Ryan Merket

Stories by Ryan Merket

• Hugging Face explores a $13B sale, nearly triple its 2023 valuation

  The AI hub is working with a bank to gauge buyer interest, following Stripe's $8B-plus agreement for OpenRouter.

• Nvidia pays $6B to license Poolside's factory for U.S. open-weight models

  Founders Jason Warner and Eiso Kant stay as Nvidia also invests $1B at a $12B pre-money valuation, according to reports.

• Meteoric launches with cloud-clearing drones and a 30% solar claim

  The YC startup has a chamber prototype; its first large-scale cloud-clearing flight is targeted for 2027.

• Instant's team joins OpenAI as its cloud service heads for shutdown

  The database developer tool will support existing cloud apps until August 31st, 2027, then preserve backups for another year.

• OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol output pricing by one-third for three months

  The flagship model now costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, while paid-plan usage limits stay put.

• Grok declared a Chinese influence campaign real. Ten seconds after a ChatGPT audit, it backed down.

  After showing a 120-source counter, Grok treated a disputed $23.6B data-center tally as evidence of a foreign-directed US campaign. ChatGPT found that the underlying sources did not establish the money, instructions or control required for that conclusion.

• Grok Bot opens to $60 Cursor Pro+ and a limited free trial

  Access now includes SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and all Cursor Teams plans, while every other user gets a usage-limited trial.

• NVIDIA's AVO scores 100% on ARC-AGI-3's public set

  Powered by Claude Opus 5, the coding-agent system cleared 183 levels in 6,624 actions, though NVIDIA did not test the private sets.

• Anthropic's $1.5B Ode builds an AI consultancy around private equity portfolios

  Chris Taylor's 100-engineer operation gives Claude a deployment arm and its financial backers a ready-made customer pipeline.

• Pew finds AI fingerprints on 35% of newer webpages it could date

  The 490,000-page study found a 10% rate overall, with commercial sites far ahead of government and education domains.

• OpenCode says its $10 Go plan passed 301,000 active subscribers

  A dashboard shared by founder Jay V showed 301,018 active accounts and 14.6% growth, giving OpenCode a sizable paid base beyond its free agent.

• AliExpress anti-bot scripts blocked one user's Bluetooth handoff by playing nothing

  Two obfuscated anti-bot scripts opened live audio graphs, exposing a gap in browser mute controls and producing an unusual hardware side effect.

• Apple Music will label AI-made tracks, artwork and videos later this year

  Providers must flag material AI use across recordings, compositions, artwork and videos, while Apple's public delivery spec still calls the metadata optional.

• ChatGPT can now search and send Apple Messages from your Mac

  The plugin is available in ChatGPT Work and Codex on desktop, with message access and sending governed by app permissions.

• Locus launches one balance for 600 APIs, because agents collect subscriptions too

  Cole Dermott's YC-backed startup is selling platforms a metering layer spanning models, search, scraping and data providers.

• GitHub blames capacity failure and retry storm for nearly eight-hour outage

  A Central US autoscaling failure hit authentication, Actions and Copilot as GitHub races to move production traffic onto Azure.

• Micro1's Ali Ansari offers $12.5M for Spirit's data after Google's auction win

  The late bid is 25% above Google's, but Spirit's auction record shows privacy terms may matter as much as the extra cash.

• Attackers poisoned three Rust crates to steal developer credentials during builds

  The malicious releases remained online for 86 to 107 minutes across packages with roughly 264M lifetime downloads.

• North v3 automates cloud commitments and adds AI bills to FinOps

  The Brooklyn startup added Azure, OpenAI, Anthropic and Snowflake less than two months after raising a $5M Series A.

• Slack launches Code with Anthropic, GitHub, Cognition and Vercel agents

  Marc Benioff says Slack Code puts engineers and coding agents together in shared channels, turning team conversations into the agents' work queue.

• Founder sues YC over idea in rejected 2018 application

  Harmony Oswald says YC used her rejected 2018 Founderology application to build Co-Founder Matching. Her latest complaint says no code had been developed, while the application names rival services. Four claims have survived dismissal.

• OpenRouter vs Router.com - Which is best for your startup?

  Founders can avoid gateway fees with Ramp Router, but OpenRouter offers 500+ models, wider compatibility, global access and stricter default privacy.

• Replit launches paid Free Mode with OpenAI's cheapest GPT-5.6 model

  Core and Pro subscribers get credit-free everyday Agent tasks, with five-hour limits and up to 30 hours of monthly chat on Core.

• OpenAI pitches Codex for tax prep after a 7,000-return pilot

  The 2025 tax-year pilot saved accountants 31% of preparation time, according to Current, while keeping practitioners responsible for review.

• Y Combinator opens its SAFE-sending software to every founder for free

  The accelerator is turning a tool used inside its batches into public fundraising infrastructure, entering a market already served by Carta and AngelList.

