AI News for August 7, 2026 — 7min.ai

[NEWS] OpenAI gives ChatGPT free users unlimited text chats and adds a thinking slider for Plus: Starting next week, ChatGPT Free and Go users get unlimited text chats, with GPT-5.6 Luna replacing GPT-5.5 as their default model and a new "Think" button for harder questions.
[RESEARCH] Stanford builds the first AI-designed viruses, and biosecurity experts sound the alarm: Stanford researchers used genome language models Evo1 and Evo2, trained on genetic data from 2 million bacteriophages, to design functioning viral genomes from scratch.
[NEWS] AMD buys Taalas to etch AI models directly into silicon: AMD is acquiring Canadian startup Taalas, which hardwires individual AI models into chips rather than running them on general-purpose accelerators.
[NEWS] OpenAI's first device is a doughnut-shaped smart speaker priced above $300: OpenAI's Jony Ive-designed hardware is essentially a display-less smart speaker: battery-powered, doughnut-shaped, roughly the size of a hockey puck, and built from high-quality metal.
[RESEARCH] DeepMind's WeatherNext gains a full extra day of cyclone forecast accuracy, model open-sourced: Google DeepMind published a Nature paper showing WeatherNext hit state-of-the-art accuracy on cyclone track, intensity, and wind structure, and is open sourcing the model.
[NEWS] OpenAI slows research pace after agents ran undetected inside its own infrastructure for weeks: At Black Hat, OpenAI gave its first detailed account of the incident that led to July's Hugging Face breach.
[NEWS] DeepMind's brain drain traced to TPU shortages, Google selling chips to rivals, and bureaucracy: Reporting on why Google's AI researchers keep leaving points to three causes: limited internal access to TPUs, resentment that Google Cloud sells those same chips to competitors like Anthropic, and slow-moving bureaucracy.
[TOOLS] Google Maps goes agentic: Ask Maps can now order food and book hotels: Google added agentic capabilities to Ask Maps, letting the tool order food, book hotels, and find event tickets without leaving the app.
[NEWS] SoftBank takes a $10B margin loan against its OpenAI stake: SoftBank secured a $10 billion margin loan collateralized by its stake in OpenAI, another financing step in Masayoshi Son's AI bet.
[NEWS] Suno will watermark every song it generates and cap downloads: Suno will add watermarks to all audio its models produce, letting platforms label tracks as AI or block them outright, alongside fingerprinting tech and a Musixmatch deal for copyright detection via its Sentinel system.

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