AI & Web3 News 7/4/2025

AI & Web3 News 7/4/2025

Author

Stylianos Kampakis
July 04, 2025

AI News

  1. Court blesses AI training data: A U.S. judge ruled that using copyrighted books to train large language models can qualify as fair use, handing Anthropic a key win and setting an early precedent that could shield other model builders — but the court will still probe damages tied to pirated copies. Read the ruling techcrunch.com

  2. China’s MiniMax drops million-token model: Shanghai-based MiniMax open-sourced its M1 LLM with a one-million-token context window and “Lightning Attention” for faster long-context reasoning, claiming benchmark parity with OpenAI o3 and Gemini 2.5 while undercutting them on cost. The Apache-licensed release ups the pressure on rivals clinging to partly closed weights. Details lastweekin.ai

  3. Cloudflare wants crawlers to pay: The internet-infrastructure giant launched a private beta for Pay-Per-Crawl, reviving HTTP 402 to let publishers charge AI bots for training data. It positions the scheme as groundwork for an agent-driven web where paid content access becomes programmable rather than scraped for free. Announcement theneurondaily.com

  4. Radial Attention slashes video compute: Researchers from MIT, NVIDIA, and Stanford introduced “Radial Attention,” an O(n log n) sparse mechanism that trims training time up to 2.8× and inference 2.3× on long-form video diffusion models by dropping far-distance token pairs. The paper hints at cheaper, longer AI-generated films. Paper arxiv.org

  5. Amazon hits 1 M warehouse robots: Crossing the million-bot mark, Amazon also unveiled DeepFleet, a generative-AI model that optimizes robot traffic and promises a 10 % throughput bump. With robots now assisting 75 % of deliveries, the company edges toward a workforce that’s half silicon, half human. Coverage techcrunch.com

  6. Meta’s Superintelligence Labs go talent-hunting: Mark Zuckerberg formed Meta Superintelligence Labs under new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang and advisor Nat Friedman, luring OpenAI and DeepMind researchers with lavish “Zuck Bucks” packages to chase AGI after Llama 4’s lukewarm reception. Report reuters.com

Web3 News

  1. Bitcoin snaps back above $109K: Crypto markets rallied after a U.S.–Vietnam trade accord eased macro jitters, pushing BTC within 2 % of its all-time high while dollar weakness stoked risk appetite across digital assets. Market wrap thedefiant.io

  2. Grayscale wins ETF conversion: The SEC green-lit Grayscale’s Digital Large-Cap Fund to become a spot ETF tracking BTC, ETH, SOL, and ADA, paving the way for multi-asset crypto exposure on traditional brokerage rails. More thedefiant.io

  3. Ripple seeks U.S. banking charter: Following Circle’s move, Ripple filed for a national trust-bank license to custody tokenized dollars and integrate on-chain payments with the regulated banking system — a step that could tighten stablecoin oversight. Story theblock.co

  4. JPMorgan tokenizes carbon credits: The bank’s Onyx division teamed with S&P Global to pilot blockchain-based carbon-credit settlement, aiming to bring transparency and secondary liquidity to a market expected to exceed $250 B by 2030. Pilot details theblock.co