☕️ Elon Musk pledges to rebuild xAI

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In today's Techpresso:

💥 Elon Musk pledges to rebuild xAI

🥑 Meta delays AI model over performance concerns

👋 Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen steps down after 18 years

🧠 China approves first-ever commercial brain implant

🍎 Apple cuts App Store fees in China to 25%

Plus: 🎁 10 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 3 papers.

💥 Elon Musk pledges to rebuild xAI LINK

Elon Musk apologized on X for past hiring mistakes at xAI and said the company is reviewing old interview records to reach back out to promising candidates who were previously turned down.

Musk compared the overhaul to Tesla's early days, writing that xAI "was not built right first time around" and is now being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Musk also announced a formal Tesla-xAI collaboration called "Macrohard" or "Digital Optimus," designed to build AI systems that can perform the functions of entire companies using Tesla's AI4 chip.

🥑 Meta delays AI model over performance concerns LINK

Meta has pushed back the release of its new AI model, code-named Avocado, from March to at least May after internal tests showed it fell short of leading rivals from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Avocado beat Meta's previous model and Google's Gemini 2.5 from March but has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November on reasoning, coding, and writing benchmarks.

Meta's AI division leaders have discussed temporarily licensing Google's Gemini to power the company's AI products while Avocado is delayed, though no decisions have been reached on that plan.

👋 Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen steps down after 18 years LINK

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is stepping down after nearly 18 years leading the company and will stay on as board chair while Adobe searches for his successor.

Under Narayen, Adobe grew from under $1 billion in revenue to over $25 billion, but generative AI tools now challenge its core creative software business.

The shift comes as tech firms cut thousands of jobs to reorganize around AI, with companies like Atlassian and Block recently eliminating roughly 5,600 positions combined.

🧠 China approves first-ever commercial brain implant LINK

China has approved the first-ever commercial brain implant, a brain-computer interface made by Neuracle Medical Technology, for use in people with spinal cord injuries.

The coin-sized wireless device sits on the brain's surface and records electrical signals from neurons, which software decodes to let patients control things like a computer cursor.

No BCI devices have been approved for commercial use in the U.S., where Neuralink, Synchron, and Paradromics are still running clinical trials with their own implants.

🍎 Apple cuts App Store fees in China to 25% LINK

Apple is dropping its standard App Store commission rate in China from 30 percent to 25 percent for in-app purchases on iOS and iPadOS, starting March 15, after discussions with Chinese regulators.

Developers in the App Store Small Business or Mini Apps programmes will also see their fees cut by 3 percent, going from 15 to 12 percent on IAPs and subscription renewals after the first year.

Developers don't need to agree to the new terms by the March 15 deadline to receive the lower rates, and the change comes a year after reports of a state watchdog investigating Apple's fees.

Other news you might like

• Claude can now create interactive charts and visualizations directly in chatLINK

• Google Chrome on Linux is getting a big upgradeLINK

• Facebook Marketplace’s new AI ends the “is this available” nightmareLINK

• Lucid Motors shows off robotaxi concept called ‘Lunar’LINK

• Bumble introduces an AI dating assistant, ‘Bee’LINK

• China's ByteDance Outsmarts US Sanctions With Offshore Nvidia AI BuildoutLINK

• Meta's massive undersea cable project delayed in Persian Gulf as Iran conflict escalatesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Pinnacle: measures brain activity via iPhone sensors and provides conversational AI coaching to improve focus, resilience, and mental performance through real-time feedback.LINK

GStack: turns Claude into specialized workflow assistants with slash commands for code reviews, deployment, browser automation, and engineering retrospectives to streamline development tasks.LINK

Pre: an AI accountability agent that tracks startup progress through connected data and sends unfiltered weekly reports to keep founders focused on goals.LINK

Manus Agents for Telegram: runs multi-step AI tasks, research, and file operations directly in Telegram via QR code connection without terminal or API setup.LINK

Algorithms and Data Structures in TypeScript: a free 400-page book covering sorting, dynamic programming, graphs, trees, heaps, and hash tables with executable, tested code examples.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Private LLM inference runs 70B parameter models on consumer Blackwell GPUs using homomorphic encryption, enabling users to query AI without revealing their data to the server.LINK

Transformer attention patterns mathematically favor tokens at the start and end of sequences from initialization, explaining why models struggle with information buried in the middle of long contexts.LINK

A digital fruit fly brain with 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million connections successfully controls a simulated fly body to walk, demonstrating that connectome maps can produce coordinated movement.LINK

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