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A hub for startup news, trends, and insights, covering the global startup ecosystem for founders, investors, and innovators. Community: @startupdis Buy Ads: @strategy (this is our only account).
🧑💻 GitHub Sells Repos on CD-ROM
GitHub now offers copies of repositories on CD-ROM.
Users can order physical copies to preserve code offline or for future use.
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🇨🇳 China launches 5-year AI education plan
The State Council set a five-year plan making AI literacy a core skill for all students starting around age 6. The curriculum will cover all school grades and extend into higher education.
This move is part of Xi Jinping's strategy to secure technological dominance and compete with the US. AI literacy is framed as a matter of national competitiveness and security.
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🌐 China hits 51.3 Tbps internet speed
Chinese researchers achieved 51.3 Tbps internet speed using hollow-core fiber optics, surpassing the default 100 Mbps by 513,000 times.
The hollow-core fiber transmits signals through an air channel instead of glass, reducing signal loss and boosting speed.
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🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Science for research
Anthropic introduced Claude Science, an AI agent designed as an end-to-end research infrastructure. It handles literature search, data analysis, computation, visualization, and article preparation in one interface.
Claude Science comes with a built-in skill base and offers various visualizations and artifact displays. It is currently in beta and available as an app for MacOS and Linux.
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🤖 Anthropic restores Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models
The US Commerce Department lifted export restrictions on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, allowing access to resume this Wednesday. The rollout starts on Claude platforms and will expand to AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry.
Anthropic had to disable these models after Amazon researchers flagged a hacking risk. To fix this, they trained a new protective classifier that blocks the exploit over 99% of the time, redirecting blocked requests to Opus 4.8.
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Ⓜ️ Meta’s Brain2Qwerty v2 reads silent typing
Meta’s Brain2Qwerty v2 reconstructs text typed silently from continuous brain signals without exact keypress timing, reaching 61% word accuracy on average and about 70% with top users.
It processes raw MEG data through an encoder, an Aligner detecting word boundaries and embeddings, then a large language model refines the output. The system costs millions and isn’t consumer-ready.
Accuracy remains low for practical use, but a near-perfect scaling law shows quality improves almost logarithmically with more data, with no saturation yet. Noninvasive thought reading may just need bigger datasets.
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🍏 Apple Plans Touchscreen MacBook on M5 Chips
Apple is preparing a touchscreen MacBook using current top-tier M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, skipping the M6 Pro and Max generations. The new 14- and 16-inch models are expected between late 2026 and early 2027.
The laptop will feature an OLED display, Dynamic Island interface from iPhone, and a refreshed chassis design. The M7 chip series is still in testing and likely to arrive by the end of 2027, with M7 Ultra possibly in 2028.
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🤖 US Allows Anthropic Access to Mythos 5
The US government cleared Anthropic to expand access to Mythos 5 after a security review. The model was previously restricted due to concerns under the Trump administration.
Anthropic is now the first major AI lab to pass this government filter publicly. The exact security issues were not disclosed but have been resolved.
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📊 Sunlight on Your Face Took 100,000 Years
A photon warming your face now began its journey from the Sun's core about 100,000 years ago, when early humans were just leaving Africa and Neanderthals still lived. Inside the Sun, photons collide constantly with electrons, bouncing randomly through dense plasma, making their path trillions of times longer than a straight line.
This slow random walk happens in the Sun's radiative zone, covering 70% of its radius. Photons lose energy step by step, shifting from high-energy gamma rays to visible light by the time they reach the surface. The final stretch through the convective zone takes only months, but the bulk of the journey is a century-long crawl.
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💻 China’s LineShine Tops Supercomputer List Without GPUs
China’s LineShine from Shenzhen leads the TOP500 supercomputer ranking with 2.19 exaflops, 22% faster than the US’s El Capitan.
LineShine uses nearly 14 million computing cores and a custom design without GPUs, avoiding US export limits.
It combines scientific computing and AI, running a decade of weather forecasts over East Asia in 15 hours.
Though top-ranked, LineShine isn’t fastest for all tasks, some large clusters excel at less precise calculations but aren’t listed.
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🔍 Android 17 adds virtual gamepad for foldables
Android 17 introduces a gaming mode for foldable phones that turns half the unfolded screen into a virtual gamepad with touch buttons. It arrives in the coming months.
