Perplexity's $34B Chrome bid ✉️, Altman backs Neuralink rival 💰, AGI disenchantment 🤖

AI startup Perplexity has made an offer to purchase Google's Chrome browser for $34.5B, an offer significantly more than Perplexity's own valuation ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2025-08-13 Take Control of User Access with WorkOS (Sponsor) As your app grows, managing "who can do what" becomes complex. Hard-coded roles and scattered permissions slow you down and fail to meet enterprise demands for fine-grained access. WorkOS RBAC is the fastest way to implement structured, scalable permissions. Define roles, group permissions, and update access for entire user groups in a single step. With developer-friendly APIs, a powerful dashboard, and native integrations for SSO and Directory Sync, WorkOS gives you enterprise-grade access control out of the box. Integrate RBAC with WorkOS 📱 Big Tech & Startups Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome (3 minute read) AI startup Perplexity has made an offer to purchase Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion. The offer is significantly more than Perplexity's own valuation at $18 billion and far below some estimates of Chrome's enterprise value. A US District Judge is currently weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser. Perplexity's offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there is an interested buyer should he force a sale. Sam Altman, OpenAI will reportedly back a startup that takes on Musk's Neuralink (2 minute read) Sam Altman is in the process of co-funding a new brain-computer interface startup called Merge Labs. He is raising funds for it using capital possibly coming largely from OpenAI's ventures team. Merge Labs is expected to be valued at $850 million - OpenAI has not yet committed to the deal, so terms could change. The startup will compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink, which currently has a device in trials for people who suffer from severe paralysis. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology SpaceX rival AST SpaceMobile prepares to deploy nearly five dozen satellites (2 minute read) Satellite designer AST SpaceMobile is preparing to deploy 45 to 60 satellites to power cellular-based broadband networks to compete with SpaceX. It plans to deploy its satellites into orbit by 2026 and support continuous service in the US, Europe, Japan, and other strategic markets. AST SpaceMobile plans to launch satellites every one to two months to reach its goal. SpaceX currently has more than 8,000 satellites in orbit. The expanding world of genetic testing for your embryos (5 minute read) Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) is testing performed on embryos before implantation for the purposes of gathering genetic information to guide embryo selection during IVF. It is considered a low-risk procedure when performed by experienced professionals. This article looks at what can and can't be learned from the genetic testing of embryos and the different types of testing available today. PGT results should only be seen as screening and not a perfect diagnosis. While it is powerful, it is only useful if it is understood and applied properly. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science 📈 AI Is Elevating HR's Role in Enterprise Tech Strategy (Sponsor) New research from Sapient Insights shows HR isn't just supporting tech strategy—it's driving it. Join this exclusive webinar to see how HR leaders are shaping governance, ethics, and AI adoption across the enterprise. 👉 Reserve your spot Tech Debt? I don't believe it exists (4 minute read) One way to approach tech debt is to treat it like it doesn't exist and instead focus on things that are causing problems now, things that will be causing problems soon, and things that are not causing problems. Sometimes people want to schedule tech debt in - this is an anti-pattern that indicates you don't actually know what your problems are, where you want to go, and why you want to go there. Getting a handle on tech debt is about working on the right problems, at the right time, for the right reasons. No AGI in Sight: What This Means for LLMs (7 minute read) There's a widening gap between AI hype and reality. Large language models have hit a plateau despite industry claims of imminent superintelligence. Releases have been underwhelming despite bold predictions and massive investments. The industry needs to make systems actually useful for the industry to have a future. 🎁 Miscellaneous Angel Investors, A Field Guide (10 minute read) Akira started with several angel investors, including NBA player Kevin Durant. Its founder became better-prepared and more well-connected thanks to their angel investors. This post details everything they would tell a first-time founder looking to work with angel investors. It covers Akita's fundraising story, the founder's personal experience with angel investors, how to know when to bring on angel investors and how to do so, how to leverage angel investors, and more. Choosing the right angel investors can help founders a lot. OpenAI burns the boats (11 minute read) Anthropic was dominating the AI coding space and had a consistently better model than OpenAI for almost two years. OpenAI's response was to set the entire business model on fire and move to a different arena. By releasing GPT-5, a model with the same performance benchmarks as Claude on coding, at a cost of $10 per million tokens, every application layer company that was previously dependent on Anthropic's price point switched overnight. The move signals OpenAI's willingness to prevent the AI coding market from existing. ⚡ Quick Links Ship B2B SaaS Faster: Multitenant Auth Made Simple (Sponsor) Learn how to design secure, scalable multi-tenant authentication without reinventing the wheel — and speed up your B2B SaaS roadmap using Clerk's built-in capabilities. Musk-Altman battle escalates as Tesla CEO drags Apple into the spat (5 minute read) Elon Musk has threatened Apple with immediate legal action over antitrust violations, accusing Apple of favoring OpenAI's ChatGPT over X's Grok chatbot in the App Store. AI Is Forcing the Return of the In-Person Job Interview (5 minute read) Cheating by candidates and other digital threats have caused companies to start returning to face-to-face meetings. The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know (6 minute read) 'Let Me Know' is a hypothetical protocol that provides a method for people to be notified when a singular, specific event occurs. Craving more AI in your inbox? (Sponsor) TLDR AI is your daily fix of LLMs, GenAI, and deep learning goodness. Same TLDR format. Still free. Subscribe now. Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? (32 minute read) The Rationalist community has hosted several small groups with very strange beliefs - some are fairly harmless, but others have been linked to violent deaths. The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists (15 minute read) A lot of people effectively use AI as a sort of therapist or life coach, and even OpenAI still hasn't figured out how to make it a big net positive. Reddit blocks Internet Archive to end sneaky AI scraping (3 minute read) AI firms are scraping the Internet Archive instead of scraping data directly from Reddit. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. 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