Kids are heading back to school across the country with a tool in their pocket that will do their homework, answer the questions they’re too embarrassed to ask an adult, and never tell anyone they asked.
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MIT Technology Review asked kids aged 10 to 18 what they make of AI. Their answers had me plowing through every survey and interview with kids about AI I could find. Plenty of what kids do with it is ordinary: looking things up, homework, messing around.
This article is about the parts they keep to themselves.
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1. Kids are taking their mental health to a chatbot, and telling nobody.
Nearly one in five Americans aged 12 to 21 has asked a chatbot for help when feeling sad, angry or nervous. RAND puts it at 8.2 million young people, and 63% of them told no one at all.
The silence is a calculation about what adults would do, as one teenager explained to YouGov’s researchers.
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The most vulnerable kids use chatbots more.
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2. Kids see both sides of AI in school.
Some teenagers see AI as a shortcut past the hard parts of schoolwork.
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Others describe using it the opposite way.
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Between May and December 2025, RAND watched homework use among middle school, high school and college students climb from 48% to 62%. Over a slightly longer stretch, from February, the share saying AI harms critical thinking climbed from 54% to 67%. The same students can hold both thoughts at once.
The Concord Monitor interviewed eight New Hampshire high schoolers this spring. They weren’t outraged at their classmates, but they described losing motivation to do the work themselves. One in ten teens tells Pew they do all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot’s help.
Caledonia Mahon, a Concord High senior, watched a classmate stand up and admit he’d had ChatGPT write a personal reflection, and started wondering why she was still writing her own.
Her classmate Andrew Pfitzenmayer supplied the detail I can’t get out of my head, about a boy in his advanced history class.
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Yet, the same technology can be positive for kids who don’t have much else.
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By May 2025, 84% of American high schoolers were using AI for schoolwork at least occasionally. The kids who lean on it hardest have the least support around them, which is why telling them to quit doesn’t work.
If quitting isn’t the option, what’s left is changing what the tool does when a kid opens it. Two Seattle startups are trying that.
3. Kids are writing the rules adults haven’t.
Suspicion of AI runs strongest among the kids furthest from it: 78% of students who don’t use AI say it harms critical thinking, against 60% of those who do.
In July, 98 high schoolers from all 50 states spent three days in a replica of the U.S. Senate chamber in Boston and passed what Congress hasn’t. Their STUDENTS FIRST Act requires AI literacy, bars teachers from letting AI decide a grade on its own, lets a teacher ask a student to defend suspected work out loud, and gives any student the right to an alternative to an AI assignment.
A majority of educators told Education Week’s Research Center last fall that their district has no AI policy, or that they don’t know whether it does. At least seven states have a comprehensive one, by Education Week’s count.
Ashley Kannan has taught social studies for almost 30 years in Oak Park, Ill. He planned to ignore AI, then noticed that every conversation about it in his building was about catching students. He recruited nine eighth graders to spend a year working out what AI was actually good for. In April they briefed 60+ teachers and parents on the rules they thought were needed.
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Hazel is 17, a rock climber in New York who wants to be an ecologist. She won’t touch AI, and her reason is specific: what data centers do to the water supplies of the towns they’re built in. Asked what advice she’d give other kids, she gave four words.
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Hazel can afford that advice. Most kids can’t.
So the practical alternative is narrower than just telling them to quit: ask them what they use AI for, ask what they’ve decided not to use it for, and don’t make an honest answer cost them the tool. Right now 61% of young people say their parents rarely or never talk to them about AI, and 53% say the same of their teachers.
Hazel may walk away from AI. But Amira, describing a pain in her side to a chatbot, may not, and the odds are nobody in her house knows she’s doing it.
Hon Hai reported August revenue of NT$921.8B, about $29.1B, up 52% year on year on AI server demand, well ahead of analyst expectations for the quarter. In June it signed a EUR 120M manufacturing partnership with Bull, the French state-owned computing firm, splitting work between Pardubice and Angers.x
Hon Hai reported an August revenue rise of 52% to NT$921.8B, about $29.1B, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. July grew 54%, and analysts are looking for around 37% growth in the three months to September, so the company is running well ahead of them.
