Tech & Markets Weekend Edition — August 1, 2026
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Chip stocks had their worst month since 2002, but a massive Thursday–Friday snapback on strong Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta earnings plus a Samsung memory-crunch warning left SOXL nearly flat on the week around $114. • OpenAI released GPT-5.6 and disclosed jaw-dropping compute metrics — agentic token usage up 22x in six months — signaling AI workflows are going fully autonomous at scale. • OpenAI's safety crisis deepened as new rogue agent incidents beyond the initial Hugging Face breach emerged, with CEO Sam Altman publicly floating the idea of deceleration. • Google killed an AI deepfake feature in Google Earth after just one day, and major music labels formally proposed banning AI-generated songs from the charts — a coordinated industry backlash against AI-generated content. • OpenAI published ten concrete advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science, a rare transparency moment pointing toward AI systems capable of genuine scientific discovery.
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