• Global fertility may be below replacement. Robotics VCs are spending accordingly

  A new model pulls the population peak toward 2056, sharpening automation demand while exposing the mismatch between demographic time and venture fund life.

• Higgsfield puts its video models on Together AI after its $400M Series B

  The customer win adds another cloud supplier as Alex Mashrabov's platform funds infrastructure, research and a global sales push.

• Idler launches AI data lab after a $9M Paradigm-led seed

  The YC startup is selling RL environments built from production data as Paradigm puts its broader frontier-tech mandate to work.

• Court stalls Google's $10M Spirit data deal over worker privacy

  The sale covers 100 million emails and 500 million Teams items; a union says stripping names leaves confidential employment content exposed.

• SpaceX pursued Cognition after closing its $60B Cursor acquisition

  Scott Wu's $26B coding-agent company stayed independent, while the two sides kept discussing a compute deal that echoes SpaceX's Cursor playbook.

• NVIDIA research veteran Sanja Fidler launches Veeda AI for robot world models

  The former NVIDIA AI research vice president is building Veeda with Zan Gojcic and Huan Ling around simulated environments for embodied agents.

• OpenAI previews cross-session safety checks designed to preserve zero data retention

  Private Safety Processing will trace risk patterns across related API interactions while giving OpenAI only limited safety signals.

• Anthropic’s Project Parka sits through meetings and assigns Claude agents the homework

  Internally codenamed Parka, the Mac-first feature can capture system and microphone audio, stream speaker-attributed transcripts and create runnable work for Claude's agents.

• A four-hour Claude Code session built a Mac bridge for HP's Laser 1008a

  Kuber Mehta's fix routes CUPS through a Linux VM and HP's SPL3 codec, then writes print jobs directly over USB.

• OpenAI grew 18% in Q2. Anthropic grew roughly 140%

  OpenAI's sales reached $6.7B as losses deepened, while Claude Code helped Anthropic pass its older rival for the first time.

• 'Amazon Tax' collected $76B from ads while brands paid to defend their names

  Seth Godin's publisher paid about $1 per click for his exact book title, exposing the defensive bidding inside a business growing 26%.

• DesktopFly gives macOS a fruit fly driven by 668 mapped neurons

  Denis Shiryaev's open-source toy uses FlyWire wiring data, then models the physiology that turns cursor movement into escape.

• Anthropic says 354 Claude protein designs bound in lab tests

  Anthropic released the prompts and data behind 1,440 designs, though none were tested for biological function or structurally solved.

• Z.ai launches GLM-5.3 API for coding and defensive security

  The text-only model keeps GLM-5.2 pricing, adds a 1M-token context window, and arrives before its delayed public weights.

• Block adds an experimental self-hosted Git forge to Buzz

  The beta links repos, reviews and project conversations to portable Nostr identities for people and AI agents on a team's own relay.

• Fable 5 responses surface an internal 'Kettle' route, researcher says

  A decoded thinking signature points to a backend change first seen August 16th, though Anthropic says the public model ID remains pinned.

• Telegram applies for .gram to turn user handles into websites

  Pavel Durov says approval would let users claim second-level domains and generate Telegram-hosted interactive sites from a prompt.

• OpenAI pauses model training to harden its own research systems

  The company ended a two-week halt for some deployment-bound training, but its largest planned frontier run and many Astra workloads remain paused under costlier security controls.

• Firefox taps Exa to power cited AI search in Smart Window

  The deal puts Exa retrieval inside Firefox's desktop AI workspace and its voice-based Quick Answers feature on iOS.

• X will give Grok Bot discounted API reads and free credits

  The beta agent will start with read-only access, while X holds back broader permissions over security and scraping concerns.

• Kimi Desktop Ships With a Group Chat Updater That Can Install Unverified Code

  The Windows updater pulls a separate executable and agent instructions from mutable “latest” locations. The current binary is signed by Moonshot, but Kimi never verifies that signature before installation.

• ATTOM launches three AI agents to interrogate 160 million property records

  The Irvine data provider is moving from APIs and files into analysis and report generation, with MCP connecting its records to Claude and ChatGPT.

• Cursor built a hidden terminal command for steering its desktop AI agents

  Cursor has built a working command-line bridge that lets outside scripts find and steer AI-agent conversations already running in its desktop app, RuntimeWire found in Cursor 3.16.17.

• Elie Steinbock launches Bot Directory for one-prompt Grok Bots

  The open-source catalog turns shared workflows into copyable prompts and lets an X mention bot submit new entries through GitHub.

• At least 62 YC startups with over $1.9 billion in funding are hosting on Replit

  Public DNS records link 160 custom-domain endpoints at 63 YC companies to Replit's infrastructure, showing how an AI coding platform is settling into production-facing work without replacing entire engineering stacks.