The Taiwanese company assembles Nvidia’s servers, and its monthly filing has become a check-in for the AI trade. Concerns about overcapacity, rising debt and fierce competition have grown around it, and the revenue line keeps ignoring them.
TNW reported after the second quarter that AI servers now bring in more than everything else Hon Hai makes combined.
The rest is largely Apple. Foxconn, as it is also known, remains the primary iPhone assembler on thinner margins, with plants in China and India, and Apple is spreading work towards Luxshare Precision.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang note that the consumer electronics business dilutes the cloud momentum, leaving gross margin and forward price to earnings below the peer average.
So the order book keeps compounding while the market argues about what the spending eventually returns. Demand and confidence have come apart.
TNW has followed that argument through Big Tech’s cash flow, and Chinese investors marked the trade down this week despite the strongest earnings season in five years.
Europe is about to add to the same order book, and it has already picked its assembler.
Bull and Foxconn announced a manufacturing partnership on 1 June with an initial commitment above EUR 120M, according to Bull’s own statement.
Components and initial testing go to Foxconn’s plant in Pardubice, in the Czech Republic. Final assembly, integration and system validation happen at Bull’s factory in Angers.
Foxconn’s head of AI and quantum, Jesse Chao, said the collaboration advances “building sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe” and supports a resilient supply chain.
The French state finished buying Bull from Atos for EUR 404M in April, two months before the Foxconn announcement, and presented the purchase as a sovereignty measure.
The Commission has committed EUR 20B to AI gigafactories, with 77 proposals across 16 member states and construction of the first planned for 2027. The racks will be assembled in France from parts made in Czechia by a Taiwanese company whose monthly revenue is $29B.
The sale of the Seattle Seahawks to the Khosla family officially closed on Thursday, completing a historic ownership transition for the NFL franchise. But a small surprise emerged in the final paperwork.
Nestled among a newly revealed co-owner lineup were a couple familiar names for the Pacific Northwest tech community: former Apptio CEO and longtime Seattle entrepreneur Sunny Gupta, and Nader Naini, managing partner at Seattle-based healthcare private equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners.
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Under the final transaction terms announced by the team, Vinod Khosla — the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist who founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures — will serve as chair, while his wife Neeru Khosla steps in as controlling owner and president of the Seahawks Charitable Foundation. Their son Neal Khosla takes on the role of vice chair.
The conclusion of the sale brings to an end an era of ownership under the estate of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, while keeping the franchise’s deep ties to the technology sector intact.
Gupta and Naini appear on a list of co-owners that spans prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, global private equity firms, institutional sports investors, and international business dynasties. They include:
When news of the Allen estate’s decision to sell the team first broke, speculation ran rampant — including on GeekWire — about which deep-pocketed tech titan with Seattle ties might step up with almost $10 billion.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, MacKenzie Scott, Satya Nadella, Rich Barton, Melinda French Gates — the list of mostly Seattle billionaires who took a pass was lengthy. The Khosla family emerged victorious, but at least brought along a couple heavyweights to keep the local tech flag flying.
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Gupta brings deep roots in the region’s software ecosystem. He co-founded Bellevue-based enterprise software maker Apptio, guiding it through a public listing, a private equity buyout, and an eventual $4.6 billion sale to IBM in 2023. Gupta served as executive chair at Bellevue-based Smartsheet through its recent $8.4 billion private equity acquisition and launched enterprise AI startup Thira earlier this summer with $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona.
Naini grounds the group in local healthcare private equity and regional sports governance. He joined Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Partners in 1991 and has led the firm since 1995, helping scale it to manage more than $11 billion in institutional capital globally. Based in Seattle, Naini serves on the board of the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers baseball team and is active with regional community organizations, including Bellevue-based senior living developer Aegis Living.
The Seahawks will formally introduce the Khosla family via press conference next Wednesday at 11 a.m. PT at Lumen Field. The team opens the 2026 season and defense of its Super Bowl title that night against the New England Patriots.
