Jason Koebler / 404 Media:
X's location tool shows revenue sharing incentivizes US political content from international sock puppet and bot accounts, making polarization a side hustle  —  The ‘psyops’ revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.

Jiyoung Sohn / Wall Street Journal:
South Korea, the EU, the UK, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others aim to build “sovereign AI”; Gartner expects $1.5T in AI spending in 2025, up 50% from 2024  —  South Korea and others believe their homegrown tech sectors are strong enough to build up their AI capabilities

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
X exposing political accounts' location shows why trust and safety teams mattered: to combat coordinated inauthentic behavior, not “censorship” of viewpoints  —  from the it's-almost-as-if-there-are-some-bad- actors-online dept  —  For the last few years, Matt Taibbi …

Luz Ding / Bloomberg:
Alibaba reports Q2 revenue up 5% YoY to ~$35B, vs. ~$34.5B est., Chinese e-commerce revenue up 16% YoY, and net income down to ~$3B, as it boosts cloud spending  —  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue growth, riding China's AI development boom.

Debby Wu / Bloomberg:
TSMC sues former VP Lo Wen-jen, who left to join Intel, alleging a high likelihood that he leaked secrets to Intel after a two-decade career at TSMC  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. sued a former executive who left to work for Intel Corp., saying there is a high likelihood …