MoH pesticide warning, Claude Opus 5, Qualcomm price hike

Etched, an AI inference chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation just a month after emerging from stealth. Sequoia led the round with participation from SK Hynix, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, and Diffusion. Etched builds a transformer-only ASIC called Sohu that hardcodes the transformer architecture for superior inference efficiency. For the AI hardware market, this signals that specialised inference chips are attracting serious capital and general-purpose GPUs may not dominate inference forever.

Qualcomm sent a letter to customers on Friday warning of plans to increase prices by a double-digit percentage, with the hikes taking effect on products shipped after 1 September. The company says it has exhausted its ability to absorb higher costs from suppliers as ongoing component shortages drive up input prices. For Android phone makers, this means higher bills for Snapdragon chips across the stack. Expect mid-range and flagship Android devices to get more expensive in the coming quarters as the increases pass through to consumers.

Meta paused plans to charge a $20 per month subscription for the Conversation Focus feature on its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The feature processes audio locally on the device and does not require cloud servers, making the proposed charge particularly hard to defend. The company walked back after fierce criticism over charging for a capability that runs entirely on-device. Separately, Meta faces a moderation problem as bad actors use the glasses to film strangers without consent and post the content to Instagram. For consumers, the subscription retreat is a rare win against hardware fee creep, but privacy concerns around always-on cameras remain unresolved.

Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of seven stable Linux kernels: 7.1.5, 6.18.40, 6.12.97, 6.6.145, 6.1.178, 5.15.212, and 5.10.261. The 7.1.5 release candidate alone included more than 2,000 patches, while 6.18.40 contained 1,611. The scale of this batch is unprecedented for the stable kernel series, described as possibly the largest ever. All Linux users, especially those running production servers, should plan an update window. The sheer patch volume suggests significant security and stability fixes across the board.

Ford has issued a recall for over half a million Bronco SUVs due to an engine fire risk. The recall covers a significant portion of the popular off-road SUV's production run and requires a dealer fix that should be covered under warranty. Separately, Honda is pausing production of its manual transmission sport sedans, another signal that the manual gearbox is in terminal decline. For Bronco owners, the recall means a trip to the dealer but no out-of-pocket cost. This is one of the larger single-model safety actions this year and highlights ongoing quality issues in high-volume SUV production.