Up until recently, anyone into fitness probably had a smartwatch. These tiny computers would sit on your wrist, track health metrics, and also show notifications from your phone to help you stay connected. Well, that has changed recently. With Instagram trying to suck all of my time and WhatsApp becoming a home for advertising, I’ve found myself not wanting to wear a smartwatch anymore. It just doesn’t let me stay in the moment, and every time it buzzed, I’d instinctively pick up my phone. Apparently, I’m not the only one dealing with smartphone fatigue, which is exactly why screenless wearables have taken off. These retain all the workout features of a smartwatch, sometimes even more, and remove the annoying parts like the screen.
Surely, you’ve heard about Whoop. It’s been the screenless tracker to get, worn by stars like Ronaldo and LeBron James. The thing is, Whoop costs a minimum of $199 every year. And without a subscription, you can’t even access your data. There is also Google’s Fitbit Air, but it’s not available in India yet. So, when Noise, the guys I bought my first smart band from a decade ago, came up with a screenless fitness tracker, the Rep Band, I was quite excited. It costs ₹9,999, and you don’t have to pay for any subscription. The band tracks many of the same metrics, such as heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, HRV, sleep tracking, and more. And if you’re thinking about ditching your smartwatch, don’t worry. I’ve been testing the Rep Band for almost a month and have taken it to various workout sessions.
Noise REP Band
Summary
The Noise REP Band is a very competent take on the screenless fitness tracker game, without the predatory feel of Whoop’s subscription model. Everything you need is included in the price, and I’d be keeping it as my primary workout tracker for several reasons. The biggest reason is its accurate workout tracking, backed by genuinely useful insights into recovery and sleep. The app presents all this data in a very digestible form, especially the three scores, which are great.
Let’s get one thing straight: the Whoop and Noise Rep are made for different people. The Whoop is for professional athletes, while Noise Rep is for people like me. Someone who goes to the gym pretty regularly, tries to be fit, and wants a general overview of their health. Keeping that in mind, I love the Noise Rep band’s design. It’s similar to a Whoop in that there is a fabric band that wraps around your wrist. Up top, you get a stainless-steel frame that contains the tracking puck and looks surprisingly premium.
You can play with different strap colors, with Orange being the boldest. I used the beige band for the majority of my testing. Yes, it does get dirty after a week of use, but you can just wash it, and it’ll be like new. What is better than the Whoop, though, is the closing mechanism. The Rep band uses a standard Velcro mechanism, which is orders of magnitude better than fiddling with the metal clasp on the Whoop.
The good stuff continues in comfort. The Rep band weighs just 27g. It was a lot more comfortable than wearing a smartwatch, and better at the whole wear-it-and-forget-it idea. It is a little wider than the Fitbit Air, but I’m not complaining. Like the Air, the Rep band has a haptic motor that vibrates when you start or stop a workout. I’d have loved to see a haptic alarm too. On the side, there’s a little LED indicator that lights up when the band is charging or when you put it on.
The Noise Rep tracks almost everything you’d expect from a modern fitness tracker. These include steps, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), breathing rate, resting heart rate, body temperature, stress, calories, and workouts. Support for blood oxygen is coming soon. Since there is no screen to distract you, everything is managed by the Noise app. While I do agree it looks a bit like the Whoop app, I’m not complaining. It’s a very slick, modern take that shows all fitness data without feeling cramped and is genuinely intuitive in some ways.
Up top, there are three scores: Sleep, Recovery, and Effort. Sleep tracks how well you slept last night, taking into account stages like REM and deep sleep, as well as whether you were actually asleep or simply lying in bed. This data is presented as a timeline, allowing you to better understand what happened. The app combines that data into a score, then uses AI to explain what went well and what could have been better. The band also measures your skin temperature variability, which can be a good indicator of when you might get ill.
Next to the Sleep score is Recovery. It refers to how ready your body is to take on strain the next day. You can use it to plan the perfect time to hit a bench PR. There is even an Effort score. It measures the load your body takes on during the day with workouts or walking, and gives you the ideal range of how much you should push. Underneath that, you’ll find your vitals and other important metrics. You can also log in water intake, but there is no food logger, so keep that in mind.
