Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🚀 Sam Altman wants to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX
🧄 OpenAI is secretly fast-tracking 'Garlic' to rival Google
✂️ Meta pulls back on its metaverse dreams
⚠️ Anthropic CEO warns AI rivals are 'YOLOing' into bubble territory
💾 After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers
🎨 Apple design chief joins Meta
🎁 + 18 other news you might like
🧰 + 6 trending tools
📚 + 1 trending papers
🚀 Sam Altman wants to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX LINK
Sam Altman recently held talks to partner with a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, driven by his long-term interest in building massive AI data centers in orbit to harness the power of the sun.
The proposal involved OpenAI making equity investments to take a controlling stake in Stoke Space, a startup founded by former Blue Origin employees working on a fully reusable rocket called Nova.
Altman believes that insatiable demand for computing resources means humanity must eventually build a Dyson sphere around the solar system because it makes no sense to put these systems on Earth.
🧄 OpenAI is secretly fast-tracking 'Garlic' to rival Google LINK
OpenAI is rushing to build a new model codenamed Garlic to compete with Gemini 3 after Sam Altman declared a code red to address Google's rise on the LMArena leaderboard.
Mark Chen told colleagues that adjustments to pretraining allow this smaller system to rival Opus 4.5 on coding and reason by prioritizing broader connections before training for specific tasks.
The team plans to release the project "as soon as possible" for consumers, a path that differs from Anthropic, where Dario Amodei says his focus remains on serving enterprises.
✂️ Meta pulls back on its metaverse dreams LINK
Meta is signaling a definitive end to its era of unlimited spending by reportedly preparing to slash the budget for its Reality Labs metaverse division by nearly 30 percent next year.
The austerity measures specifically target the hardware unit responsible for Quest headsets and the Meta Horizon Worlds social platform, with workforce reductions and layoffs expected to begin as early as January 2026.
In a notable strategic contradiction, the company poached Apple VP Alan Dye to lead a new Creative Studio that suggests a pivot toward boutique AI hardware rather than a total retreat.
⚠️ Anthropic CEO warns AI rivals are 'YOLOing' into bubble territory LINK
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says rivals are taking dangerous risks by “YOLO-ing” billions of dollars on AI systems before knowing if the economic value will grow fast enough to justify the cost.
While OpenAI has committed $1.4 trillion to AI infrastructure projects, Amodei claims the industry faces a real dilemma balancing costly investments in data centers with uncertainty about how quickly economic value grows.
Despite his warnings about competitors pulling the risk dial too far, Anthropic is still committing $50 billion to build its first custom data centers while focusing on growing its enterprise business responsibly.
💾 After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers LINK
Micron is shutting down its Crucial brand after decades of business and will stop shipping consumer hardware like RAM sticks and solid state drives to retail stores for good.
The company says it must shift production capacity to data centers because the current generative AI boom has caused a massive surge in demand for flash memory and storage components.
Product shipments will officially end in February 2026, leaving fewer competitors against brands like Samsung, though Micron promises to still provide warranty service and support for all existing devices.
🎨 Apple design chief joins Meta LINK
Alan Dye, the head of user interface design at Apple, will reportedly join Meta in a notable shift of talent within Silicon Valley, a move the company has now confirmed.
CEO Tim Cook stated that Stephen Lemay is set to succeed the outgoing executive, noting the veteran designer has played a key role in every major interface released by the team since 1999.
This departure follows the recent launch of Liquid Glass software for iPhones and Macs, a system featuring translucent buttons and fluid animations that earned mixed reviews after it shipped in September.
Other news you might like
- Nvidia CEO says China likely won't accept its US-made H200 chips nowLINK
- The EU is probing Meta over WhatsApp’s AI chatbot restrictionsLINK
- OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model trainingLINK
- Proton now has a Google Sheets clone with end-to-end encryptionLINK
- Maximum-severity vulnerability threatens 6% of all websitesLINK
- Google launches Workspace Studio to create automated Gemini-powered agentsLINK
- Microsoft pushes back on report claiming it cut AI sales targetsLINK
- Gemini was Google’s top trending search term in 2025LINK
- OpenAI Unveils ‘Confessions’ Method to Make AI Models HonestLINK
- IBM CEO warns there’s ‘no way’ hyperscalers like Google and Amazon will be able to turn a profit at the rate of their data center spendingLINK
- Reddit’s CEO says r/popular ‘sucks,’ and it’s going awayLINK
- Sundar Pichai says Google will deploy solar-powered data centers in space by 2027LINK
- AI devices are just "solutions looking for a problem," says Logitech CEOLINK
- Valve Has Quietly Backed Projects to Bring Windows Games to ArmLINK
- Planned satellite constellations may swamp future orbiting telescopesLINK
- Inside Silicon Valley’s ‘soup wars’: Why Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI are hand delivering soup to poach talentLINK
🧰 Trending tools
Compass: a Slack-integrated data assistant that queries your warehouse and prospecting data using natural language, with GitOps-controlled context for analysts.LINK
Credit Union Mortgage Rates Dashboard: aggregates and compares current mortgage rates from 120+ credit unions against national benchmarks, with filtering by loan type and eligibility.LINK
Seedream 4.5: a scaled-up image generation model that handles multi-image editing, preserves reference details accurately, and renders dense text clearly for professional creative workflows.LINK
Weather mini 3: displays multi-stop trip forecasts in one view with on-device AI insights, eliminating the need to check weather city-by-city when traveling.LINK
Claude-Mem: a persistence layer that stores context and decisions across Claude sessions so you don't have to re-explain your project setup every time.LINK
ReliAPI: caches and validates LLM API responses to prevent paying for invalid outputs and reduce redundant calls during development and production.LINK
📚 Trending papers & reports
AI-powered persuasion could reshape democracy: researchers found that cheaper automated messaging lets wealthy groups influence public opinion more easily than grassroots movements can resist.LINK
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