The virtual controller works at the system level, supporting any game with physical gamepad compatibility. It offers a full set of controls: D-pad, sticks, A, B, X, Y buttons, bumpers, triggers L1-L3 and R1-R3, plus start.
Users can customize the layout by moving sticks, resizing buttons, and adjusting vibration. The mode activates when unfolding the phone and hides or disables automatically if a real controller connects.
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🤖 OpenAI launches GPT-5.6 trio
OpenAI released three GPT-5.6 models: Sol, Terra, and Luna. Sol is the largest, outperforming Mythos with half the cost and three times fewer tokens, offering 5-6x efficiency.
Terra is mid-tier, three times cheaper than Mythos and better than Opus 4.8. Luna is the cheapest and fastest, still solid. Access is limited to testers for now, with wider rollout in weeks.
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🍏 Apple raises prices across most devices
Apple increased prices on nearly all hardware.
🔸 MacBook Neo rose $100 to $700
🔸 MacBook Air $200 to $1300
🔸 MacBook Pro $300 to $2000
🔸 iPad Pro went up $200 to $1200
🔸 HomePod mini $30 to $130
The lineup includes laptops, tablets, smart speakers, and the Vision Pro headset, which rose $200 to $3700.
iPhones kept current prices, but the iPhone 18 series may cost more this fall.
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📱 Nothing unveils fan-made Dream Phone concept
Nothing revealed the Dream Phone, a compact concept under 6 inches built from community requests. It brings back a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD slot, features rare in modern phones.
The front camera hides in a pop-up module with two sensors, leaving the screen uninterrupted by notches or holes. The rear camera block is flush with the body, preventing wobble on flat surfaces.
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🤖 OpenAI unveils first custom AI chip
OpenAI introduced its first in-house chip called Jalapeño, designed solely for inference tasks. It is currently in testing and reportedly outperforms competing chips in efficiency.
The chip was developed with Broadcom, known for making AI chips for Meta and Google TPU, and Anthropic also collaborates with them. Integration into full servers is pending since the largest deployed model is GPT 5.3 Spark.
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Vibe-coders work on a $1 billion AI startup at 2 AM.
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😐 xAI launches Voice Agent Builder
xAI introduced Voice Agent Builder, a platform to create voice agents that handle calls and tasks over the phone. Users describe agent behavior in plain language, upload documents, connect tools, and the agent manages calls with background noise, accents, interruptions, and complex queries in 25 languages.
The agents answer questions from uploaded documents, schedule meetings in Google Calendar or Outlook, check order status via APIs, search the internet for current info, and transfer calls to humans if needed. Each call is recorded with a transcript and action log.
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🔍 Google Builds Data Center from Old Smartphones
Google and UC San Diego researchers are creating a data center using 2,000 recycled Pixel smartphones, launching this fall. They remove screens and batteries, using only the motherboards clustered into a computing platform.
The project runs a Linux server distro on Android hardware, turning each phone into a small server. Some smartphone cores outperform traditional server cores in benchmarks, but limited memory and I/O restrict tasks.
A 20-phone cluster handled 75+ students’ workloads faster than a standard AWS backend. The full cluster aims to deliver about 50 servers at a fraction of typical costs. Reliability remains a key concern since phones aren’t built for continuous heavy use.
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🍏 Cursor launches iOS app for AI coding agents
Cursor released a public beta of its iOS app, allowing users to run AI coding agents directly from their iPhones. You can pick a repository, start an agent, and even dictate tasks by voice.
The app sends notifications when the agent finishes, letting you review and merge code changes immediately. It supports all paid subscriptions, with a 75% discount on the Composer 2.5 model until July 5.
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🙀 OpenClaw Launches Native iOS App
OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent, has released a native app for iPhone and iPad. Previously accessed via Telegram on mobile, it now offers a dedicated client available on the App Store.
OpenClaw runs independently on Mac or PC, connects to APIs of any model like Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini, and executes tasks directly within the system.
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🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, the most agentic Sonnet model. It plans actions, uses a browser and terminal, and handles tasks once needing larger models.
Sonnet 5 narrows the gap with Opus 4.8 at a lower cost. It completes complex tasks fully, unlike earlier Sonnet versions that stalled.
Testers say it writes tests to reproduce bugs, fixes code, and reverts changes to confirm issues without guidance. It also cuts false info, resists manipulation, and declines harmful requests better.