Workouts have a different section. Here, the headline metric is Stamina, which, as the name suggests, estimates how much energy your body has left for the day. The higher the number, the better. The actual workout options range from essential walking, trekking, and running to sports like Cricket, Football, swimming, Pilates, Yoga, Strength training, and much more. I stuck with Strength Training since that’s pretty much all that I do. The band also measures your overall training load. Lastly, Training Effect summarizes what each workout did for your body. All super helpful stuff.
Where things do take a bit of a downturn is in the overall app experience. Don’t get me wrong, Noise has done a lot of clever work, but the app still lacks polish. For example, workouts and general health data take time to sync, and I often have to pull down to refresh the home screen multiple times before the data syncs. There have been several instances when I clicked on something and a “Please Wait” pop-up appeared. It usually goes away, but sometimes the app gets stuck and requires a force close.
All the bickering about the features and bugs aside, workout tracking is the most important aspect of a fitness band. And yes, the Noise Rep band is pretty good at it. For context, I used it alongside my Galaxy Watch for a few different workout sessions. During those sessions, the band stayed within a 5% margin of error for heart rate. Calorie estimations were pretty much on par, and even the steps were counted equally. The Rep band does not have GPS support built in. It can, however, use your phone’s GPS to log that data.
Sleep tracking was another pleasant surprise. I found the Rep band to be slightly more accurate in measuring actual sleep duration, including the few bathroom breaks I took during the night. It knows when I’m actually sleeping or just lying in bed restless. One night, I woke up for a bathroom break, and just couldn’t sleep again. The next day’s sleep score dropped to 67 (my sleep scores are usually around 80), which reflected exactly how I felt. The band suggested I take it easy at the gym that day, which I did. Battery life lasted me a full week of continuous use. You do get an alert in the app when the charge is below 20%, which is when I’d recommend putting the band on the included charger.
At ₹9,999, or ₹8,999 if you buy early, the Noise REP Band did surpass my expectations. It’s a very competent take on the screenless fitness tracker game, in a way that doesn’t seem predatory like Whoop’s subscription model. Everything you need is included in the price, and I’d be keeping it as my primary workout tracker for several reasons. The biggest reason is its accurate workout tracking, backed by genuinely useful recovery and sleep insights. The app presents all this data in a very digestible form, especially the three scores, which are great. Is it perfect, though? Nope. The Noise app still needs some work on app sync times and random bugs that are definitely annoying. Blood oxygen monitoring is also coming soon, so we’d have to wait and see how that pans out.
Inverse shares a movie success story from last weekend:
Coyote vs. Acme debuted to $15.9 million at the box office, beating out iconic director Ridley Scott’s latest sci-fi adventure, The Dog Stars. This success has only continued since, and the worldwide box office currently sits above $22 million. Strong reviews and word-of-mouth are sure to keep viewers coming in, especially during the holiday weekend.
What’s impressive is Coyote vs. Acme had a limited marketing campaign that includes viral stunts. They photographed the movie’s world premiere with a vintage Tasmanian Devil polaroid camera, and launched a phone number for the law firm suing Acme. (“If you’ve been injured by an enormous rubber band, press 7. If you’ve been injured by painted train tunnel that suddenly sprang to life, press 8…”)
And Cartoon Brew reports that Wednesday “the famously silent Looney Tunes star participated in an AMA on Reddit’s r/movies, answering questions about his career, his relationship with the Road Runner, and the Warner Bros. executive who nearly prevented audiences from seeing his latest movie.”
In keeping with tradition, Wile E. delivered his responses through images of himself holding signs. The format produced several interesting and occasionally thought-provoking exchanges, but one obvious highlight came when a user asked: “Rumor has it that David Zaslav was paid off by ACME to cancel your film; what is your opinion on this?” Wile E.’s response was an image of the coyote glaring at the camera while holding a sign that read, “It’s a limited number of signs,” pulled from a scene in the film when Mr. Coyote first meets his eventual attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte.
