The Bank of New York Mellon is in talks with Kraken’s parent company about infrastructure cooperation.

Prominent trader Killa posted that he expects Bitcoin to reach a yearly high of $97,000, with the majority of the year likely seeing the cryptocurrency trade sideways below that level. Killa noted Bitcoin’s short-term key level is $80,000–$83,000, a threshold more significant than many realize: if it breaks, the next likely zone would be $74,000–$77,000, which could mark the final capitulation bottom before Bitcoin’s push toward $97,000. However, if bullish momentum persists, pullbacks could be far shallower, potentially only dipping to the $80,000 low before the next upward rally. As a BTC-focused quantitative trader, Killa correctly predicted the peak of the current bull run in May 2025 and has over 200,000 followers on X. In mid-April, he shorted Bitcoin at $74,688, then shifted to a long position during the broad market sell-off on June 5.

The largest $CXMT short, 0xf292, has fully closed the position, taking a total loss of $10.79M!

Beating AI Express News reports that Andrej Karpathy, currently part of Anthropic’s pre-training team, has once again discussed how large models should output results to humans. He argues that as AI takes on more specific tasks, humans will spend more time understanding AI outputs, verifying the processes behind them, and making judgments. Making it faster for people to grasp what AI has accomplished will grow increasingly critical. Karpathy’s suggestions have evolved from text to video: For text, teams can draw on the ASD-STE100 standard to use shorter, less ambiguous language; for complex content, they can create diagrams directly, and further develop animated, interactive web pages. He is most bullish on customized explanatory videos, such as having AI generate a 3Blue1Brown-style animated video with voiceover on the spot for a specific problem. This aligns with Karpathy’s earlier views on AI interaction. Back in May this year, he already recommended using HTML to host complex large model outputs, summarizing the evolution of AI outputs as: plain text → Markdown → HTML, and eventually moving toward interactive videos and simulated environments. Compared to long blocks of text, images, animations, and interactive interfaces can turn complex information into far more accessible forms. As code and model capabilities grow cheaper, software that was not worth developing specifically in the past can now be built on demand. A single web page, an interactive tool, or even a short video can be tailored to serve one person, explain one problem, and be discarded after use.

Beating AI News reports that AI2 has open-sourced AstaBrief 8B, a research report model based on Qwen3-8B that serves as the report-writing component of AI2’s research assistant Asta. Asta first retrieves relevant papers and content snippets, then passes them to AstaBrief to organize into a cited research report. Asta’s original "Thinking" mode relied primarily on Claude and used a multi-step process: it first summarized and organized retrieved results, then generated reports by chapter. AstaBrief eliminates these intermediate steps, allowing it to produce a full report in one step once given a research question and relevant paper snippets. AI2 has now integrated AstaBrief into Asta’s Fast mode. AI2’s tests show Fast mode takes an average of 51.1 seconds to generate a report, compared to 178.5 seconds for the original Claude-powered Thinking mode—an approximate 3.5x speedup. In the ScholarQA-CS2 benchmark, AstaBrief scores 90.5 in citation precision and 78.2 in citation recall, while base Qwen3-8B scores 76.2 and 64.6 respectively. The model weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license, with training data also made public. Developers can integrate AstaBrief into their own paper retrieval systems, or use official examples to process local PDFs directly. AI2 also noted that the model’s main training and evaluation were completed in 2025, with comparisons made to state-of-the-art systems at that time; no full retesting was conducted against 2026’s latest models like Claude.

Former President Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration will immediately begin distributing $100 "checks" to more than 20 million seniors to help cover their Medicare Part B premiums. He also stated that if Republicans win the midterm elections, a "$5,000 Trump bonus" will be distributed to every U.S. citizen.

According to three U.S. officials who spoke to Axios, multiple core members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s cabinet held a closed-door, hours-long meeting at Camp David on Friday to discuss next steps for a potential war with Iran and the ongoing conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi movement. The Trump administration did not publicly announce the highly unusual gathering. The last comparable meeting took place in June 2025, just days before Israel launched a war on Iran. Officials said the session was chaired by Vice President JD Vance. Attendees included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. One official noted of the Middle East crisis: “Some decisions have been made, or at least thoroughly discussed.” The White House declined to comment. Separately, on Friday afternoon, as advisors met at Camp David, reporters asked Trump about his next moves regarding Iran. Trump responded: “If I told you, you’d have a blockbuster news story. But you’ll have to wait and see. Things are going very well. Iran is not in a good position.”