Meta’s free Seller app gives frequent Facebook Marketplace sellers AI listing creation, bulk inventory tools, a unified inbox, and performance insights.

The post Meta Launches AI-Powered Seller App for Facebook Marketplace Users appeared first on TechRepublic.

Jeff Bezos may never again “walk alone.”

The Amazon founder is reportedly part of a group interested in buying a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club, the storied English Premier League soccer team whose legendary fans belt out the show tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before each home match.

Bezos would join a group that includes the former co-owner of soccer club Queens Park Rangers, Amit Bhatia, who is looking to pay £1.35 billion (about $1.8 billion) for the stake, reports The Guardian. The stake is being sold by current owner Fenway Sports Group, the firm that also owns The Boston Red Sox.

Bezos, who founded Amazon in Seattle in 1994, is considered the fourth richest person on the planet with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $224 billion.

The billionaire has long been rumored as a possible sports team owner, and his name was often tossed out as a possible buyer of the Seattle Seahawks and the Washington Commanders. Earlier this month, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his family emerged as the lead bidder for the Super Bowl champion Seahawks at a reported purchase price of $9.6 billion.

In addition to his recent marriage to former journalist Lauren Sanchez, Bezos also is highly engaged with his space venture Blue Origin and a new AI company by the name of Prometheus, which just raised $12 billion and where he serves as co-CEO.

Owning a piece of a UK soccer club has become a status symbol of sorts for wealthy Americans, perhaps driven by the popularity of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The latter is a documentary that tracks Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and their exploits of owning the Welsh team Wrexham FC.

American owners currently own outright or a piece of some of the top clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea led by Todd Boehly; Arsenal owned by Stanley Kroenke; and Manchester United owned by the Glazer family. Liverpool also is considered one of the top soccer clubs on the planet, winning the Premier League trophy in the 2024-2025 season.

On a smaller scale, Remitly co-founder Shivaas Gulati joined an ownership consortium two years ago that purchased Southend United, a football club founded in 1906 and located in Southend-on-Sea, about an hour from London. They play in the National League, which is the fifth tier of English soccer.

The English Premier League season starts on Friday, Aug. 21 when defending Premier League champs Arsenal take on newly-promoted side Coventry City.

Big Tobacco studied nicotine analogs like 6-methyl-nicotine for decades but never marketed them. Now, Chinese vape makers are using them to sidestep US regulations.

On this episode of Uncanny Valley, we dive into accusations that China’s Moonshot AI stole from  Anthropic, and how the US Army needs to cut back on AI use.

The AI “startups” worth billions of dollars are raising alarm bells about Chinese AI. The smaller players have a totally different take.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PYMNTS.com: Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while Stripe pursues a far larger target: a bid for PayPal that would value the payments giant at about $53 billion. The Journal reported Thursday (July 23) that a transaction could be announced soon, though the talks could still collapse or another buyer could step in. The exact price under discussion could not be learned. Several other large technology companies had also been weighing deals for OpenRouter. The startup was valued at $1.3 billion in May, according to PitchBook, meaning a sale near $10 billion would represent a steep markup in a matter of months. Its backers include Menlo Ventures and CapitalG, the growth fund of Google parent Alphabet. OpenRouter sells software that lets customers reach AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, along with open weight alternatives anyone can download and run. The Journal described the company's position this way: "OpenRouter is part of an emerging crop of startups that have found a lucrative niche between AI developers and the companies that want to use them." The platform lists hundreds of large language models and lets developers compare and switch between them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The clip features the David Bowie track “Five Years,” which includes lyrics such as “Earth was really dying (dying).”

Google has reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2026 (PDF), and as usual, the search giant raked in an unfathomable amount of money. Google saw total revenue of $119.8 billion, beating analyst expectations by a comfortable margin. Despite that, the company's stock has taken a hit. Along with all that revenue, Google has announced a further increase in its AI-fueled capital expenditures (or capex). The company is actually spending so much on AI infrastructure that it has negative cash flow for the first time.

