OpenAI’s “AI companion” device will reportedly be a $300-$400, hockey puck-sized smart speaker with cameras, moving parts, and personalized voice interactions. This marks the company’s first step into consumer hardware. — Bloomberg

OpenAI is making GPT-5.6 Luna ChatGPT’s default, giving free users unlimited text chats, and a “Think” option for tougher questions. Cheaper Chinese models continue to intensify pressure on premium AI pricing. — Axios

Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used the Evo AI model to design 16 working viruses that infect bacteria, a biotech milestone that also highlights gaps in safeguards for AI-designed viruses. — The New York Times

SpaceX and Tesla will initially spend $16.8 billion building Terafab in Texas, a massive investment that signals deeper integration across Elon Musk’s industrial empire. — Reuters

ByteDance is reportedly pre-training a 10 trillion parameter model, a scale that would place it among the largest AI systems under development, despite US restrictions on advanced chips. — Reuters

Whatnot — The livestream shopping platform raised a $545M Series G led by Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Avra to expand its live commerce marketplace, valuing the company at $20B. — Fortune

Firmus — The Sydney-based AI data center company raised $2B at a $10.5B post-money valuation in a round led by Coatue, with Nvidia participating, to accelerate its AI factory build-out. — Reuters

DeepSeek — The Chinese open-model developer revived plans for a nearly $8B second external round, with Monolith Management discussing participation, to build a new data center and expand computing capacity. — Bloomberg

Taalas — The AI chip startup, which etches model weights into silicon, is being acquired by AMD for undisclosed terms to accelerate and lower inference costs across its AI platform. — The Register

Mido Capital — Former Andreessen Horowitz partner Daniel Kim is targeting $100M for the venture firm’s debut fund, which will back early-stage consumer AI and other startups. — The Wall Street Journal

“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. And it will be stunningly beautiful," said @Elon Musk, describing xAI’s planned 100M-square-foot AI-chip manufacturing hub. Elon added “Terafab will be 50 times the size of the Pentagon when complete.”

"Shameful act... serve an adversarial nation in the most important race of our lifetime," said @Ali Ansarinik, responding to Forbes reporter @Anna Tong’s report on Chinese labs buying US data. He warned that selling AI training recipes to China "is a disservice to U.S. AI Labs as well as the U.S. government," and that it risks "exporting U.S. company data directly to China at a large scale." His verdict: "This must stop.”

"No macro-technology birthed by the Bay Area tech industry has been met with more hatred by Bay Area tech industry elites than frontier AI," wrote OpenAI strategiest @Dean Ball, arguing that elites who bet on crypto over AGI now see their businesses threatened. He said they "hate it" and "beg for the labs to go away, to become commoditized, by America's enemies if necessary." His take: "there is something Randian about it all... their utter disdain for success and achievement and discovery and chutzpah.”

This Week in Startups

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