Veteran portfolio manager Nancy Tengler said U.S. equities can keep climbing even with the S&P 500 near record highs, laying out a second-half playbook centered on AI infrastructure, mispriced growth stocks trading like value, cybersecurity, and catch-up opportunities in financials and consumer discretionary. Speaking on TheStreet’s Aug. 12 podcast with Caroline Woods, the Laffer Tengler Investments CEO and CIO said she has shifted capital toward names tied to power, data centers, and electrification, including Quanta Services, GE Vernova, Williams, and Deere. She also argued that Nvidia and Amazon belong in a value-oriented portfolio under current market conditions, pointing to Nvidia’s 16x to 18x forward earnings multiple, 60% to 80% earnings growth, and a PEG ratio of 0.25. Tengler said her firm also owns Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, with a preference for CrowdStrike, while treating Palantir, Tesla, and SpaceX as high-volatility “narrative” stocks. On the other side of the ledger, she said she would avoid Meta, staples, most utilities, and REITs. Her main risks for the bull market are a break in credit markets and a return of inflation, while her base case is for the S&P 500 to finish the year up 12% to 15%, rather than 20% to 25%.

Google’s Aug. 6 AI leadership reshuffle closed a long-running internal power struggle without an open break. Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of Google DeepMind and moved into a new role as Alphabet president and chief scientist focused on long-term AGI strategy. Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and one of the company’s most influential technical figures, left to start a new company, with Google joining the seed round. At the same time, Koray Kavukcuoglu was elevated to senior vice president and given direct control of the Gemini business, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai. The move lands after more than a decade of tension between DeepMind and Google Brain, two teams that operated with different cultures, priorities and chains of command. The article traces that split from Google’s 2014 acquisition of DeepMind for £400 million through the 2023 creation of Google DeepMind, when Hassabis became CEO and the company folded compute, budgets and personnel into a single structure after the shock of ChatGPT and GPT-4. It argues that while Hassabis appeared to win that merger, the deeper result was that Pichai gained tighter control over Google’s AI apparatus. With Gemini facing delays in 2026 and Google stepping up capital spending, the latest changes mark a transfer of operational authority away from star scientists and toward engineering managers and top corporate leadership.

OpenAI product lead Tibo Sottiaux said on X that he was part of a Google team that built an internal product called LMChat, which he described as essentially "ChatGPT one year before it came out." According to Sottiaux, the tool was never released because Google was too nervous to ship it, and DeepMind was blocked from launching products that could disrupt Google’s core search business. His comments came in response to a post by former Meta engineer Cheng Lou, who referenced remarks from Google chief scientist Jeff Dean saying Google had internal chatbots before ChatGPT launched, but did not think they were better than standard Google Search. The timeline outlined in the report links LMChat to Google’s broader work on conversational AI, including LaMDA in 2021 and Meena in 2020. The report also revisits Google’s rushed response after ChatGPT’s release. In February 2023, Google introduced Bard, but an error in a live demo was followed by an about $100 billion one-day drop in Alphabet’s market value. Two months later, Google merged Brain and DeepMind into Google DeepMind. Sottiaux later joined OpenAI in 2024, led work on Codex, and in 2026 became a core product leader overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex.

Stablecoin payments infrastructure startup Cyclops said on July 15, 2026 that it had raised a $20 million Series A led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures and Global PayTech Ventures. The round came roughly four months after an $8 million seed financing in March, bringing the company’s total funding to $28 million in less than half a year, all in equity. Headquartered in Miami with an office in Vienna, Cyclops sells stablecoin infrastructure to payment service providers, acquirers and payment processors. The company says its platform has processed more than $2 billion in total volume, operates across 150 countries, holds more than 100 related compliance licenses globally, supports a merchant network of 300,000 and recently posted 350% month-over-month transaction growth. Cyclops was founded by former The Giving Block executives who later ran crypto and stablecoin operations inside Shift4 Payments after that company acquired The Giving Block in 2022. The startup says it is trying to solve the fragmented process payment companies face when adding stablecoin capabilities, offering a single API, low-code integration, compliance tooling and settlement infrastructure built around payment workflows rather than retail crypto use cases.

WEMADE and WEMIX PLAY have opened global pre-registration for the Web3 version of Legend of YMIR, a fantasy MMORPG built on Unreal Engine 5. Players can earn exclusive NFT rewards, participate in staking events, and receive gWEMIX tokens ahead of the official launch.

WEMADE and WEMIX PLAY have launched global pre-registration for the Web3 version of Legend of YMIR, featuring gWEMIX rewards, staking campaigns, NFT incentives, and community events ahead of launch.

WEMADE and WEMIX PLAY announce global pre-registration for the Web3 version of Legend of YMIR, a fantasy MMORPG built on Unreal Engine 5. Players can earn exclusive rewards, participate in staking events for NFTs, and join the Valhalla Trials for token airdrops.

Elon Musk's social platform X obtains 12 more money transmitter licenses across the US, advancing its 'everything app' vision. Meanwhile, his AI startup X.AI files with the SEC to raise $1 billion via equity offering, with nearly $135 million already secured.