Search was the largest chunk of Google's income, accounting for $63.3 billion. Google Cloud pulled in $24.8 billion, a significant 23.8 percent increase from the first quarter. This shows there is massive demand for Google's AI services. Google also earned $12.9 billion from its subscriptions, platforms, and devices portfolio, as well as $11.1 billion from YouTube ads. The company managed to goose that last one by more than 12 percent since last quarter as it made YouTube ads even longer.

A significant chunk of Google's revenue comes from investments. When you subtract those non-cash earnings, Google's operating cash flow for Q2 2026 was about $39.1 billion. That's not the most the company has ever seen, but it's a healthy 40 percent increase from Q2 2025. The problem is that Google's spending has also gone up—a lot.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson

The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors.

Nearly 200 Silicon Valley companies, including Proton and Y Combinator, are urging the Trump administration not to block U.S. access to Chinese open-weight AI models or risk crippling the next generation of U.S. startups. Politico reports: On Wednesday, the newly-formed Little Tech Association sent letters to President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others in the administration with its appeal, marking the first coordinated effort by Silicon Valley's wider influential startup community to weigh in on one of the Trump administration's most closely watched AI debates. At issue: whether Washington should restrict access to increasingly powerful open-weight -- meaning, AI models whose weights are publicly available -- AI models released by Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI and Alibaba. "American leadership requires two things: world-leading American open-weight models and continued access for U.S. builders to open models already available worldwide," the startup founders wrote in the letter (PDF) obtained by POLITICO, also sent to Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. Instead of broad prohibitions, they argue the government should adopt targeted safeguards. And they warn that banning Americans from downloading Chinese open-weight models wouldn't stop their proliferation -- but would weaken U.S. startups. "There'll be hundreds of companies that instantly die," said Suhail Doshi, founder of AI infrastructure startup Particle and a member of the association, which POLITICO first wrote about exclusively, in an interview. "It's great for Anthropic. We're all going to have to spend money on Anthropic." Last week, the Beijing-based AI company "Moonshot" released a massive new model that reset the AI race overnight, immediately vaulting into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests. China's Xi Jinping also used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As access to Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable.

The company donated more than $3.6 million to conservative groups between 2020 and 2025, including $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Pat Gelsinger wants to pave the way to ever more powerful artificial intelligence using tiny beams of light.

Since its 2022 launch, the Steam Deck has consistently been at or near the top of the company's "top selling products by revenue" charts, with brief dips outside of the top 10 treated as newsworthy events. But sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently been on a steep decline since the system relaunched at a higher price in May.

Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam breaks down the historical data, showing how the Deck's chart position has fallen from fifth place immediately after orders resumed in late May down to 14th place for two weeks in early July (the hardware sits at 12th place in the current edition of those charts).

That's in sharp contrast to 2025, when the Steam Deck never dropped below seventh place on the bestseller charts and was only rarely outside the Top 5. Then Valve warned of "intermittent shortages" for the Steam Deck starting in February, leading to weeks of lower chart positions before the Deck became completely unavailable until May.

Read full article

Comments

© Kyle Orland

Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform combines CPUs and GPUs into a single system, reflecting the company’s growing ambition to power every layer of AI infrastructure.

The FDA could decide whether to loosen rules around peptide production this week. Some telehealth players are already seeing dollar signs.

Last month, more than a hundred Stanford students left their own graduation to protest Google’s military contracts and deals with ICE. Two organizers, Amanda Campos and Eva Jones, tell us why.

The agency stressed that the July 17 voluntary recall from Taylor Farms still stands. The supplier has been linked to the ongoing cyclospora outbreak.

From countertop kits to a bathroom bucket full of straw and beyond, I spent a year testing popular mushroom-growing methods. Here’s what fruited—and what just grew mold.

An error with the cloud computing giant’s billing operation caused some customers’ monthly bills to rise from a few cents to billions of dollars.