☕️ Apple hits record sales despite chip shortage

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In today's Techpresso:

📈 Apple hits record sales despite chip shortage

👀 Musk says xAI trained Grok on OpenAI

🚛 Tesla starts Semi truck mass production after 9 years

🐧 Severe Linux threat catches world flat-footed

👓 Meta fires 1,100 AI trainers over Ray-Ban leaks

🤖 1X opens US humanoid factory targeting 100,000 NEO robots

Plus: 🎁 16 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

📈 Apple hits record sales despite chip shortage LINK

Apple brought in $57 billion from iPhone sales during its record March quarter, contributing to total revenue of $111.2 billion, with Tim Cook crediting strong demand for the iPhone 17 lineup on Thursday's earnings call.

Cook cautioned that memory chip costs will climb significantly starting in June due to "RAMageddon," the AI industry's heavy appetite for memory chips, which has already quadrupled RAM prices and may push iPhone prices higher.

Apple's March spending on memory chips already rose, though the company offset costs by selling stockpiled inventory, and Cook told Reuters there is "just a little less flexibility in the supply chain at the moment for getting more parts."

👀 Musk says xAI trained Grok on OpenAI LINK

Elon Musk admitted on the stand in a California federal court on Thursday that xAI trained Grok using distillation on OpenAI models, saying the practice was common across AI companies when asked directly.

The admission came during Musk's trial against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, where he alleges they broke the original nonprofit mission by shifting the entity to a for-profit structure.

Musk also ranked the leading AI providers during testimony, placing Anthropic first, followed by OpenAI, Google, and Chinese open source models, and described xAI as a smaller company with just a few hundred employees.

🚛 Tesla starts Semi truck mass production after 9 years LINK

Tesla has kicked off mass production of its Semi electric truck nearly a decade after the 2017 unveiling, with the first big rig rolling off the high volume line at a dedicated plant near Gigafactory Nevada.

The Semi comes in a 325-mile Standard Range trim priced around $260,000 and a 500-mile Long Range version near $300,000, both packing a 1,072HP tri-motor system that charges at up to 1.2MW on Megachargers.

Deliveries start later this year and undercut the Freightliner eCascadia ($400,000, 230 miles) and Volvo VNR Electric ($350,000, 275 miles), though Tesla won't hit the factory's 50,000-truck yearly peak output.

🐧 Severe Linux threat catches world flat-footed LINK

Researchers at security firm Theori released attack code on Wednesday for a Linux bug called CopyFail that lets regular users seize full control of almost every version of Linux, leaving companies racing to protect servers and personal machines.

Known as CVE-2026-31431, the flaw was quietly reported to Linux kernel maintainers five weeks ago and fixed in updates such as 7.0 and 6.19.12, but most Linux distributions had not yet shipped those fixes when the code went public.

One script works against every unpatched system without changes, letting attackers take over shared servers, escape Kubernetes containers that isolate apps, and sneak the code into pull requests so it runs inside automated build and deployment pipelines.

👓 Meta fires 1,100 AI trainers over Ray-Ban leaks LINK

Meta has cut ties with Sama, a Kenya-based contractor that trained its generative AI systems using Ray-Ban smart glasses footage, triggering the layoff of 1,108 workers after some spoke out about the recordings they reviewed.

Sama employees told Swedish newspapers in February that they labeled footage showing banking information, private conversations, naked people in bathrooms, and intimate encounters, often captured from subjects who seemingly did not know they were being recorded.

Meta says its terms of service cover these details and the glasses need explicit permission to engage AI mode, but Sama workers reported being forced to sit idle under tighter security as the firm hunts for the whistleblowers.

🤖 1X opens US humanoid factory targeting 100,000 NEO robots LINK

1X has begun full-scale production of its NEO humanoid robot at a new 58,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California, with plans to build more than 100,000 units per year by 2027.

The factory uses a vertically integrated model, with 1X designing and making motors, batteries, sensors, structures, and transmission systems in-house, and its first-year run of over 10,000 units sold out within five days of its October launch.

Each NEO runs on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor platform for onboard AI inference and is trained using NVIDIA Isaac simulation tools, with customer shipments starting in 2026 through a $20,000 early access program or a $499 monthly subscription.

Other news you might like

• Half of Google’s and Amazon’s ‘blowout AI profits’ came from a stake in Anthropic—not from their actual businessLINK

• GPT-5.5 matches Claude Mythos in cyber attack tests, UK AI Security Institute findsLINK

• Elon Musk's 7 biggest stumbles on the stand at OpenAI trialLINK

• Anthropic Opens Claude Security Beta as Mythos Access Fight DeepensLINK

• Netflix's TikTok-like vertical feed is finally hereLINK

• The craziest part of Musk v. Altman happened while the jury was out of the roomLINK

• Microsoft rolls out Xbox Mode, bringing a console-like experience to any PCLINK

• More than half of all Polymarket "long shot" bets on military action pay offLINK

• Meta says it may withdraw its apps from New Mexico if judge agrees to the state's demandsLINK

• Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for MonthsLINK

• Google Deepmind's "AI co-clinician" beats GPT-5.4 in blind doctor tests but still trails experienced physiciansLINK

• Uber taps Hertz to clean, charge, and fix its Lucid Motors robotaxisLINK

• Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date"LINK

🧰 Trending tools

Buda: a team-focused agent coordination platform that recruits and runs multiple Claw agents with live monitoring, removing the need for dedicated hardware.LINK

Postiz: an all-in-one social media scheduler that handles post recycling, multi-account management, API access, and performance analytics from a single dashboard.LINK

Montage: a UI agentic framework that reduces token usage and speeds up output, making AI-driven interface development more efficient and cost-effective.LINK

Zed 1.0: a Rust-built code editor that combines native-speed performance with built-in AI agents and real-time team collaboration features.LINK

Bitgrain: a template-based visual editor focused on dithering and texture effects, letting you create distinctive graphics faster than traditional design tools.LINK

Genspark for Word: an AI-powered Word add-in that lets specialized agents research topics and draft unbiased, synthesized content directly in your documents.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Agentic Harness Engineering automatically improves the scaffolding around AI coding agents, lifting benchmark performance from 69.7% to 77.0% in ten iterations, beating human-designed and self-evolving competitors, while using 12% fewer tokens.LINK

Confidential Kubernetes is a new architecture that lets organizations run containerized workloads in the cloud while keeping data private, even from the cloud provider itself.LINK

Physics constants and life reveal that the universe's basic numbers, like particle masses and force strengths, fall within a narrow range that makes stars, chemistry, and biology possible.LINK

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