Meanwhile, Boing Boing cites local news reports that a Southern California bird watcher Alexander DeBarros has actually captured a photo of a coyote holding a roadrunner bird in its mouth:
In an incredible coincidence that is a movie publicist’s dream, he snapped the rare, possibly unprecedented, photo on the opening weekend of the movie Acme vs. Coyote… In an even more incredible coincidence, DeBarros’s father, Brian Mainolfi, is an animator whose first job in the field was working for Chuck Jones, the creator and director of the Roadrunner cartoon series.
Cartoon Brew notes a Reddit user specifically asked the Coyote for his reaction to the news.
Wile E. responded with some unexpectedly healthy advice: “We cannot judge our worth on the work of others.”
Aftermath calls the movie “a well made, deeply funny movie that pays a deep respect to the Looney Tunes in a way that Warner Brothers currently seems uninterested in doing.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Every year around this time, Apple announces new iPhones. The products go on sale soon after, usually ranging from a base model to more premium and more expensive Pro models. But this year will likely be different—not just because the company has a brand-new CEO.
Apple’s iPhone event will be held on September 9 at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern), announced last week with the title “Surprise and Shine!” If you tune into the livestream, expect the announcement of an iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and, if all the rumors and widely held analyst expectations are true, the first look at an Apple foldable device.
Based on leaks and the ongoing tech rumor mill and its decent track record for figuring these things out, Apple is expected to prioritize its more expensive, premium devices this year and hold off on announcing its base model iPhone 18. That cheaper model is rumored to launch in the spring of 2027, potentially alongside an iPhone 18e and maybe a second-generation iPhone Air.
Why the drastic change in strategy? It may be due to the ongoing memory shortage, which has made just about everything more expensive. Apple hasn’t been spared. In June, former Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that Apple would raise product prices to keep up with manufacturing costs.
“Our assumption is that they’re going to be launching three models in the fall, the premium side of the models of the 18 series,” says Nabila Popal, a senior director of data and analytics at IDC. “Then the mid/budget devices will be launched in the spring.”
Popal says it’s a smart strategic move because Apple is aiming to spread out its revenue between a usually very strong fourth quarter and a typically much weaker spring quarter the following year. Apple’s portfolio has also expanded, and the iPhone Pro and Pro Max lineup are more enticing for people already prepared to spend the money on a new iPhone.
When components become more expensive, companies have three real options: Eat the costs, raise prices, or, as Apple seems to be doing, lean into it. By moving its cheaper options to a later date, Apple can drum up excitement for its bigger, better, pricier offerings. When it charges more for those, it is likely to be less off-putting than making a cheap phone even more expensive. It’s part of a “premiumization” of devices, as Popal calls it, that Apple hopes to leverage and build hype for its pricier options.
Shawn DuBravac, chief economist at the Global Electronics Association, tells WIRED he is optimistic about what these kinds of rising prices ultimately mean for customers.
“Throughout the history of time, the deflationary pressures of technology have always flowed to the consumer,” DuBravac says. “I’m confident that will be the case again. It just will take some time for the markets to solidify.” In other words, new technologies launch with a high price, but manufacturing efficiencies and competition inevitably drive costs down for consumers.
That may not be the case anytime soon for folding phones, which are seeing higher prices than ever. Samsung’s entire 2026 Galaxy Z folding smartphone range saw price increases, as did Google’s new Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and Motorola’s Razr 2026 models. Apple’s folding iPhone is rumored to cost around $2,000.
To help mitigate those high costs, Apple is turning to financing options and trade-in programs. In July, the company launched an iPhone leasing program that lets people pay a monthly fee to rent the newest iPhones, then swap them out when a new device releases. The program will undoubtedly help more people afford the newest devices, but ownership advocates have criticized it, saying it keeps you from truly owning and managing your device. It also fits Apple’s broader effort to turn all of its products into a subscription service.
Apple could be preparing a new MacBook tier that would sit between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, according to a new product roadmap from research firm Omdia.
The unannounced model is expected to feature a 13.8-inch OLED display and could arrive in 2029. That would give Apple another option for buyers who want a more advanced display than the current MacBook Air, without stepping up to the higher-end MacBook Pro.
