AI Briefing — Thursday, June 18, 2026

AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round

Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.

Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs

The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be composed of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO

OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.

Almost half of U.S. singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says

About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating -- but, many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips

AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

MosaicLeaks: Can your research agent keep a secret?

AI data centers just got a government-mandated fast lane to the grid

FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.

New usage analytics and updated spend controls for enterprises

OpenAI introduces new spend controls and usage analytics for ChatGPT Enterprise, helping organizations manage costs and scale AI with confidence.

‘Queer Eye’s’ life coach Karamo Brown launches Kē, a wellness app featuring his AI digital clone

Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app, Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to…

Launch HN: TesterArmy (YC P26) – Agents that test web and mobile apps

Hey HN - we’re Oskar, Szymon, and Piotr, and we’re building TesterArmy ( https://tester.army ). TesterArmy is an agentic testing platform that runs end-to-end checks before deployment and in producti…

MosaicLeaks: Can your research agent keep a secret?

Beyond LoRA: Can you beat the most popular fine-tuning technique?

Is it agentic enough? Benchmarking open models on your own tooling

MolmoMotion: Language-guided 3D motion forecasting

From the Hugging Face Hub to robot hardware with Strands Agents and LeRobot

Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding

Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although inter…