussions, in the next fortnight.

Launch

ATTACK SHARK’s Carbon-Fiber Mouse Wants to Be Luxury Gear

ATTACK SHARK’s X11 ULTRA turns a gaming mouse into a carbon-fiber flex. It is gloriously extra, oddly thoughtful, and closer to a real hit than it should be.

This Week in Snark

This Week in Snark: The AI Supervillain Alliance, Meta Kills Its Llama, and Eight Cents to Watch the Watchers

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic joined forces this week — against a common enemy who learned everything from them. Meanwhile, Meta quietly buried its open-source identity.

Startups

Juno Raised $12 Million to Fix Tax Season—and Somehow Made It Sympathetic

Juno wants to rescue accountants from PDF purgatory with AI. Against all odds, the week's most charming seed round is about tax prep.

Review

GeeLark Wants to Replace Your Device Farm — Which Is Both Useful and Slightly Cursed

GeeLark turns racks of phones into cloud-managed account labor. It is efficient, a little suspicious, and annoyingly plausible for teams that scale by spreadsheet.

Deep Dive

Humanoid Robots, Explained: Why Factories, Startups, and Tech Billionaires Suddenly Want a Mechanical Workforce

Humanoid robots are leaving demos for factories and warehouses. This guide explains the tech, labor incentives, competition, safety issues, and hype.

Enterprise Tech

CoreWeave Rents Anthropic More GPUs — The Cloud Is Now a Landlord

CoreWeave’s new Anthropic deal turns enterprise AI into premium rental property. Useful, formidable, and alarmingly close to becoming a utility.

Gaming

OpenNOW Rebuilt GeForce NOW in Public — and Somehow Made Cloud Gaming Less Annoying

OpenNOW is an unofficial GeForce NOW client with diagnostics, Linux builds, and zero-telemetry swagger. Against all odds, the fan-made version feels refreshingly adult.

Launch

Google Gave Gemini a Notebook. I Hate How Sensible That Is

Google’s new synced Gemini notebooks are tidy, useful, and suspiciously mature. I wanted more chaos. I may prefer the filing cabinet.