Omdia’s latest roadmap places the 13.8-inch MacBook in a new product category between the Air and Pro lines. The machine is expected to use a single-stack hybrid OLED panel, rather than the more advanced tandem OLED technology reportedly planned for future MacBook Pro models.
The display could also bring several features not currently found on Apple’s laptop lineup, including an LTPO+ backplane, integrated touch sensing and an under-panel camera. Omdia also expects the OLED panel to feature a colour filter integrated into the OLED encapsulation layer.
Interestingly, the roadmap doesn’t show an OLED MacBook Air. Instead, the 13.8-inch OLED model appears as an entirely separate product, while the MacBook Air is expected to continue using LCDs through to 2030.
Some evidence suggests Apple has at least explored a MacBook with this display size. A June report from ZDNet Korea claimed Apple had approached Samsung Display, LG Display and BOE for information about 13.8-inch OLED panels earlier this year. At the time, the assumption was that these panels could be intended for an OLED MacBook Air.
Omdia now appears to have a different view, suggesting the panel could instead be used for a new MacBook tier aimed at the mainstream market.
There’s still plenty of uncertainty here. Omdia’s roadmap is based on current market expectations, while Apple’s plans could change depending on OLED production capacity, component costs and its wider product strategy. The machine is also reportedly three years away, so it’s worth treating this one as a long-term possibility rather than a firm product plan.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has patched a critical vulnerability in the ArubaOS-CX network operating system that could lead to remote code execution.
Tracked as CVE-2026-73749, the security issue is a buffer overflow that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to send specially crafted packets to an affected daemon process, achieving code execution with elevated privileges.
“Multiple vulnerabilities exist in a daemon of ArubaOS-CX that may allow for improper processing of malformed input,” reads HPE’s bulletin.
“An unauthenticated remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending specially crafted packets to the affected service.”
Affected release branches and fixes listed in the bulletin are:
HPE noted that the AOS-CX 10.10.1181 version has reached End of Maintenance (EOM) and only receives fixes for internally discovered, critical issues, a condition that also applies to CVE-2026-73749.
ArubaOS-CX is HPE Aruba Networking’s operating system for its enterprise-grade network switches, typically used by large businesses, government agencies, universities, healthcare organizations, data centers, and service providers.
HPE’s security bulletin also covers a set of 23 other security vulnerabilities, some with high severity ratings, between 8.1 and 8.8:
The vendor “strongly encourages” customers to upgrade to one of the fixed releases listed in the bulletin.
HPE mentions that, at the time of the bulletin’s publication, it was not aware of active exploitation or publicly available proof-of-concept exploits targeting the listed flaws.
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
Apple TV just confirmed that Silo is returning for a fourth season on July 9, 2027, and the teaser that dropped with the announcement gives us glimpses of what happens next. The final chapter will pick up after the dramatic events of Season 3, with Juliette Nichols preparing for a direct confrontation that could determine the fate of every silo.
Season 3 expanded the story by revealing the truth about Silo 1, where survivors from the past oversee the remaining silos. The teaser shows Juliette returning with a new purpose after uncovering those secrets. Instead of simply trying to survive, she is now determined to challenge the people controlling the underground world.
Apple says the new season follows Juliette as she uncovers even more hidden truths while fighting to protect the future of the silos. The teaser also hints that the conflict between Silo 18 and Silo 1 will become the central focus.
According to showrunner Graham Yost, the season can be summed up in two words: “It’s war.” The story will also spend more time inside Silo 1, giving viewers a closer look at how it operates and the people pulling the strings.
Season 4 will expand its focus inside Silo 1, bringing side characters like Senator Rosalind Thurman, her daughter Anna, and aide Henry further into the spotlight. But the bigger payoff might be closure on characters who’ve been missing since the explosion that first sent everyone underground.
Journalist Helen Drew disappeared from the story after that moment, and Yost has confirmed her fate is exactly what season 4 plans to reveal, along with flashbacks connecting her time inside Silo 18 to the present. Whatever happened to trillionaire Per Stensen remains a separate open question the show hasn’t addressed yet, but we see a glimpse in the teaser.
