Daily AI Grants Roundup – July 17, 2026

Hemispheric emerged from stealth with $52M to build AI that turns brain activity into actionable medical insights for clinicians and researchers.

General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed a $400 million loan from Upper90, a tech investment firm.. It might be the first deal to put up inference-specific chips as collateral — chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather…

Patreon , the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes.. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their…

OpenAI’s Sora may have shut down , but Google apparently thinks there’s still interest in a tool that lets you star in your own AI videos.. On Thursday, the tech giant announced an update to Google Vids that will allow you to create a custom digital avatar that looks and…

Roblox announced Thursday a new feature called “Build,” allowing users to design games from their mobile devices using AI.. The Build feature lets anyone turn simple text prompts into a basic game without any programming experience.. For example, if a user types, “Let’s make…

You may have heard that OpenAI released its first piece of hardware this week: a $230 mini keyboard .. You may not have heard that alongside this “command center for agentic work,” OpenAI also released a ChatGPT basketball.. “This basketball comes from the Pause.. campaign, a…

Andrew Dai left Google DeepMind knowing visual AI was the frontier he wanted to stake his claim in.. He pulled off a whirlwind fundraise that resulted in a more aggressive valuation-to-capital ratio than Thinking Machines , which raised one of the largest rounds in U.S.. In…

Posted: Dominic-Madori Davis Moonshot’s upcoming Kimi 3 is expected to close the gap with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 The latest iteration of Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI’s Kimi model series is expected to perform at par with or even surpass Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, Financial Times…

Posted: Sarah Perez Apple Intelligence approved for launch in China with Alibaba and Baidu Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s generative AI offering, is coming to China.. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that China’s internet content regulator, the Cyberspace Administration…

Microsoft appears to be prepping its sales team to get more competitive with the other major players in the AI industry.. At an internal meeting on Tuesday, the company’s executives outlined a plan for salespeople to negatively compare AI products from companies like OpenAI,…

OpenAI is officially entering the hardware market with the launch of a $230 light-up keyboard designed to pair with its AI coding assistant, Codex.. The Codex Micro, co-designed with specialty keyboard designer Work Louder, is being advertised as a fancy new way for ChatGPT…

SpaceX’s shares fell to just above $135 on Wednesday, the price that CEO Elon Musk and his company chose ahead of its blockbuster June 12 IPO that raked in nearly $86 billion.. The company’s stock spent much of the day below that IPO price, at one point dipping beneath $133…