evening AI tech roundup: funding, safety, and shipping

DeepSeek , the Chinese large language model developer, is preparing for a 2027 IPO debut, but it could come as early as the en d of this year as it also looks to raise around $1.5 billion in new funds at about a $71 billion valuation, Bloomberg reports . The news comes after the company raised $7 billion in funds just a month ago at around a $50 billion valuation in its first-ever outside funding round.

The China-based startup, founded in 2023, made headlines early last year after releasing AI technology that was both more efficient and more cost-effective than U.S. model makers. It has since grown exponentially in popularity. In June, it accounted for nearly 23% of all the tens of trillions of tokens processed by enterprise-focused AI gateway Vercel, the company reports.

DeepSeek continues to show how Chinese open source models perform within a few breaths of top U.S. AI labs, despite U.S. export controls on chips. DeepSeek’s cloud service runs on chips made by the Chinese company Huawei Technologies. Investors in DeepSeek include Tencent and Beijing’s National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, per Bloomberg.

Last chance to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit. Join 1,000+ founders and VCs at all stages for real-world scaling insights and connections that move the needle. Savings end June 26, 11:59 p.m. PT .

Users of OpenAI’s latest coding and cybersecurity-oriented flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, are posting horrifying accounts on social media, claiming the model just up and deleted their files, data, even entire databases, on its own, without asking first.

“GPT-5.6-Sol just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac’s files,” wrote Matt Shumer, the founder and CEO of AI startup OthersideAI, maker of HyperWrite, in a now viral post on X .

“GPT-5.6 Sol just deleted my whole production database. That’s it. Not a joke. This had never happened to me before, with any other model, ever,” developer Bruno Lemos posted on X .

“Looks like I’ve gotten bit by Codex Sol’s overly ambitious system and it deleted some files it shouldn’t have. I have backups so I’ll be fine, but this is not cool, Sol needs to be toned down,” posted developer Joey Kudish.

True, a handful of users making such claims — even one as credible as Shumer — isn’t statistically reliable evidence that the model is solely at fault. Plenty of other variables can cause an AI system to misbehave.

Apple is opening up its biggest-ever Siri overhaul to a broader audience with the release of the iOS 27 public beta, giving everyday users the chance to try out the new AI assistant ahead of its broader launch later this fall.

The public beta marks the first time Apple has made its AI-powered Siri widely available beyond developers. With some 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, even if only a fraction of users install the public beta, it will still represent the largest test of Apple’s redesigned AI assistant and its answer to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

The Siri AI update , which was officially announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, turns Apple’s aging voice assistant into a more capable, AI-powered tool that can access information on a user’s device, including emails, photos, and messages, as well as respond to what’s on the screen and ground its answers in world knowledge, similar to any modern-day AI chatbot.

It’s also more deeply integrated across the operating system. It can be accessed by saying “Hey Siri” or by pressing the side button, as before, as well as by swiping down from the Dynamic Island (the black bar at the top of the screen). Plus, it’s integrated into the iPhone’s built-in search engine tool, Spotlight, making it more powerful than before because it can search for answers to almost any question.

For the first time, Siri has also been given its own stand-alone app, a user experience that people already comfortable with chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini may prefer. However, because Siri is so deeply integrated throughout the iPhone, accessing it via an app seems somewhat unnecessary.

The post title is "Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone."

It links to a PrismML release update.

The post has drawn 266 upvotes and 90 comments on Hacker News.

The focus is on making a large model practical on-device rather than only in cloud hosting.

A Show HN post by julesrms presents Juggler as an open-source GUI coding agent.

It links to the project at github.com/juggler-ai/juggler.

The thread shows 142 upvotes and 75 comments.

The announcement positions it as a developer-facing interface option in agent-based coding.