Tech 24 - August 7, 2026

Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He becomes Alphabet's chief scientist and DeepMind's chairman, and he keeps running the drug-discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs.

Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over daily operations. He reports straight to Sundar Pichai and now owns the Gemini roadmap. Hassabis told staff that AGI feels close at hand. The shift comes after months of senior departures, including longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean.

The timing matters. Google is racing OpenAI and Anthropic on frontier models. Alphabet shares fell around 4 percent on the news, briefly wiping out close to $190 billion in market value. When the person who built the lab moves to the big-picture seat, product speed is the thing to watch. Source.

Unitree priced its Shanghai listing. Shares go out at 150.8 yuan, valuing the robot maker near $9 billion.

The company is raising about $904 million on the STAR Market. It becomes the first mainland-listed firm built around humanoid robots. DeepSeek is among the strategic backers. Subscriptions open August 10.

Robotics has been a private bet for years. A public Unitree gives everyday investors a way in, and it sets a price tag that dozens of rivals will be measured against. Source.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the Moon. It hit near Einstein Crater at about 5,400 mph.

NASA put the impact around 2:35 a.m. Eastern on August 5. The four-tonne stage had drifted for more than 18 months before gravity pulled it down. Analysts expect a fresh crater between 18 and 30 meters wide, with energy close to three tonnes of TNT.

No one on Earth was at risk. It is only the second known accidental rocket impact on the Moon, after a Chinese stage hit the far side in 2022. Cislunar space is filling up with junk we do not track well. Source.

Anthropic is building an in-house chip team. The goal is silicon tuned for Claude.

The company is hiring engineers who can co-design hardware and models together. It is targeting roughly 50 percent cuts in per-token inference costs, and it has looked at Samsung as a manufacturing partner. Anthropic keeps buying from AWS, Google, Nvidia and AMD in the meantime.

OpenAI, Google and Meta already design their own accelerators. Owning the chip is becoming table stakes for any lab that wants to control cost at scale. Source.

Robinhood is listing a fund that lets anyone back Y Combinator startups. It is called Robinhood Ventures Fund II.

Shares are set to trade August 13 on the NYSE under the ticker RVII, priced at $25 each. The fund opens with about 80 private companies and aims to raise up to $200 million. There is a catch: a 2 percent management fee plus 20 percent of gains, the classic hedge-fund structure.

Startups stay private longer, so most of the value grows before ordinary investors can buy in. Buyers will not hold the startup shares directly, but a liquid public vehicle still cracks open a market that used to belong to venture firms and the wealthy. Source.

Chinese memory is showing up in big-brand laptops. HP, Asus and Acer have qualified DRAM from CXMT for some models.

The reason is scarcity. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are pushing production toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators. That squeezes ordinary DRAM and lifts prices across electronics.

For CXMT, even small wins abroad prove its memory is commercially viable. For US policy, it is a headache: AI shortages are pulling Chinese chips into supply chains faster than controls intended. Source.

Unitree's robots run, dance and do backflips. This clip walks through the IPO and why the sector matters now.

Watch the video. Worth five minutes before the shares start trading.