☕️ Meta signs $27 billion AI infrastructure deal with Nebius

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In today's Techpresso:

💰 Meta signs $27 billion AI infrastructure deal with Nebius

🔞 OpenAI advisers alarmed by adult content plans

🎧 Apple unveils the AirPods Max 2

🤖 Pokémon Go data now guides delivery robots

⏸️ ByteDance pauses Seedance 2.0

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 2 papers.

💰 Meta signs $27 billion AI infrastructure deal with Nebius LINK

Meta has agreed to pay up to $27 billion over five years for AI infrastructure from cloud provider Nebius Group, marking one of the largest single contracts the company has ever signed.

Nebius will provide $12 billion in dedicated capacity starting in early 2027, while Meta also committed to buying up to $15 billion in additional capacity built for third-party customers.

Meta and its biggest tech peers are expected to spend around $650 billion in 2026 on data centers and related infrastructure, as the company competes with OpenAI and Google.

🔞 OpenAI advisers alarmed by adult content plans LINK

OpenAI's own advisory council on well-being reacted with alarm to the company's plans for an "adult mode" in ChatGPT, with one member warning it risked creating a "sexy suicide coach."

The company delayed adult mode partly because its age-prediction system was misclassifying minors as adults about 12% of the time, potentially exposing millions of under-18 users to erotic chats.

OpenAI staffers internally identified risks including compulsive use, emotional overreliance on the chatbot, a drive toward more extreme content, and crowding out offline social and romantic relationships.

🎧 Apple unveils the AirPods Max 2 LINK

Apple announced the AirPods Max 2 on Monday, a $549 pair of premium headphones with the H2 chip, active noise cancellation, and live translation, available for pre-order starting March 25.

The new headphones offer active noise cancellation that is up to 1.5x more effective than the original, along with Adaptive Audio that adjusts ANC and Transparency based on your surroundings.

Other features include Camera Remote, which lets you trigger your iPhone or iPad's camera shutter by pressing the Digital Crown, and support for 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio over USB-C.

🤖 Pokémon Go data now guides delivery robots LINK

Niantic Spatial, an AI spinout formed in 2025, is repurposing location data and street-level imagery collected from Pokémon Go players to help Coco Robotics guide its sidewalk delivery robots through dense cities.

The visual positioning system was trained on roughly 30 billion crowdsourced images from Pokémon Go and Ingress, letting robots pinpoint their location to within a few centimeters using cameras instead of GPS.

Coco operates about a thousand sidewalk robots across US and European cities, and the company plans to fuse GPS with Niantic Spatial's camera-based localization to improve reliability on routes.

⏸️ ByteDance pauses Seedance 2.0 LINK

ByteDance has delayed the worldwide release of its AI video model Seedance 2.0, which launched in China in February, as the company works to avoid further legal problems.

Videos generated by the model went viral, including a clip of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, which drew a wave of cease-and-desist letters from Hollywood studios like Disney.

Disney's lawyers accused ByteDance of a "virtual smash-and-grab" of its IP, and the company promised to introduce stronger safeguards for intellectual property before expanding access.

Other news you might like

• China’s JD.com Takes On Amazon With Launch Of Joybuy In EuropeLINK

• Tech companies are teaming up to combat scammersLINK

• Grandmother spent six months in jail after AI facial recognition misidentified herLINK

• ‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’LINK

• STMicro to deploy humanoid robots to its legacy fabs in Europe — over 100 humanoid robots to be used for routine and physically demanding tasks in fight for efficiencyLINK

• Gig workers are getting paid to film their daily chores to train robotsLINK

• Apple Acquires Final Cut Pro Plugin Company MotionVFXLINK

• Encyclopaedia Britannica sues OpenAI, claims ChatGPT copied nearly 100,000 articles to train its AI modelsLINK

• The billionaires made a promise — now some want outLINK

• Hua Hong becomes the second Chinese chipmaker to crack 7nm manufacturing as Beijing pushes for AI independenceLINK

🧰 Trending tools

MuleRun: a continuously learning personal AI that runs on dedicated cloud infrastructure, adapting to your work patterns and proactively handling tasks while you're offline.LINK

Glam AI: generates on-trend social media visuals from your photos using pre-built templates and multiple AI models, eliminating prompt engineering for fast content creation.LINK

GLM-5-Turbo: a free platform to test MIT-licensed GLM models including base, reasoning, and rumination variants through a straightforward chat interface for developers.LINK

JetBrains Air: a cloud-based development environment that lets you code in JetBrains IDEs through your browser without local installation or setup.LINK

Donely: a free managed OpenClaw container with app integrations and AI-powered auto-repair, charging only for AI credits you actually consume.LINK

Hackerbrief: a daily digest that automatically summarizes the top posts from Hacker News into a single brief.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Robotic flower tracking achieves 92% accuracy identifying individual flowers across multiple days in vertical farms, enabling automated pollination and yield monitoring for crops like strawberries.LINK

Invariant Risk Minimization trains machine learning models to find patterns that hold across different environments rather than exploiting spurious correlations, improving accuracy when test data differs from training data.LINK

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