☕️ Google DeepMind boss steps down

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🧠 Google DeepMind boss steps down

🤖 Meta launches its first AI coding agent

🗺️ Google Maps AI can now order food

🍎 Apple private relay can leak your real IP address

⚖️ OpenAI asks judge to toss Apple lawsuit

Plus: 🎁 15 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🧠 Google DeepMind boss steps down LINK

Demis Hassabis is leaving his day-to-day role running Google DeepMind to become Alphabet's chief scientist and DeepMind chairman, saying he wants to focus on artificial general intelligence, which he believes is now close at hand.

Koray Kavukcuoglu, a 13-year DeepMind veteran and its chief technology officer, will take over as senior vice president reporting to Sundar Pichai, overseeing Gemini development, Frontier AI research, and the Gemini app, which now has over 950 million monthly users.

Hassabis will spend more time at Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed drug discovery firm, saying AI should first prove its worth by helping cure diseases like cancer, building on DeepMind's AlphaFold work that predicted 200 million protein structures.

🤖 Meta launches its first AI coding agent LINK

Meta launched its first coding agent, Muse Code, in a preview version, letting developers install it with one command to plan changes, write code, and validate results across a wide variety of software engineering tasks.

The tool comes from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs, and represents another way CEO Mark Zuckerberg aims to make money from AI while spending heavily on data centers and computing infrastructure.

Muse Code works alongside the Muse Spark 1.2 model and competes with Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex on price, offering a pay-as-you-go option and a contributor tier Wang says is more than 10 times cheaper.

🗺️ Google Maps AI can now order food LINK

Google is expanding Ask Maps, the chatbot it added to Maps in March, with new agentic capabilities that let you order food conversationally through partnerships with Toast and Square, with Uber Eats to follow at a later date.

The same integration lets Ask Maps help book hotels and find live events, while Personal Intelligence connects the chatbot to Gmail first, letting it check where you're staying before suggesting nearby restaurants, though it stays off by default.

Ask Maps now generates live transit widgets showing wait times and delays, lets Local Guides suggest edits through photos, and is expanding to Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and 150 other countries in English.

🍎 Apple private relay can leak your real IP address LINK

Apple's iCloud Private Relay, meant to hide Safari users' IP addresses, can be tricked into leaking a person's real IP, and many websites may have already gathered that information, security researchers found.

The leaks come from three WebKit features that skip proxy settings: WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, active since iOS 18, plus DNS prefetching and WebTransport, both added in iOS 26, with the WebAuthn one needing no user prompt.

The same flaws hit proxy-based browsers like Psylo and Onion Browser; Apple told 404 Media it is investigating and marked the report as one it plans to fix, with a patch set for fall 2026.

⚖️ OpenAI asks judge to toss Apple lawsuit LINK

OpenAI has asked a U.S. judge to dismiss Apple's lawsuit accusing it and two former Apple employees of stealing trade secrets, saying it has "no use, need or desire" for Apple's confidential technology.

In the Wednesday motion, OpenAI argued that Apple's July complaint names no specific trade secrets, fails to prove it owns protectable ones, and never shows the defendants took anything as it builds "something entirely new."

The fight centers on AI-powered hardware, with analysts expecting OpenAI to make its own phone-like device; despite it, the two remain partners, since iPhone users reach ChatGPT through Siri and can subscribe from iOS settings.

Other news you might like

• Google may spend $1.5bn on a 35-person startup to catch up on AI codingLINK

• Shopify says AI search is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing GoogleLINK

• DeepSeek is preparing users for a big price hikeLINK

• Reddit aims to make ‘karma’ less important for first-time posters with shift to AI moderation toolsLINK

• Microsoft filings suggest "around 70%" of its AI revenue is concentrated entirely on OpenAI — which seems rather unhealthyLINK

• Switch 2 sales are slowing down but apparently Nintendo is still winningLINK

• China opens a cybersecurity review into Palo Alto NetworksLINK

• Uber is spending $10 billion to deploy 120,000 robotaxis across 15 citiesLINK

• Nikita Bier steps down as X’s head of productLINK

• Microsoft removes support page recommending 32GB RAM for gaming PCsLINK

• Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8B to start building ‘Terafab’ chip factory in TexasLINK

• OpenAI reportedly slows research after its own models secretly coordinated hacks for weeks undetectedLINK

• SpaceX backs Nvidia exclusively for future AI infrastructureLINK

• DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold outLINK

• Meta AI Hacked External Systems During Cybersecurity TestingLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Aveiro: an AI-native publishing platform that lets you manage sites, blogs, newsletters, and social media directly from ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor via MCP.LINK

Shieldstral: offers free, permissively licensed open AI models plus optimized commercial versions, letting teams deploy flexibly across cloud, edge, or on-premise environments.LINK

Ticketdesk AI: an AI-powered support platform that creates automated agents to handle customer tickets and email responses around the clock.LINK

Chute: a quick way to send files, links, and photos from your computer to your iPhone instantly without cables or email.LINK

Brandfetch MCP: retrieves official logos, colors, fonts, and company details for 50M+ brands, letting AI agents access accurate brand data instantly.LINK

UCP Radar: scans your Merchant Center catalog to flag policy issues, rewrite weak titles, and fill missing fields so AI shopping assistants can read your products.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Fact-checking chatbot answers gets far less reliable when a question is merely reworded without changing its meaning, cutting GPT-5-mini's faithfulness to its source material by up to 50%, across 10 major models.LINK

Recursive training on AI-generated text steadily amplifies existing demographic biases in language models, and this bias worsens before standard quality metrics show any sign of the models degrading.LINK

Safety panels of chatbots can be swayed by fake peer pressure, with one round of six simulated peers insisting content is unsafe pushing the panel's false-alarm rate from 56.5% to 100%, showing group review can backfire before deployment.LINK

Fine-tuning safety leaks can be plugged by adding just 1% targeted safety examples, cutting a model's attack success rate from ~59% to ~14%, far better than random safety data mixing.LINK

AI self-correction claims often just fix answer-formatting glitches rather than actual reasoning, explaining a median 71% of the apparent "improvement" and showing zero real reasoning gain in frontier models tested.LINK

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