☕️ Pentagon signs AI deals with 7 companies

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In today's Techpresso:

🪖 Pentagon signs AI deals with 7 companies

🤖 Meta acquires robotics AI startup

🎮 GameStop wants to buy eBag

💻 Apple raises Mac mini price

🚀 xAI launches Grok 4.3 with voice cloning

🔍 People are finally using Reddit’s search

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

🪖 Pentagon signs AI deals with 7 companies LINK

The Pentagon has struck deals with seven AI companies — SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services — to bring their tools onto the Defense Department's classified networks at Impact Levels 6 and 7.

The Pentagon said the agreements will speed up its push to become an "AI-first fighting force," helping with data synthesis, situational understanding, and warfighter decision-making across complex operational environments and all domains of warfare.

Anthropic is notably absent after a dispute with the Pentagon over guardrails on military use of its AI tools, which led the department last month to label the company a supply-chain risk, barring it from Pentagon contractors.

🤖 Meta acquires robotics AI startup LINK

Meta has bought Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup founded by ex-Fauna Robotics co-founder Lerrel Pinto and former Nvidia researcher Xiaolong Wang, folding its whole-body robot control models and tactile sensor technology into Meta Superintelligence Labs.

The deal gives Meta e-Flesh, a tactile sensor that reads deformations in 3D-printable microstructures through magnets and magnetometers, plus Wang's activation-aware weight quantisation work that shrinks AI models to run on a robot's limited onboard compute.

Meta wants to be the Android of humanoids, supplying the intelligence layer while others build the machines, a strategy that competes with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics and its Apptronik partnership but sidesteps vertically integrated makers like Tesla and 1X.

🎮 GameStop wants to buy eBag LINK

GameStop is preparing a bid to acquire eBay, a company valued at roughly $46 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report that sent eBay shares jumping more than 13% in after-hours trading on May 1st.

CEO Ryan Cohen is pursuing a target nearly four times GameStop's size, backed by about $9 billion in cash and investments, and is ready to take the offer directly to shareholders if eBay's board resists.

The approach follows a January 2026 stock option award for Cohen valued at roughly $35 billion if fully earned, which requires GameStop to hit a $100 billion market value and $10 billion in cumulative EBITDA.

💻 Apple raises Mac mini price LINK

Apple has quietly removed the $599 base Mac mini from its U.S. online store, pushing the entry price for its smallest desktop up to $799 as the 256GB configuration disappears from standard, education, and military storefronts.

On Apple's April 30, 2026 earnings call, Tim Cook said demand for Mac mini and Mac Studio has outpaced supply and will take months to stabilize, driven partly by interest in running AI workloads locally on compact Macs.

With the Mac mini no longer offering a $599 starting point into macOS, that role shifts to the MacBook Neo, though refurbished listings still carry lower-priced Mac mini units when limited inventory allows.

🚀 xAI launches Grok 4.3 with voice cloning LINK

xAI has released Grok 4.3, a new base large language model with a 1 million-token context window and always-on reasoning, alongside a Custom Voices suite that clones a person's voice from a reference clip as short as 120 seconds.

Grok 4.3 costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens, roughly 40% and 60% cheaper than Grok 4.2, and xAI now charges a $0.05 fee for requests blocked by safety filters.

The model ranks #1 on Vals AI's CaseLaw v2 and CorpFin benchmarks, but Andon Labs reported "narcolepsy problems" on Vending-Bench 2, and it scored just 11% on ProofBench for difficult math.

🔍 People are finally using Reddit’s search LINK

Reddit's long-criticized search function is finally catching on with users, with CEO Steve Huffman reporting a 30% year-on-year jump in weekly search users after the company poured money into its search engine and added AI features.

Huffman said search DAUs, WAUs, and queries are all up meaningfully year-over-year, crediting the team for better integrating Reddit Answers into the product and calling search a major driver of user acquisition and retention.

Reddit ended the quarter with 493 million weekly active unique users and 126 million daily active unique users, and posted $663 million in revenue, beating Wall Street's expectation of $609.8 million.

Other news you might like

• Nebius acquires AI model optimization startup Eigen AI for $643MLINK

• Ubuntu infrastructure has been down for more than a dayLINK

• ChatGPT now tracks users for ads by default as OpenAI looks for new revenueLINK

• New panels produce hydrogen fuel using only water, sunlight and no electricityLINK

• A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a ThreatLINK

• Driverless Cars Will Be Subject to Moving-Violation Tickets in California SoonLINK

• Apple plans ‘aggressive pricing’ for iPhone 18 Pro models, per reportLINK

• Google Is Considering Ads in Gemini, But Says It's Not Rushing AnythingLINK

• Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centersLINK

• Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companiesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

DESIGN.md by Google Stitch: an open-source specification that standardizes how design documentation is structured and shared across tools and platforms.LINK

Marx Finance: a platform where AI agents autonomously discuss market news, share trading signals, and debate financial positions to surface collective market insights.LINK

Scholé: an adaptive AI learning tool that delivers personalized, task-based skill training directly within your workflow, making learning immediately applicable.LINK

Cloud Computer by Manus: a cloud-based AI agent that autonomously executes tasks on your behalf, handling work and personal workflows without requiring your active involvement.LINK

Microsoft Copilot Health: a centralized health hub that connects wearables, lab results, and medical records to surface actionable, source-backed insights.LINK

YouTube TV Custom Multiview: lets you watch multiple live streams simultaneously on one screen, solving the problem of missing concurrent sports events.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Rust firmware proved just as memory-efficient and fast as C in a real industrial microcontroller project, making it a solid choice for embedded software development today.LINK

MathDuels, a new benchmark, tests AI models as both math problem creators and solvers, revealing that these two skills are partially separate abilities, exposing differences that standard fixed tests miss.LINK

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