Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Rivian makes its second small workforce cut of the year ahead of R2 SUV launch
Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second small staff cut in a matter of months — as the company readies itself for the all-important launch of its more-affordable R2 SUV next year. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that the new cuts were mostly to its “commercial” team, which deals with sales and…

Bret Taylor’s Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation
Investors are clearly bullish about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s AI agent startup Sierra. Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer service AI agents, announced it raised a $350 million funding round on Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, according to a company blog post that confirmed…

Atlassian to buy Arc developer The Browser Company for $610M
Productivity software maker Atlassian has agreed to acquire The Browser Company, which makes the Arc and Dia browsers, for $610 million in cash. “Today’s browsers weren’t built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era,” Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian’s…

Adobe to bring its video editing app Premiere to iPhones
Adobe is planning to bring its video editing software, Premiere, to the iPhone. The company has listed the app on the App Store with a pre-order link and an expected release date of September 30. The company said that Premier on iPhone will let users edit videos and export them without any watermarks. The app…

Scale AI is suing a former employee and rival Mercor, alleging they tried to steal its biggest customers
Scale AI, which helps tech companies prepare data to train their AI models, filed a lawsuit against one of its former sales employees and its rival Mercor on Wednesday. The suit claims the employee, who was hired by Mercor, “stole more than 100 confidential documents concerning Scale’s customer strategies and other proprietary information,” according to…

Mistral, the French AI giant, is reportedly on the cusp of securing a $14B valuation
French AI startup Mistral AI is finalizing a €2 billion investment at a post-money valuation of $14 billion, reports Bloomberg, positioning the company as one of Europe’s most valuable tech startups. The two-year-old OpenAI rival, founded by former DeepMind and Meta researchers, develops open source language models and Le Chat, its AI chatbot built for…

Netflix updates its Moments feature to give users greater control over scene clipping
Netflix launched a scene-clipping feature for mobile last year called “Moments,” which lets users quickly save their favorite scenes from shows and movies within the Netflix app. The streaming giant rolled out an update on Wednesday, allowing users to specify both a starting point and an endpoint when saving a scene. People now have the…

Advanced geothermal startups are just getting warmed up
When Congressional Republicans took a sledgehammer to the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, advanced geothermal startups were largely spared. Drilling for renewable energy appears to be one of the few things that engenders bipartisan support. Now, with the uncertainty settled, geothermal companies are announcing deals that promise to pave the way for broader deployment of…

Google avoids break up, but has to give up exclusive search deals in antitrust trial
Google will not be forced to break up its search business, but a federal judge has tentatively ordered other changes to the tech giant’s business practices to keep it from further anticompetitive behavior. U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta outlined remedies on Tuesday that would bar Google from entering or maintaining exclusive deals that…

Waymo expands to Denver and Seattle with its Zeekr-made vans
Waymo announced Tuesday that it’s going to bring both of its vehicles — the Jaguar I-Pace SUV and the Zeekr van — to Denver and Seattle starting this week, the latest move in a continued expansion across the United States. The vehicles will be manually driven to start, before the company starts testing its autonomous…
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