☕️ OpenAI's first gadget is a $230 keyboard

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

⌨️ OpenAI's first gadget is a $230 keyboard

🍎 Apple seeks chip startups for AI

🧠 Murati's startup launches first AI model

🇪🇺 EU forces Google to open Android

🏭 TSMC to invest another $100B in US

Plus: 🎁 15 other news you might like, 🧰 5 tools, and 📚 4 papers.

⌨️ OpenAI's first gadget is a $230 keyboard LINK

OpenAI has put out its first piece of hardware, a $230 mechanical keyboard called the kbd-1.0-codex-micro, made with Work Louder and built to control the company's Codex coding agent.

Each Agent Key shows live RGB colors tied to Codex, letting you see whether an agent is thinking, running, waiting, or finished without having to switch between open chats.

The keyboard, sold in clicky and silent versions, has a joystick that launches Codex jobs like reviewing a pull request or debugging, plus a dial that changes how much reasoning the agent applies.

🍎 Apple seeks chip startups for AI LINK

Apple is reportedly talking with bankers and semiconductor startups about buying one to strengthen the server chips it builds for running AI, according to a report from The Information.

The move follows problems with Apple's own AI servers, which run on its M2 Ultra chips, while its next server chip, code-named Baltra, has slipped past a planned 2026 launch.

A large purchase would break from Apple's habit of buying smaller startups, though it recently spent close to $2 billion on Israeli AI firm Q.ai and held talks with PrismML.

🧠 Murati's startup launches first AI model LINK

Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati in early 2025, released its first AI model called Inkling, moving the company from research previews to a full public launch.

Inkling reasons across text, images, and audio, adjusts its effort to balance cost against performance, and is a mixture-of-experts model with 975 billion total parameters and a context window of up to 1 million tokens.

The open-weight model, which the company admits is not the strongest available, can be downloaded and fine-tuned on Thinking Machines' Tinker platform, the paid service that earns revenue from customers like hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.

🇪🇺 EU forces Google to open Android LINK

The European Commission has ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and to share anonymized Google Search query and click data with competitors, using the Digital Markets Act to push for fairer competition.

Under the new rules, people will be able to trigger their chosen AI assistant with a voice command like the "Hey Google" wake word, and let third-party assistants carry out tasks inside apps on their behalf.

Google has strongly opposed the decision, arguing that giving outside apps deep, system-level permissions gets around hardware safety protections and could create a serious privacy and security disaster for millions of European users.

🏭 TSMC to invest another $100B in US LINK

TSMC, the main maker of AI chips and a key Nvidia supplier, pledged on Thursday to spend another $100 billion in Arizona, on top of the $165 billion it has already committed to build chip factories there.

The extra money would probably fund four more plants in Arizona, including one for advanced packaging, adding to eight already being built or planned, though the timing depends on the market, CEO C.C. Wei said.

The pledge came as TSMC posted a record quarterly profit of $22 billion, up 77%, and raised its 2026 spending forecast to as much as $64 billion, citing strong AI demand it expects to last through 2030.

Other news you might like

• Uber is acquiring German food delivery giant Delivery Hero in a $14.8 billion dealLINK

• SpaceX stock sinks below $135 IPO price for the first timeLINK

• Ofcom opens a child safety investigation into TikTokLINK

• Nvidia is assembling Japan's biggest industrial names around its physical AI robot platformLINK

• The OpenAI BubbleLINK

• Elon Musk pledges to make X open source after Grok backlashLINK

• Apple Watch among wearables exempted from EU user-replaceable battery rulesLINK

• Hack suggests AI music generator Suno scraped YouTube for training dataLINK

• Claude can now use your 1Password credentials for youLINK

• Microsoft is reportedly training salespeople to talk down OpenAI and AnthropicLINK

• AI chatbots at risk of spreading govt restrictions on online speech, new study saysLINK

• xai-org/grok-build, now open sourceLINK

• Anthropic CEO gives $1 million to super PAC amid battle of AI big-money groupsLINK

• Jamie Dimon has a warning about Anthropic's most powerful AI modelLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Verse: converts a single prompt into an autonomous AI worker that integrates with your existing tools, remembers context, and runs continuously without any coding.LINK

SIMPLI: consolidates email, calendar, lists, notes, and files into one app, using cross-source tagging to organize and link related items together.LINK

Paradigm: an AI tutor that creates personalized learning paths, tracks your progress over time, and teaches expert-level thinking patterns for any goal.LINK

River: an AI account executive that automatically demos your product to prospects and helps close SMB deals without manual follow-up.LINK

WorkflowMaps: maps client workflows from uploaded transcripts using AI, then runs FixFlow to flag bottlenecks and automation opportunities, delivering costed reports.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

AI agents that answer the same question differently each time are more likely to be wrong, so checking whether an agent repeats itself let researchers boost accuracy to 87-88% by only trusting answers given consistently across 3 runs.LINK

Chatbot memory compression shrinks the "notes" AI models keep during long conversations without needing preset calibration data, boosting speed up to 3x over full-precision methods.LINK

Photo cloning protection hides a hidden trigger in image models so unauthorized attempts to copy someone's face or art style produce blocked outputs, while normal use stays unaffected.LINK

Search blind spots in AI lookup tools miss relevant facts that don't closely match the search wording, but adding targeted background text fixed this, boosting accuracy by 3.4 to 4.5 points.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!