☕️ OpenAI investors doubt Sam Altman can lead IPO

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In today's Techpresso:

🤔 OpenAI investors doubt Sam Altman can lead IPO

👥 Meta plans to cut 8,000 jobs next month

🤖 China humanoid robot half-marathon to showcase technical leaps

👁️ World partners with Zoom and Tinder for human verification

📩 Failed startups sell old Slack chats to train AI

⚠️ Nvidia CEO warns DeepSeek on Huawei chips threatens US

Plus: 🎁 17 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🤔 OpenAI investors doubt Sam Altman can lead IPO LINK

Some OpenAI investors are questioning whether Sam Altman should lead the company's IPO, given his growing focus on side projects and his own admission that he is not excited about running a public company.

Altman recently asked OpenAI's board to fund Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup he partly owns, and also pushed the company to back rocket maker Stoke Space, even floating an acquisition.

The current favorite to replace Altman as CEO is OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor, a former Salesforce co-CEO who co-created Google Maps and is known for focusing on one role at a time.

👥 Meta plans to cut 8,000 jobs next month LINK

Meta is preparing to lay off around 8,000 employees next month, which amounts to roughly 10% of its nearly 79,000 global workforce, according to three sources familiar with the plans.

The company is planning further layoffs in the second half of the year, though the date and size are not yet settled, and executives may adjust based on developments in artificial intelligence.

Meta has also reorganized teams in Reality Labs and moved engineers into a new "Applied AI" organization focused on building AI agents that can write code and carry out complex tasks.

🤖 China humanoid robot half-marathon to showcase technical leaps LINK

China is holding its second humanoid robot half-marathon this Sunday in Beijing, with over 300 robots from more than 70 teams racing across 21 km of paved slopes and parkland.

Almost 40% of the robot participants will navigate the course autonomously this year, a big change from last year when all entrants were remotely controlled by human operators.

Experts say the skills on display do not translate to widespread commercialisation, noting that Chinese robotics firms still struggle to develop AI software enabling humanoids to match human factory workers.

👁️ World partners with Zoom and Tinder for human verification LINK

World, the verification project co-founded by Sam Altman, announced partnerships with Zoom, Tinder, and DocuSign to bring its "proof of human" technology into dating apps, video calls, and digital signatures.

Tinder will expand its World ID verification integration to global markets including the U.S., after a pilot in Japan, adding an emblem to profiles that confirms a user is a real person.

A new Concert Kit feature lets artists reserve tickets for World ID-verified humans through Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, aiming to block scalper bots, with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars signed on.

📩 Failed startups sell old Slack chats to train AI LINK

Startups going out of business are selling their internal Slack messages, emails, and other company data for up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to help train AI models.

A shutdown service called SimpleClosure launched Asset Hub this week, letting failing startups license workplace data, source code, and internal communications after removing personally identifiable information.

Privacy advocates warn that selling employee Slack messages raises serious concerns, since those internal communications contain identifiable people and were never meant to become AI training data.

⚠️ Nvidia CEO warns DeepSeek on Huawei chips threatens US LINK

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the Dwarkesh Podcast that DeepSeek optimizing its AI models for Huawei's Ascend chips instead of American hardware would be "a horrible outcome" for the United States.

DeepSeek has been rewriting its core code to work with Huawei's CANN framework, moving away from Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem and breaking the software-hardware dependency that gave America a second layer of control.

DeepSeek's upcoming V4 multimodal foundation model is expected to run on Huawei's Ascend 950PR processor, which would show competitive AI can be built without any American chips in the supply chain.

Other news you might like

• Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed ‘side quests’LINK

• DeepSeek is seeking outside funding for the first time at a $10 billion valuationLINK

• App Store scams are getting worse and Apple isn't doing enoughLINK

• Sources: Cursor in talks to raise $2B+ at $50B valuation as enterprise growth surgesLINK

• Apple wins latest round in Masimo fight as ITC closes Apple Watch import ban caseLINK

• Just ten minutes of using AI as an answer machine can measurably erode problem-solving skills, new study findsLINK

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says APIs are the new UI for AI agentsLINK

• Once close enough for an acquisition, Stripe and Airwallex are now going after each otherLINK

• Man with @ihackedthegovernment Instagram account tells judge, “I made a mistake"LINK

• Anthropic’s Alarming Mythos Findings Replicated With Off-the-Shelf AI, Researchers SayLINK

• Self-improving AI startup Recursive Superintelligence pulls in $500 million just four months after foundingLINK

• Nvidia rival Cerebras discloses US IPO filing as AI boom drives listingsLINK

• Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymoreLINK

• Bluetooth tracker hidden in a postcard and mailed to a warship exposed its locationLINK

• The App Store is booming again, and AI may be whyLINK

🧰 Trending tools

CraftBot: a self-hosted AI assistant that autonomously interprets, plans, and executes daily tasks on your machine with support for integrations and extensible skills.LINK

Notebooks in Gemini: an interactive coding environment within Google's AI platform that lets developers prototype, test, and document code alongside AI assistance.LINK

Vercel Flags: enables feature flag management in Next.js applications to control rollouts, A/B test features, and toggle functionality without redeploying code.LINK

ChatGPT Shopping: integrates e-commerce from major retailers like Target and Walmart directly into ChatGPT with visual comparisons and personalized product recommendations.LINK

Android CLI: a terminal toolkit that accelerates Android development through modular commands and AI agent integration, reducing setup time and guiding best practices for faster builds.LINK

Grok Voice API: enables developers to integrate xAI's conversational AI with voice capabilities for building applications that need real-time spoken interactions and audio processing.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Hierarchical JSON structures retain the meaning of scientific sentences effectively when created by a fine-tuned language model and used to reconstruct the original text.LINK

CalliMaster, a framework generates full pages of Chinese calligraphy by first planning character positions, then rendering detailed brushwork, allowing users to resize or reposition individual characters while maintaining artistic harmony.LINK

Claude Code's architecture relies on a simple loop that calls AI models and runs tools, but most of its complexity comes from surrounding systems for permissions, context management, extensibility, and safety controls.LINK

A new framework for generating regular expressions breaks down complex pattern creation tasks into smaller pieces, significantly improving accuracy across different tools and achieving state-of-the-art results on real-world tests.LINK

An AI coding assistant mechanized a 7,800 line compiler correctness proof in approximately 96 hours with human guidance, a task that previously took human experts several months for a related proof.LINK

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