According to BlockBeats, on September 12th, US inflation data for August showed a further increase. A research report from CICC pointed out that the US CPI rose 0.4% month-on-month in August, while the core CPI rose 0.3% month-on-month, both indicators showing an acceleration compared to the previous period; the core CPI rose 2.4% year-on-year, slightly higher than market expectations.

CICC believes that August's inflation performance has reached the threshold for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again. It expects the Fed to raise interest rates by 25 basis points at its September 16 meeting, raising the target range for the federal funds rate to 3.75% to 4%.

Structurally, rising energy prices and resilient service prices remain key drivers of inflation, while some AI-related price pressures are also beginning to emerge. CICC expects the Federal Reserve to lower its unemployment rate forecast, raise its inflation forecast, and increase its interest rate path for 2027 and 2028 at this meeting, sending a more hawkish policy signal.

CICC also cautioned that a greater risk lies in the possibility that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates further this year or next, which means that there is still room for the market to readjust its current pricing of the interest rate cut cycle.

According to a report by the Financial Times on September 12th, Li Lin, the former founder of Huobi, recently sold his mansion, The Holme, located in Regent's Park, London, for approximately £190 million. Li Lin purchased the property in 2024 for £139 million and sold it after holding it for nearly two years, resulting in a book value difference of approximately £51 million.

The Holme boasts 40 bedrooms and approximately 4 acres of private gardens, and is leased on a long-term Crown Estate property. The seller's identity was not previously disclosed, and Li Lin's actual ownership was not reflected in publicly available UK property registers.

Li Lin founded the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi in 2013 and sold his shares in 2022. His family office, Avenir Group, is headquartered in Hong Kong and primarily invests in digital assets. Li Lin is also currently the largest shareholder of the cryptocurrency wealth management group Bitfire Group, holding a 30% stake.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Mecka AI, a humanoid robot data startup, is nearing completion of a new round of financing led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at approximately $500 million. The size and specific terms of this round of financing are yet to be determined and are subject to change.

Mecka AI primarily collects data on people's daily movements through body sensors and smartphones, and uses this data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems. Founded in 2024, the company just completed a $60 million funding round this June, led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures.

It is worth noting that the founding team of Mecka AI previously focused on food service fintech and crypto startups, and did not come from the robotics industry.

According to Beating AI News, OpenAI has fixed a number of quality issues that arose after the launch of Astra. The most egregious issue involved older skills: some skills written for previous models were frequently triggered unnecessarily on Astra, even preventing models from checking their own work.

Another issue stemmed from the context management experiment, which caused Astra to stop prematurely or even respond to earlier messages. OpenAI has shut down the experiment, affecting an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 users.

The team also removed a batch of misconfigured inference engines that were lowering model quality. After the fixes, Astra should be able to more stably keep up with the latest instructions and check its own performance. OpenAI also announced another reset for users.