☕️ Sony robot beats elite table tennis players

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In today's Techpresso:

🏓 Sony robot beats elite table tennis players

💥 Kalshi suspends and fines 3 congressional candidates

🗺️ Apple Maps remains Tim Cook's biggest mistake

📱 Apple fixes bug FBI used to read deleted messages

🤝 xAI seeks alliance with Mistral and Cursor

🚗 Xpeng plans flying car deliveries starting 2027

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

🏓 Sony robot beats elite table tennis players LINK

Sony's AI division built a table tennis robot called Ace that can compete with and sometimes beat elite and professional players in matches following official International Table Tennis Federation rules.

Ace has eight joints for controlling the paddle's position, orientation, and power, along with a vision system using nine cameras and three gaze control systems to track the ball's speed, spin, and trajectory.

In test matches published in Nature, Ace won three out of five games against elite players in April 2025 and went on to defeat professional players in December 2025 and again last month.

💥 Kalshi suspends and fines 3 congressional candidates LINK

Kalshi, the prediction market platform, suspended and fined three congressional candidates from Virginia, Minnesota, and Texas for trading on markets tied to their own campaigns, calling it "political insider trading."

Virginia candidate Mark Moran traded on two markets related to his campaign, was fined $6,229.30, and received a five-year suspension after he stopped communicating with the company's team.

Kalshi said all three candidates were caught by its newly released safeguards designed to block political candidates from trading on their own elections, and two of them cooperated with probes.

🗺️ Apple Maps remains Tim Cook's biggest mistake LINK

Tim Cook has called the 2012 launch of Apple Maps his biggest mistake as CEO, explaining for the first time that testing was mostly done locally around Cupertino, which hid problems elsewhere.

Cook shared these remarks at an Apple Town Hall on April 22, 2026, where he and incoming CEO John Ternus answered employee questions about the leadership handover.

Cook named the Apple Watch as his greatest achievement, saying he still receives daily notes from users who credit the watch with saving their lives since that very first message.

📱 Apple fixes bug FBI used to read deleted messages LINK

Apple patched a bug in its iPhone and iPad software that the FBI had been exploiting to read deleted messages from apps like Signal using forensic tools.

The problem was that notification content showing message text was cached on the device for up to a month, even after the messages were deleted inside the app.

Signal president Meredith Whittaker said the company asked Apple to fix the issue, and Apple also backported the patch to devices still running the older iOS 18 software.

🤝 xAI seeks alliance with Mistral and Cursor LINK

Elon Musk's xAI has been in talks with French AI startup Mistral and coding tool Cursor about a three-way partnership, on top of SpaceX's $60 billion option to buy Cursor.

Mistral cofounder Devendra Chaplot now leads xAI pretraining, and two senior Cursor engineers joined SpaceX in March, with all of them reporting directly to Musk.

Anthropic blocked xAI's access to Claude through Cursor in January, leaving Cursor exposed because its product depends on models from the same companies building competing coding editors.

🚗 Xpeng plans flying car deliveries starting 2027 LINK

Xpeng, the Chinese EV maker, plans to begin delivering flying cars starting in 2027 and has already received more than 7,000 orders, mostly from customers in China awaiting aviation authority approval.

The company will start robotaxi tests in Guangzhou this year and expects to produce hundreds to thousands of robotaxis over the next 12 to 18 months, seeking global partners.

Xpeng currently operates in about 60 countries and generated roughly 15% of its revenue from overseas sales last year, aiming to push that above 50% within ten years.

Other news you might like

• Microsoft looked at buying Cursor before SpaceX deal, sources sayLINK

• Google puts AI agents at heart of its enterprise money-making pushLINK

• OpenAI unveils Workspace Agents, a successor to custom GPTs for enterprises that can plug directly into Slack, Salesforce and moreLINK

• Intel lands Tesla as first major customer for 14A chip technologyLINK

• Elon Musk admits millions of Tesla owners need upgrades for true ‘Full Self-Driving’LINK

• Anthropic overtakes OpenAI with $1T secondary market valuation after 233% revenue surgeLINK

• Exclusive: SpaceX targets in-house GPUs as it warns investors of chip supply, costsLINK

• Nvidia has not yet sold its H200 AI chips to China, Lutnick saysLINK

• Google says AI now generates 75% of its new code, up from 25% in 2024LINK

• TSMC unveils process technology roadmap through 2029: A12, A13, N2U announced, A16 slips to 2027LINK

• UK security agency officially declares passkeys superior to passwordsLINK

• Even the Cheapest Mac Mini Is Now Unavailable on Apple's Online StoreLINK

• Sam Altman’s Orb company announces deal with Bruno Mars that doesn’t existLINK

• Tencent unveils first flagship AI model with former OpenAI researcher at helmLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Monid: lets AI agents autonomously purchase and access tools like social scraping, lead gen, and market analysis from a single balance without managing API keys.LINK

ASI:One: a personal AI that remembers your preferences, coordinates with other agents, and handles booking and planning tasks automatically.LINK

Wellows: a brand visibility platform that monitors AI-driven content performance, automates outreach, and tracks measurable growth across multiple AI platforms.LINK

Blink AI CFO: an AI-powered app builder that converts ideas into fully functional apps with auth, database, and hosting included, while automatically fixing bugs.LINK

Qwen3.6-27B: a 27B parameter language model supporting chat, vision, document processing, web search, and tool use in one deployable package.LINK

Figma For AI Agents: a markdown-based design system library that gives AI coding agents brand-accurate visual guidelines so generated UI stops looking generic.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

LLM agent design has shifted away from retraining models toward reorganizing their runtime environment, externalizing memory, skills, and interaction structure into infrastructure that makes AI systems more reliable.LINK

MemReader: a family of models that actively extracts and filters long-term memories for AI agents using reasoning-driven, selective memory writing.LINK

AI coding assistants make developers faster in the short term but weaken their ability to solve problems independently, as reliance on AI reduces the persistence needed to work through difficult challenges alone.LINK

Agentic coding performance jumps significantly when AI agents summarize their own past attempts into compact notes, letting them learn from failures, with Claude-4.5-Opus improving from 70.9% to 77.6% on one key benchmark.LINK

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