Sonnet 5 is now default on free and Pro plans and available on Max, Team, Enterprise, Claude Code, and API. Intro pricing lasts until August 31.
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🖥 Microsoft updates Excel Copilot for finance teams
Microsoft rolled out new features for Copilot in Excel aimed at financial teams. It now includes ready-made skills for common tasks, connections to six financial data sources, and full transparency of its actions.
Copilot uses templates to perform tasks like company valuation models or quarterly closes step-by-step instead of improvising. It pulls data directly from sources like CB Insights, PitchBook, FactSet, and S&P Global without manual input.
Before making changes, Copilot shows a detailed plan of affected cells and formulas. All edits are logged and marked as done by Copilot. The update is available for Microsoft 365 Copilot users on Windows, Mac, and browser.
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🔍 Gemini now searches and buys apps in Play Store
Google integrated Play Store into Gemini, letting users find apps by simply telling the AI what they need. For example, saying "map for travel abroad" prompts Gemini to locate and open the app page directly.
Gemini also enables buying Play gift cards and in-game items right in chat. This feature is limited to personal Google accounts, users 18+, and is rolling out gradually on Android.
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🤖 Claude controls robot dog 20 times faster
Anthropic tested Claude on a four-legged robot with tasks that human teams completed less than a year ago. Claude connected to the robot’s camera and sensors, wrote control code, and set up object detection in under 10 minutes.
Claude] was 37 times faster than humans without AI and nearly 19 times faster than humans with AI. It wrote ten times less code than the previous human+Claude team, with most working on the first try.
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🤖 OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Beats Claude Mythos
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol edges out Claude Mythos 5 in agent coding with 88.8% vs. 88% on Terminal-Bench 2.1. The Sol Ultra variant scores 91.9%.
Sol matches Anthropic’s model in cybersecurity using three times fewer tokens. The US government restricts its release, which OpenAI opposes.
OpenAI plans wider API and Cerebras access in July. Officials previously blocked Anthropic’s Fable 5, showing ongoing regulatory hurdles.
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❄️ Adidas unveils clothing with built-in air conditioning
Adidas has introduced a new collection featuring built-in cooling systems. Oversized jackets and shorts inflate while integrated fans circulate air inside the garments to keep the wearer cool.
The concept is inspired by cooling equipment used by Formula 1 drivers and professional football players, adapting the technology for everyday clothing.
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Extreme weather is becoming a product category.
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🤖 Notion Integrates Claude Agents in Beta
Notion added support for Claude agents in its beta, letting users work with Claude directly inside their workspace. The new Agents section in the sidebar lets you pick Claude, start from a template or scratch, and set instructions and triggers.
Claude agents can answer chat questions, handle documents and task boards, and create or edit content. They only access pages and databases you allow and cannot browse the internet or call other agents. Usage consumes Notion credits, with no separate Anthropic account or keys needed.
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🤖 OpenAI Codex Now Dominates Output Tokens
Inside OpenAI, Codex accounts for 99.8% of output tokens, while ChatGPT makes up just 0.2%. Business users generate about 64% of their token consumption through Codex.
The top 1% of Codex users run agents for an average of 71 hours daily across all agents. Tasks requiring around 8 hours of human work now represent over 25% of prompts, up from just over 2% in December.
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🤖 Anthropic launches Claude Tag for team workflows
Anthropic introduced Claude Tag, a team mode where one Claude bot lives in a channel and handles tasks from any member, breaking work into steps and replying in threads.
Claude Tag remembers channel context, runs projects over hours or days, and highlights key points. Admins control access, set roles, and track all actions with spending limits.
Anthropic’s product team now writes 65% of their code using an internal Claude Tag. The feature is in beta for Claude Enterprise and Team, running on Opus 4.8.
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⚡ FAW Jiefang tests sodium-ion electric truck
FAW Jiefang ran an electric truck with a 339 kWh sodium-ion battery over 15,000 km in real conditions. The battery kept over 90% capacity at −40 °C and charged fully in 20-25 minutes.
The truck’s battery was developed with Zhongke Haina and offers more than 8,000 fast charge cycles. Sodium-ion chemistry is cheaper and more stable under heat than lithium, making it a strong alternative for heavy-duty vehicles.
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