☕️ Google Maps gets its biggest upgrade in a decade

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In today's Techpresso:

🗺️ Google Maps gets its biggest upgrade in a decade

📱 Foldable iPhone to feature "iPad-like" interface

🤖 Atlassian lays off 10% of staff

💻 Musk unveils joint Tesla-xAI project 'Macrohard'

👀 Nvidia fills the open-source AI gap

🏥 Microsoft launches Copilot Health for medical records

⏹️ Grammarly will stop using AI to clone experts without permission

Plus: 🎁 16 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

🗺️ Google Maps gets its biggest upgrade in a decade LINK

Google Maps is rolling out two major new features today: a Gemini-powered conversational assistant called "Ask Maps" and a 3D navigation mode called "Immersive Navigation" for drivers.

Ask Maps sits below the search box and can answer very specific travel questions, create full itineraries from over 300 million places, and deliver personalized results based on your saved locations.

Immersive Navigation adds transparent 3D buildings, crosswalks, traffic lights, and smart zooms for tricky junctions, though it's US-only for now and will expand to more devices over coming months.

📱 Foldable iPhone to feature "iPad-like" interface LINK

Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone will run iOS with new iPad-like layouts, including sidebars and side-by-side apps, when its interior display is opened to roughly iPad mini size.

The inside display will use a wide aspect ratio unlike current foldable phones from Samsung and Google, and Apple worked to reduce the visible crease without fully eliminating it.

The device replaces Face ID with Touch ID in the side button because the front panel is too thin for the sensor array, and it will feature a hole-punch camera cutout.

🤖 Atlassian lays off 10% of staff LINK

Atlassian is cutting 1,600 jobs, about 10 percent of its workforce, and replacing its CTO just five months after the CEO publicly predicted the company would hire more engineers.

Nine hundred of the cut positions are in R&D, and the company is redirecting savings toward AI, even as cloud revenue grew 26 percent to over a billion dollars last quarter.

The Professionals Australia union called the layoffs a "devastating blow" tied directly to Atlassian's AI rollout, while analysts warned enterprise customers could face slower support during the restructuring.

💻 Musk unveils joint Tesla-xAI project 'Macrohard' LINK

Elon Musk has announced Macrohard, a joint project between Tesla and xAI that pairs the Grok large language model with a Tesla-developed AI agent to emulate the functions of entire software companies.

The system, also called Digital Optimus, processes real-time computer screen video and keyboard and mouse actions, running on Tesla's $650 AI4 chip paired with xAI's Nvidia-based server hardware.

The announcement follows Tesla's January deal to invest about $2 billion in xAI shares, as Musk's closely intertwined companies have helped push his net worth past the $800 billion mark.

👀 Nvidia fills the open-source AI gap LINK

Nvidia plans to spend $26 billion over five years building open-weight AI models, filling a gap left as Meta pulls back on Llama and Chinese providers like DeepSeek dominate the open-source space.

The company released Nemotron 3 Super, a 128-billion-parameter hybrid Transformer-Mamba model that roughly matches Claude 4.5 Haiku but still falls short of Chinese competitors like Qwen3.5.

Open models optimized for Nvidia hardware also serve a business goal: keeping developers inside the Nvidia ecosystem and providing a Western alternative as DeepSeek reportedly trains on Huawei chips.

🏥 Microsoft launches Copilot Health for medical records LINK

Microsoft announced Copilot Health, a new experience inside its consumer chatbot that combines your medical records and wearable data with an AI trained to help you understand your health information.

Health queries are the most common topic among mobile Copilot users, and the new tool was fine-tuned by in-house and external clinicians across more than 24 countries using credible medical frameworks.

Copilot Health keeps your medical data separate from regular chats, lets you delete it with a simple toggle, and is rolling out slowly to US adults — though it is not protected under HIPAA.

⏹️ Grammarly will stop using AI to clone experts without permission LINK

Grammarly has shut down its "Expert Review" feature, which gave writing suggestions that mimicked the styles of real journalists, authors, and academics — all without getting their permission first.

Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly's parent company Superhuman, alleging the tool violated New York and California laws requiring consent before using someone's name commercially.

The feature, launched in August 2025, copied styles from writers like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen King, plus tech writers from The Verge, Bloomberg, IGN, and other publications.

Other news you might like

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• Perplexity's Personal Computer lets AI agents access your Mac mini's filesLINK

• Tim Cook celebrates Apple’s ‘50 Years of Thinking Different’ in new letterLINK

• "Use a gun" or "beat the crap out of him": AI chatbot urged violence, study findsLINK

• FCC chair slams Amazon for slow satellite launches after it opposed SpaceX data center planLINK

• Netflix may have paid $600 million for Ben Affleck’s AI startupLINK

• Google sells partial stake in fiber business, becomes minority owner of new ventureLINK

• TikTok will let you stream full songs in its app if you're an Apple Music subscriberLINK

• AI Coding Startup Cursor in Talks for About $50 Billion ValuationLINK

• Google is using old news reports and AI to predict flash floodsLINK

• Nuro is testing its autonomous vehicle tech on Tokyo’s streetsLINK

• Lovable says it added $100M in revenue last month alone, with just 146 employeesLINK

• Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unitLINK

• Alexa+ gets a new ‘adults only’ personality option that curses but won’t get into NSFW contentLINK

🧰 Trending tools

s@: enables decentralized social networking through static websites, allowing users to follow, post, and interact without requiring central servers or databases.LINK

Huddle01 Cloud: a managed hosting platform that deploys OpenClaw AI agents in 60 seconds, eliminating infrastructure setup and maintenance for developers building agent applications.LINK

HTML Pub: lets AI assistants deploy generated HTML to live URLs instantly, skipping traditional hosting setup and deployment pipelines for rapid prototyping.LINK

OrangeLabs: connects to your data sources and uses AI to generate charts, tables, and insights through natural language queries without coding.LINK

Agent Browser: reduces AI token costs by letting agents navigate websites using lightweight wireframe snapshots instead of expensive screenshots or verbose DOM trees.LINK

Site Spy: monitors specific webpage elements for changes and exposes updates via RSS feeds, diffs, and notifications through a browser extension.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Oyster mushroom mycelium conducts electricity and responds to light with measurable voltage spikes, suggesting living fungi could serve as biological sensors or computing substrates.LINK

Human detection of AI text improves from 59% to 68% accuracy with training, but people also learn to recognize when they're just guessing, becoming better calibrated about their uncertainty.LINK

Single piece Tetris remains computationally hard to solve optimally, proving that even the simplest version of the game with just one repeating shape is NP-complete.LINK

Consumer robot hacking exploits AI vulnerabilities to manipulate household robots, with researchers demonstrating successful attacks on navigation, object recognition, and voice command systems across multiple commercial platforms.LINK

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