Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🤖 Amazon demands Perplexity stop its AI agent from making purchases
💻 Apple to launch a 'cheap' MacBook in 2026
📉 Big Short investor makes $1.1 billion bet against AI
🛰️ Google plans orbital AI data centers
🎥 OpenAI launches its Sora app on Android
🤝 Google settles with Epic to change the Play Store
🎁 + 22 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
🤖 Amazon demands Perplexity stop its AI agent from making purchases LINK
Amazon issued a legal threat demanding Perplexity stop its AI shopping assistant, Comet, from using the e-commerce site for violating terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent.
Perplexity claims its agent has the same permissions as a person, but Amazon says third-party applications making purchases for customers must operate openly and identify themselves as bots.
This dispute sets a precedent where Amazon claims the right to decide if it will allow external shopping bots, like Comet, which could compete with its own tool called Rufus.
💻 Apple to launch a 'cheap' MacBook in 2026 LINK
Apple is reportedly creating a lower-cost MacBook, codenamed J700, scheduled for release in early 2026 to compete against popular Chromebooks from Google for the education market.
To sell for well under $1,000, the new machine will use an iPhone’s A-series processor and a lower-end LCD display that is slightly smaller than the current MacBook Air.
This move creates an entry-level Mac category, branching Apple's silicon strategy with an A-series chip that prioritizes cost over the raw processing power found in M-series models.
📉 Big Short investor makes $1.1 billion bet against AI LINK
Michael Burry’s hedge fund Scion Asset Management has placed significant bets against the AI sector by purchasing put options on industry darlings Nvidia and the data analytics firm Palantir.
Through social media posts, Burry draws parallels to the dot-com bubble, pointing to similar U.S. tech capex growth and the subsequent telecommunications crash as a historical warning for investors.
The investor also shared a diagram of the AI industry's circular dealmaking, suggesting the market is a tangled web of multibillion-dollar investments between a handful of overlapping tech giants.
🛰️ Google plans orbital AI data centers LINK
Google's Project Suncatcher aims to create AI data centers in space using satellites with Tensor Processing Unit chips, which will operate on constant solar power in a sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit.
To work as one system, the satellites will use free-space optical links for high-speed data transfer and fly in a very close formation, separated by just hundreds of meters.
The plan's success depends on launch costs dropping below $200 per kilogram, and Google is partnering with Planet to launch two prototype satellites to test the concept by early 2027.
🎥 OpenAI launches its Sora app on Android LINK
OpenAI’s AI video generator app, Sora, has officially launched on the Google Play Store for Android users in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The Android version keeps all iOS features, including "Cameos" for creating self-likeness videos, and includes a TikTok-style feed for sharing and discovering content from other people.
Sora has faced criticism over deepfakes and copyrighted characters, but OpenAI plans future updates like basic video editing tools and expanded character cameos featuring pets and inanimate objects.
🤝 Google settles with Epic to change the Play Store LINK
Google’s settlement with Epic lets Android app developers direct users to alternative payment mechanisms inside their apps and through external web links, a significant change for the Play Store.
The deal also caps the fees the search giant can charge for these payments at either nine percent or twenty percent, with the actual rate based on the transaction type.
After a jury found Google had stifled competition, Epic Games' CEO praised the proposal and announced the Epic Games Store for Android would be coming to the Google Play Store.
Other news you might like
- Tesla Is Obsessed With Musk’s Pay Package. Musk Is Obsessed With AI.LINK
- China bans foreign AI chips from state-funded data centres, sources sayLINK
- xAI used employee biometric data to train Elon Musk’s AI girlfriendLINK
- IBM cuts thousands of jobs as it pushes deeper into AI and cloud computingLINK
- In a stunning comeback, Jared Isaacman is renominated to lead NASALINK
- Google Clears DOJ Antitrust Hurdle for $32 Billion Wiz DealLINK
- Apple Watch finally gets the WhatsApp appLINK
- Google Maps bakes in Gemini to improve navigation and hands-free useLINK
- Stability AI’s legal win over Getty leaves copyright law in limboLINK
- Sequoia names Alfred Lin and Pat Grady as new Co-Stewards as Roelof Botha steps downLINK
- Anthropic expects B2B demand to boost revenue to $70B in 2028: ReportLINK
- Google’s AI Mode gets new agentic capabilities to help book event tickets and beauty appointmentsLINK
- Former Meta employees launch a ring to take voice notes and control musicLINK
- Google warns that a new era of self-evolving, AI-driven malware has begunLINK
- AI data centers could soon consume as much electricity as one-third of all U.S. householdsLINK
- Phone location data of top EU officials for sale, report findsLINK
- Sam Bankman-Fried Wants Another Trial, But His Lawyer Faces SkepticismLINK
- Netflix Starts Bigger Push Into Video PodcastsLINK
- Shopify says AI traffic is up 7x since January, AI-driven orders are up 11xLINK
- Chinese astronauts’ return to Earth delayed over fears spaceship damaged by debrisLINK
- “Louvre” as a password, outdated software, impossible updates… Ten years of IT security breaches at the world’s leading museumLINK
- Google’s new weather model impressed during its first hurricane seasonLINK
Latest research and tools
Bluetui: a terminal-based tool for managing Bluetooth devices on Linux.LINK
Grayskull: a tiny computer vision C library that enables resource-constrained devices like microcontrollers to run algorithms on grayscale images.LINK
Analyzing the Performance of WebAssembly vs. Native Code: this paper finds that large applications compiled to WebAssembly run 45% to 55% slower on average than native code.LINK
Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery: this paper presents an AI model designed to act as an autonomous scientist that can make new discoveries.LINK
The Physics of News, Rumors, and Opinions: this paper uses models from physics to explain how information spreads through social networks.LINK
Benchmarking multilingual long-context language models: this study tests how well large AI models process long texts in different languages, showing that most struggle more as the text gets longer, especially outside of English.LINK
Want to get the latest news differently? Find us on:
See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}