The final season brings back Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Harriet Walter, Chinaza Uche, Avi Nash, Ashley Zukerman, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Steve Zahn. With a release date now locked in, Silo is heading toward its ending with a lot riding on it, and a full cast ready to bring its sprawling mystery to a close next year.
Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, several people with knowledge of the deal said.
XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024. TechCrunch reported on the startup’s $70 million Series A in June, with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital. XDOF wasn’t planning to raise again so soon after that round. But the company’s rapid growth — with annualized revenue approaching $50 million — prompted VCs to approach it about a new round, the people said.
TechCrunch was unable to learn the total capital being raised or whether the valuation includes the new funding. The terms of the deal are not final and could still change.
XDOF and 8VC didn’t respond to our request for comment.
The startup aims to build the data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems that frontier AI labs and robotics companies can’t easily build themselves, essentially acting as an outsourced data-supply chain for the robotics industry.
As a PhD student, Wu was studying how robots learn from large datasets. One big impediment to his research was the lack of “large-scale data to work with,” he told TechCrunch in June.
So he teamed up with Shentu on a project called GELLO, a low-cost teleoperation system that allows a human operator to control a robotic arm remotely in order to generate training data. Their work led to an influential paper in robotics.
That research formed the foundation for XDOF, which investors now describe as the Scale AI or Mercor for physical robotics, a reference to the data-labeling giants that helped fuel the AI boom. Unlike LLMs, which initially trained on the entirety of the internet, physical robots don’t have an equivalent real-world dataset to draw from, making data collection a critical bottleneck to building general-purpose machines.
XDOF is partnering with UC Berkeley’s AI Research lab to release what it believes is the largest collection of high-quality robot training data ever assembled, dubbed ABC.
To capture this data, XDOF combines remote robot teleoperation with human collectors who wear sensors to record everyday tasks like folding clothes and flattening boxes.
The startup plans to hire and train teams of data collectors worldwide, including teleoperators who steer robots remotely and egocentric operators who wear body sensors to capture movement data.
XDOF previously told TechCrunch that it is already working with 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs.
Other startups attempting to collect real-world data for robot training include Mecka AI, as well as human-data platforms expanding beyond LLMs, such as Scale AI and Micro1.
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AMD just built a desktop that really has no business sitting on an actual desk. At IFA 2026, the company unveiled the Threadripper Halo Station.
As the name probably already suggests, it is a liquid-cooled machine that can run AI models with more than a trillion parameters without touching the cloud even once. If you don’t already know, those numbers are reserved for server shelves, not someone’s personal desk.
The CPU alone is quite absurd on paper. It uses AMD’s Threadripper Pro 9995WX, built on Zen 5 architecture, with 96 processing cores and 192 threads. The maximum clock speed (with boost) can reach 5.4GHz, helping it tackle demanding tasks faster, and it also has a massive 384MB M3 cache for faster data processing.
Besides, 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes provide plenty of bandwidth for the rest of the hardware. To sustain all that performance, the machine needs a 350W TDP, which is significantly higher than a regular gaming PC.
Alongside it are two liquid-cooled Instinct MI350P accelerators, each with 128 CDNA 4 compute units built on TSMC’s N3 process. Each can draw up to 600 watts and comes with 144GB of HBM3E memory and up to 4TB/s of bandwidth, and the GPU memory is frankly ridiculous: 288GB across the two accelerators.
For context, 288GB is several times more GPU memory than you’ll typically find in higher-end gaming PCs or laptops. AMD says the platform will eventually support up to four accelerators, pushing that figure up to 576GB.
All of that sits on top of 2TB of DDR5 system memory, which, yet again, shows how far beyond a typical PC this machine is. The combination of the CPU cores, GPU horsepower, and sheer memory capacity lets AMD claim this machine can load and run AI models north of a trillion parameters entirely on-device.
This is clearly built for a server room with proper power and cooling infrastructure, not a home office. AMD hasn’t announced pricing or a release date for the Halo Station yet, though. However, estimates about the component costs alone put the machine well past $100,000
I’d still consider this a showcase of sheer computing power in a cabin that looks like a high-end gaming PC, at least at IFA 2026.
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