AI Summary
5 min readUber's $14.8 Billion Bet on Delivery Hero, Thinking Machines' Open-Weight Gambit, and XAI's Chaotic Rebuild
Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero for roughly $14.8 billion, Thinking Machines Lab released its first open-weight model, and sources detailed XAI's messy race to catch Claude under new leadership. Here are the major developments from Thursday, July 16, 2026.
Uber's Delivery Hero Acquisition
Uber agreed to acquire the German food delivery company Delivery Hero in a deal that values it at about $14.8 billion. The offer represents a 26% premium to the €33 per share Uber originally offered in May. Delivery Hero shares are up 68% year to date and traded at €38.28 in Frankfurt on Thursday.
In a separate transaction, investment firm SSW Partners will acquire 14 other markets for about $1.6 billion and will operate those businesses until it finds buyers for the assets, which include units in Austria, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Hiving off some markets may ease regulatory concerns about the deal.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:43) **Uber Acquires Delivery Hero for ~$14.8B** - Uber agrees to a deal for the German food delivery company at a 26% premium, expanding into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
- 2 (03:35) **Thinking Machines Lab Releases First Open-Weight Model "Inkling"** - The 975B parameter model is a broad, balanced foundation model, not optimized for a single domain.
- 3 (07:09) **Apple Planning Major iPad Mini Overhaul with OLED Screen** - The updated model, codenamed J510, is expected to feature an OLED display for the first time.
- 4 (10:16) **SpaceX AI Open-Sources Grok Build After Data Upload Backlash** - The coding agent's source code is released under an Apache 2.0 license after users discovered it uploaded files, including SSH keys and passwords, to XAI's servers.
- 5 (11:41) **Inside XAI's Chaotic Race to Catch Claude** - Bloomberg details how new President Michael Nichols was tasked with catching up to Anthropic's Claude, inheriting a company in disarray.
- 6 Standout Quotes
- 7 "He knows rockets. He knows electric cars. He did not, and I believe does not know AI." - Brockman on Elon Musk's understanding of AI during the MacHard project.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero for ~$14.8B, expanding into 99 markets. Thinking Machines released its first open-weight model, Inkling, SpaceXAI open-sourced Grok Build after a data-upload backlash, and sources detailed xAI's chaotic race to catch Claude under new leadership.
- Uber agrees to acquire Delivery Hero in a deal that values the German food delivery company at ~$14.8B, offering €41.50 per share and buying Prosus' 16.8% stake (Bloomberg)
- Thinking Machines Lab debuts Inkling, an open-weight MoE model with 975B total and 41B active parameters, trained to be broad rather than optimized for one area (Thinking Machines Lab)
- Thinking Machines Lab debuts Inkling, an open-weight MoE model with 975B total and 41B active parameters, trained to be broad rather than optimized for one area (WSJ)
- SpaceXAI open-sources Grok Build under an Apache 2.0 license, after the tool uploaded user repositories to SpaceXAI's Google Cloud bucket, causing a backlash (Simon Willison)
- SpaceXAI open-sources Grok Build under an Apache 2.0 license, after the tool uploaded user repositories to SpaceXAI's Google Cloud bucket, causing a backlash (The Decoder)
- Sources detail how xAI has been slowed down by internal chaos as Musk pushed for Grok to match Claude, amid signs it is turning a corner under Michael Nicolls (Bloomberg)
- Sources: Apple is preparing new iPads, including an iPad mini with an OLED screen by October and refreshed entry-level iPads and iPad Airs for 2027 (Bloomberg)
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