A Different Kind Of AI Virus

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $942M over harms to kids, with a trillion-dollar trial next. ByteDance started pretraining a 10T-parameter model, AMD bought Taalas to etch weights into silicon, and OpenAI's 2027 gadget leaked.

Links

• Meta Ordered to Pay $942 Million to Address Harm to Kids From Social Media (wsj.com/tech/meta-ordered-to-pay-942-million-t…) (The Wall Street Journal)

• Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (ft.com/content/9b8383b1-a28d-4940-8c4e-2f0cd21…) (Financial Times)

• AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon with the promise to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum (theregister.com/systems/2026/08/06/amd-acquire…) (The Register)

• Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality and will likely cost $300+ (bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-06/what-is…) (Bloomberg)

Longreads

• Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans (nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bact…) (The New York Times)

• David Imel: you could be taking way better photos on your phone (theverge.com/tech/973055/how-to-take-better-sm…) (The Verge)

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