YouTube has changed its monetisation rules to curb repetitive AI-generated content — so-called AI slop. Here's what changes for people who make videos.

By Oliver Grant

Illustrative · Photo: Markus Winkler / Pexels

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra headlined Samsung's London Unpacked, alongside a new wider Fold, the Z Flip 8 and a fresh watch. What changed and when it reaches Portugal.

The wait is over. After weeks of leaks, Samsung took the stage in London on Wednesday and showed off the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra — the flagship that succeeds last year's Fold, now thinner, with a triple camera and a silicon-carbon battery that promises to last longer without bulking up the phone. The night's real surprise sat right beside it. Samsung also revealed a "regular" Galaxy Z Fold 8 with a brand-new shape: a 7.6-inch inner screen in a 4:3 ratio,…

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Microsoft and Mistral have expanded their partnership with a multibillion-euro deal to grow AI compute in Europe, powered by thousands of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs.

Europe took another step this week toward weaning itself off the American cloud — and, ironically, with American money footing the bill. On 21 July, Microsoft and France's Mistral announced an expanded partnership underpinned by a multibillion-euro agreement to grow artificial-intelligence infrastructure on European soil. Here's how it fits together: Mistral will add compute capacity in Europe, drawing on thousands of the latest Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs,…

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China's Moonshot AI paused new Kimi K3 subscriptions days after launch as demand maxed out its GPU capacity. It reopens in batches and promises the full model weights by 27 July.

There are good problems to have, and Moonshot AI is living one: Kimi K3 drew so much demand that the Chinese company had to shut the door on new customers. It launched the model on 16 July and, three days later, there were no spots left — paid subscription cards simply showed as sold out. The reason isn't a lack of interest, it's the opposite. Demand pushed Moonshot right up against its GPU limits, the chips that make AI run. Anyone already subscribed…

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Google is developing Frozen v2, a chip that etches part of Gemini into silicon and could serve 6 to 10 times more tokens per unit of power than its latest TPUs.

Google is designing a chip with a single purpose in life: run Gemini faster on far less power. It is called Frozen v2, and the idea is bold — instead of a general-purpose processor, part of the model's architecture gets permanently etched into the silicon, cutting the calculations and data shuffling behind every answer. The report alone was enough to send Alphabet shares up around 3% on Monday. It is a server chip built exclusively to serve Gemini models,…

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Databricks signed a Coatue-led funding deal valuing the data and AI company at $188 billion, up from $134 billion in February's Series L.

Databricks has signed a term sheet for a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion — a $54 billion jump from February, when it closed a $5 billion Series L at $134 billion. Five months, roughly 40% added, and the data-and-AI company still is not listed on any exchange. The round is led by Coatue, already an investor, with new and existing backers joining, and is expected to close later this summer — the announcement is on Databricks' official…

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The European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros, the biggest Digital Services Act penalty yet, for failing to detect and remove illegal and counterfeit products.

The European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros on Monday — the biggest penalty ever issued under the EU's Digital Services Act. Brussels' conclusion, after a 28-month investigation, is blunt: the Alibaba-owned marketplace systematically failed to detect and remove illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products sold to European consumers. Because, according to the investigation, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and counterfeit goods stayed on sale…

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The Pentagon is accelerating AI across military systems, including weapons able to pick their own targets. In Congress, some senators are trying to slow it down.

For years, the unwritten rule of American defence was simple: the machine assists, the human decides. That line is getting fainter. The US administration is pushing the armed forces to speed up the adoption of artificial intelligence — including, according to the American press, in weapons systems with the autonomy to pick and attack targets on their own, the step that was always treated as taboo. The budget request for 2026 includes 13.4 billion dollars…

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Google delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro by months after the model fell short on coding and complex reasoning. Alphabet shares dropped about 4%, erasing roughly 200 billion dollars in market value.

Gemini 3.5 Pro was supposed to arrive in June — and Google had already pushed the launch to July promising fine-tuning. Now Google admits its most powerful AI model is months behind schedule — and Wall Street was not amused. Alphabet shares fell about 4% in a single day, erasing roughly 200 billion dollars in market value. Because the model is not living up to the company's own promises. In internal testing, its ability to write, understand and debug code…

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China's regulator approved Apple Intelligence running Alibaba's Qwen model on iPhones. Alibaba's shares added billions on the news.

Apple Intelligence finally has a green light for China — and it will arrive speaking Qwen. The country's cyberspace regulator approved the launch of Apple's AI services, built on a deal that integrates Alibaba's model across the company's operating systems: iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. For Apple, this removes one of the biggest commercial roadblocks of recent years: selling iPhones in a giant market where its AI simply couldn't switch on. For…

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The semiconductor index fell 6% after OpenAI reportedly halved inference costs and Meta confirmed its in-house Iris AI chip enters production in September. AMD, Intel and Nvidia all slid.

The fear that has hovered over the semiconductor market for months now has a concrete question attached: if AI labs can squeeze far more out of the chips they already own, how many new chips do they really need to buy? That doubt swept through Wall Street on Friday and shoved the semiconductor index down around 6%. Two blows on the same day. First, a report in The Information described OpenAI engineers celebrating optimisations that cut inference costs by…

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Brussels has ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and share search data under the DMA. The Android changes must be done by July 2027.

Android has always been Google's house — and Brussels has just ordered it to hand keys to the neighbours. Under the Digital Markets Act, the European Commission has determined that Google must open Android to rival AI assistants and share search data with competitors. Failure to comply can bring fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover. Two big things. On Android, rival AI assistants will be able to work the way Gemini does today: users pick their…

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San Francisco's City Attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google demanding the removal of 13 AI face-swap and nudify apps used to create nonconsensual sexual images.

San Francisco has decided to attack one of generative AI's most toxic uses through the door that hurts: the app stores. The City Attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google demanding the removal of 13 face-swap and "nudify" apps — tools used overwhelmingly to create fake sexual images of real people without consent, mostly targeting women and girls. They're applications that take an ordinary photograph and generate an undressed or…

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Xi Jinping delivered the opening keynote of the World AI Conference in Shanghai for the first time, pushing open-source AI and global cooperation, with concrete pledges for developing countries.

Shanghai's World AI Conference is on its ninth edition, but it had never seen this: Xi Jinping opening the event in person. China's leader took the WAIC stage on Friday for the first time since the conference began in 2018, and the gesture says as much as the speech — AI has officially moved to the top of China's political agenda, at the exact moment US restrictions are squeezing the country's access to the most advanced chips. Very concrete things. Over…

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China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that beats GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus on several benchmarks. Asian AI stocks shook.

It's called Kimi K3, it has 2.8 trillion parameters, and according to Moonshot AI it's the largest open-weight AI model ever published. The Beijing startup dropped it this week with carefully staged timing — days before the World AI Conference in Shanghai — and the numbers explain the noise: on benchmark tests, K3 goes toe to toe with the most powerful closed systems the United States has to offer. In the published benchmarks, the model beats Anthropic's…

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