TLDR 2026-07-20

Reach the people who make tech buying decisions (Sponsor)

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Big Tech & Startups

Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Anthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal (5 minute read)

Anthropic proposed a computing deal with Meta in June that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years. Meta is considering the deal, which would involve monthly payments and the option to opt out of any agreement early. The talks show how demand for more computing power is still high. The deal could open up a new line of business for Meta and provide Meta with a new revenue stream until demand for its own AI services catches up.

SpaceX in Talks to Provide Computing Power for Pentagon's AI Push (3 minute read)

SpaceX is in talks to provide the Defense Department with computing capacity at a cost of up to several billion dollars. Some national security officials have raised concerns that the Pentagon is becoming too reliant on Elon Musk's services. Pentagon officials have said they want to reduce reliance on individual tech companies. The Pentagon is seeking $30 billion in funding for an initiative that will focus on securing high-end AI chips.

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India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch (12 minute read)

Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, India's first fully commercial satellite launcher, launched into a 280-mile-high orbit from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal on Saturday. The launch was delayed for more than half an hour to resolve a last-minute technical problem, but the flight was deemed a grand success. The Vikram-1 is India's first private orbital rocket to reach orbit on its very first attempt. A second Vikram-1 launch could happen before the end of the year.

China Joins Rush to Rethink the Smartphone for the AI Era (5 minute read)

Several companies are now racing to develop devices with built-in AI agents. ZTE Corp. has unveiled a lineup of co-designed smartphones with built-in AI services. The NaviX Ultra, which it calls the world's first agentic smartphone, pulls up ByteDance's AI agent Doubao with a voice command or the press of a button. It comes in black, pink, white, and blue.

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Tune it, deploy it, own it: Crusoe Serverless Fine-Tuning is now live (Sponsor)

Fine-tune leading open models (Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma, gpt-oss) on your proprietary data with no clusters to provision and no surprise bills. Crusoe's token-based pricing ends the moment your model stops improving, and weights export in .safetensors format. Deploy in one click. Get started →

How Anthropic runs large-scale code migrations with Claude Code (14 minute read)

Code migrations were typically multi-year endeavors until recently. Claude Code's capabilities change the math for these types of projects. This post details the six-step process Anthropic uses to perform code migrations. The core principle is to fix the process that produces the code rather than fixing the code itself.

scroll-world (GitHub Repo)

scroll-world is a skill that turns any brand into a scrollable 3D world. It works with Claude Code, Codex, and any SKILL.md-compatible agent. The skill builds immersive, control-scrubbed 'fly through the world' landing pages for any industry or brand. A video example is available in the repository.

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Miscellaneous

Maybe Intelligence Ain't All That (4 minute read)

AI chatbots are now smarter and more capable than a lot of people, but there has yet to be an explosion or take-off in usage. Coming up with ideas was never the hard part. Most problems can't be worked out at a desk by thinking. Reality stays bound by how fast a thing can be built and whether it holds.

These AI-Native Companies Have Tiny Staffs and Fewer Bosses (7 minute read)

The newest generation of AI-infused companies offer a vision of how work could soon be structured in other American corporations. They have fewer workers, more on-staff engineers, and a flatter structure where everyone is a player-coach instead of strictly overseeing teams. The structure is a proving ground for the philosophy that corporate giants are trying to channel through reorganizations, de-layering, job cuts, and investment into AI.

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Are the LLM Wars the Database Wars? (2 minute read)

The winners of the database wars weren't the ones everyone was arguing about.

Domain-specific harnesses (2 minute read)

Different workloads perform better with certain combinations of models and harnesses.

Qwen3.8 has launched (1 minute read)

The massive 2.4T parameter model is also going open weight soon.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking (38 minute read)

The people in charge either have no plan or see no path forward other than keeping their heads down.

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Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders

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