Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🔍 Apple plans an AI search engine for Siri
📱 Instagram launches an iPad app after 15 years
🤖 Tesla reveals new Optimus prototype with Grok AI
⚖️ Scale AI sues former employee and rival Mercor
🤝 Atlassian acquires The Browser Company for $610 million
🌍 New AI turns photos into explorable 3D worlds
🎁 + 13 other news you might like
🔮 + 5 handpicked research papers and tools
🔍 Apple plans an AI search engine for Siri LINK
Apple is developing an AI search feature for Siri, internally named "World Knowledge Answers", that will summarize web results using text, photos, video, and other multimedia elements.
The company plans to power the new tool with a Google-developed model that will be hosted on Apple’s own secure Private Cloud Compute servers instead of on Google's cloud.
Sources claim Apple also considered a partnership with Anthropic for its Claude models, but the firm reportedly asked for $1.5 billion a year, a higher price than what Google wanted.
📱 Instagram launches an iPad app after 15 years LINK
After nearly 15 years, Instagram has launched an official iPad app that is optimized for larger screens, replacing the stretched-out iPhone layout that people previously had to use.
The new interface is built for the tablet, defaulting to the Reels screen and showing comments beside videos or letting you view a conversation next to your main chat list.
Its Feed offers three viewing modes called “All,” “Friends,” and “Latest,” which let you see recommended posts, content from mutuals, or just a simple chronological timeline.
🤖 Tesla reveals new Optimus prototype with Grok AI LINK
A video on X reveals Tesla's next-generation Optimus prototype answering questions from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, demonstrating its early integration with the company's Grok artificial intelligence assistant.
The new prototype has a fresh gold color and features hands that are much more detailed than previous versions, although they appear non-functional and similar to mannequin hands in the footage.
Tesla previously said its next-generation hands would have actuators in the forearm operating the fingers through cables, a crucial improvement for performing both delicate and more imposing tasks.
⚖️ Scale AI sues former employee and rival Mercor LINK
Scale AI is suing competitor Mercor and former employee Eugene Ling, alleging he stole more than 100 confidential documents with customer strategies and proprietary information for the rival company.
The suit claims Ling committed a breach of contract by trying to pitch Mercor's services to one of Scale's largest clients, identified only as "Customer A," before leaving his job.
Mercor’s co-founder denies using any trade secrets but admits Ling possessed old files in a personal Google Drive, stating his company offered to destroy the documents before the lawsuit.
🤝 Atlassian acquires The Browser Company for $610 million LINK
Atlassian is buying The Browser Company for $610 million in cash, acquiring the new AI-focused Dia browser to connect its popular work apps like Jira and Confluence together.
The deal gives Dia the distribution and sales team needed to compete, shifting its focus from personal tasks to exclusively serving individual users in a professional setting at their jobs.
While Dia becomes a work-focused tool, the original Arc browser will only be maintained and not actively developed, with its future now uncertain under the new company ownership.
🌍 New AI turns photos into explorable 3D worlds LINK
Tencent's new AI, HunyuanWorld-Voyager, creates explorable video from a single image by generating 3D-consistent scenes that users can navigate using a defined camera path for movement.
The model simultaneously produces RGB video and depth information, which can be converted into 3D point clouds for reconstruction, though it stops short of creating true 3D models.
To learn this effect, Voyager was trained on over 100,000 video clips, including computer-generated scenes from Unreal Engine, teaching it to imitate camera motion in game environments.
Other news you might like
- Google ordered to pay $425 million in app data collection lawsuitLINK
- DeepSeek looks to repeat R1 success, challenge OpenAI with AI agents launchLINK
- Coinbase CEO wants AI to write 50% of his platform’s code by OctoberLINK
- Amazon's Starlink Rival, Project Kuiper, Demos 1 Gigabit DownloadsLINK
- xAI’s CFO is the latest executive to leave Elon Musk’s AI firmLINK
- Police disrupts Streameast, largest pirated sports streaming networkLINK
- The Google antitrust ruling turns search into infrastructureLINK
- Mistral, the French AI giant, is reportedly on the cusp of securing a $14B valuationLINK
- Roblox expands use of age estimation tech and introduces standardized ratingsLINK
- Apple Vision Pro's biggest market is enterprise, in spite of obvious limitationsLINK
- Venezuela’s president thinks American spies can’t hack Huawei phonesLINK
- Microsoft-backed research team builds hollow-core cable with lowest signal loss recorded in optical fiberLINK
- Mis-issued certificates for 1.1.1.1 DNS service pose a threat to the InternetLINK
Latest research and tools
Microsoft BASIC for 6502: the source code for the influential programming language that powered many early personal computers and made coding accessible to a mass audience.LINK
Hledger 1.50: a plain-text accounting tool update that makes transaction balancing more robust by using only the precisions found within each individual journal entry.LINK
Entropy-Guided Loop: an approach that improves AI reasoning by using a model's uncertainty about its own words to create self-correcting loops for more accurate answers.LINK
λar: a Racket macro that allows anonymous functions to call themselves, simplifying the process of adding recursion without needing to assign a formal name.LINK
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to Be Agent-First: this paper argues that data systems need to be fundamentally redesigned to serve autonomous AI agents as their primary users, rather than humans.LINK
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