Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
📈 Sora reaches number 3 on App Store
🚀 Blue Origin to reuse New Glenn booster for Moon mission
🚫 Apple pulls ICEBlock from the App Store
🎮 xAI pays gamers $100 an hour to train Grok
⚖️ LinkedIn sues company scraping millions of profiles
☣️ Microsoft says AI can create “zero day” threats in biology
🎁 + 19 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
📈 Sora reaches number 3 on App Store LINK
OpenAI's Sora app for AI videos reached number 3 on the U.S. App Store after getting 56,000 downloads on its first day, despite being an invite-only release for now.
Its day-one installs tied with xAI's Grok but fell behind ChatGPT and Gemini, while beating the launch numbers for both the Claude and Microsoft Copilot apps on the iOS platform.
The new video application accumulated a total of 164,000 installs during its first two days, which helped it secure the high overall spot on the U.S. charts after its launch.
🚀 Blue Origin to reuse New Glenn booster for Moon mission LINK
To launch its first robotic Moon lander early next year, Blue Origin must recover the New Glenn rocket’s first stage booster during its second flight this coming November.
The rocket’s debut launch successfully reached orbit, but its booster fell into the Atlantic Ocean when three engines failed to reignite to slow the vehicle down for landing.
Engineers made seven changes focused on "propellant management and engine bleed control improvements" to fix the issue, making the company confident it will nail the next booster recovery.
🚫 Apple pulls ICEBlock from the App Store LINK
Apple pulled the ICEBlock app from its App Store after the Justice Department, acting on the Trump administration's direction, cited concerns about "safety risks" to federal immigration workers.
The app let users lawfully report sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, sharing their location within a 5-mile radius and even specific details about their clothing.
The U.S. government argued that the app endangered its workers, pointing to a recent shooting where an FBI official claimed the gunman had searched for similar tracking applications.
🎮 xAI pays gamers $100 an hour to train Grok LINK
Elon Musk's xAI is hiring a "Video Games Tutor" to train the Grok chatbot on video game concepts, mechanics, and generation, paying between $45 and $100 per hour.
The position requires proficiency in game design or computer science and the ability to analyze gaming content using proprietary software, not just experience as a proficient gamer.
This job can be fully remote for people with strong self-motivation, a surprising work-from-home option for an Elon Musk company that also comes with medical coverage benefits.
⚖️ LinkedIn sues company scraping millions of profiles LINK
LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against software company ProAPIs, accusing it of operating millions of fake accounts to scrape member data and then sell the information to third-party customers for a fee.
The court filing claims ProAPIs creates thousands of fake accounts daily to evade detection, allowing it to copy user information that is located behind the social media platform’s password wall.
ProAPIs allegedly charges clients up to $15,000 per month for the scraped data while also using LinkedIn’s trademark to falsely suggest that its product is endorsed by the social network.
☣️ Microsoft says AI can create “zero day” threats in biology LINK
Microsoft warns its research shows AI can design new toxic proteins, demonstrating an urgent need for enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening to prevent the creation of biological threats.
Monitoring commercial DNA synthesis is presented as a practical defense, since a few companies dominate US manufacturing and can work with the government to detect dangerous orders.
Some researchers argue this defense is weak and that biosecurity controls should be built directly into the large language models themselves, rather than relying on external choke points.
Other news you might like
- Perplexity’s Comet browser is now available to everyone for freeLINK
- Tension emerges between Meta's AI teamsLINK
- Threads takes on X with new communities featureLINK
- Google’s Jules enters developers’ toolchains as AI coding agent competition heats upLINK
- Amazon to resume drone delivery following crash in ArizonaLINK
- OpenAI dismisses Elon Musk’s lawsuit as “harassment tactic”LINK
- China trials 'energy-saving' underwater data centersLINK
- Anthropic claims context engineering beats prompt engineering when managing AI agentsLINK
- Ex-OpenAI researcher dissects one of ChatGPT’s delusional spiralsLINK
- Nearly a third of Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey saysLINK
- Google Quantum AI acquires Atlantic Quantum, unlocks faster chip developmentLINK
- Jeff Bezos says AI is in an 'industrial bubble' but society to get 'gigantic' benefits from the techLINK
- Microsoft inks $33 billion in deals with 'neoclouds' like Nebius, CoreWeave — Nebius deal alone secures 100,000 Nvidia GB300 chips for internal useLINK
- Strava sues Garmin in bizarre patent infringement lawsuitLINK
- Hacking group claims theft of 1 billion records from Salesforce customer databasesLINK
- Apple Watch & Mac mini no longer listed as carbon neutral after greenwashing concernsLINK
- Alphabet Prepares to Sell Life Sciences Unit VerilyLINK
- After nine years of grinding, Replit finally found its market. Can it keep it?LINK
- Meta won’t allow users to opt out of targeted ads based on AI chatsLINK
Latest research and tools
Fp8: a performance issue where operations run approximately 100 tflops faster when the underlying kernel's name includes the word "cutlass."LINK
Niri: a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that arranges windows in columns on an infinite strip, preventing existing windows from resizing when new ones open.LINK
FyneDesk: a desktop environment for Linux and Unix systems, written in the Go language and using material design to create an easy-to-use interface.LINK
Webbol: a minimal static web server written in COBOL that serves files from the directory where it is running.LINK
Redshifted civilizations, galactic empires, and the Fermi paradox: the paper argues that the universe's expansion makes it impossible for civilizations to colonize beyond their local group of galaxies, which could explain why we haven't found them.LINK
Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link B. The Transformer and Models of the Brain: this paper proposes that the way Transformer AI models work is similar to a leading theory of brain function called predictive coding.LINK
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