☕️ OpenAI's new gadget is a $300 speaker

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🍩 OpenAI's new gadget is a $300 speaker

🧬 AI designs new viruses from scratch

⚖️ New Mexico fines Meta $942M

☀️ Trump hits solar material with 15% tariff

🇨🇳 ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic

💾 SK Hynix to invest $38B in chips

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🍩 OpenAI's new gadget is a $300 speaker LINK

OpenAI's first hardware product will be a screenless smart speaker priced between $300 and $400, according to a Bloomberg report that adds fresh details about the design, features, and how the device plans to stand out.

The battery-powered speaker is said to have a doughnut shape about the size of a hockey puck, with moving parts that animate during conversations, plus microphones, lights, a camera, and sensors so the AI can read its surroundings.

Designed with Jony Ive's LoveFrom studio, the speaker is aimed at a 2027 launch and uses AI models that learn about users over time, part of a wider plan for a family of devices that could eventually replace smartphones.

🧬 AI designs new viruses from scratch LINK

Researchers at Arc Institute used an AI model called Evo to design entirely new viral genomes from scratch, producing viruses not found in nature that proved capable of infecting and spreading through bacteria.

Evo generated 700,000 potential genomes, which scientists narrowed to about 300 to build in the lab, and only 16 turned out to be viable, though those successfully overcame resistance in two strains of E. coli.

Experts at Johns Hopkins warned that while the science has clear medical uses, governance rules haven't caught up, and the NIH's new biosafety policies don't cover purely AI-based research like this.

⚖️ New Mexico fines Meta $942M LINK

A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay nearly $942 million after ruling that Facebook and Instagram fueled the state's youth mental health crisis and connected child predators with minors.

The latest $567 million judgment, added to a jury's $375 million penalty from March, will fund the state's abatement plan and requires Meta to add teen safety measures over the next five years.

Those changes include monthly time limits for teens, fewer notifications, tighter controls on adults contacting minors, AI chatbot safeguards, and better reviews of child sexual abuse reports; Meta disagreed and said it will appeal.

☀️ Trump hits solar material with 15% tariff LINK

President Trump placed a 15% tariff on imported products made from polysilicon, the key material in solar panels, aiming to shield U.S. solar supply chains from Chinese competition and boost domestic production.

Alongside the duty, Trump set minimum prices for some related imports and used Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, acting on advice from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, as part of a wider push against China in energy and AI.

U.S. solar stocks rose in Friday premarket trading, with First Solar climbing more than 7%, Solaredge Technologies up 1%, and the Invesco Solar ETF gaining 4%.

🇨🇳 ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic LINK

ByteDance is training an AI model with up to 10 trillion parameters, a size that could rival Anthropic's most advanced Mythos system and push Chinese labs closer to the leading US companies.

The model is in early pre-training, a stage that usually runs three to six months before fine-tuning and release, and its final size will only be settled later, according to three people familiar with the work.

At 10 trillion parameters, it would be three times bigger than Moonshot's Kimi K3, the largest Chinese model so far, and would top industry estimates of about 8 trillion for Anthropic's Mythos 5.

💾 SK Hynix to invest $38B in chips LINK

SK Hynix will spend 54 trillion won ($38.1 billion) to build two new memory chip plants in South Korea, aiming to meet the surging demand for chips driven by the AI data center boom.

The bulk of the money, 35.2 trillion won ($24.9 billion), goes to a Yongin plant making HBM and other DRAM, while 19.1 trillion won ($13.2 billion) funds a Cheongju facility for NAND storage chips.

The first cleanroom won't start production until as early as June 2029, so shoppers shouldn't expect relief, as analysts say memory prices are unlikely to soften before the end of 2028.

Other news you might like

• AMD buys chip startup that hardwires AI models into its siliconLINK

• Improving Fable 5's biology safeguardsLINK

• Alphabet seeks up to $25 billion in latest AI-driven bond saleLINK

• Alibaba is planning to charge big commercial users of its next open-source AI modelLINK

• Google open-sources an AI model it says can help with earlier hurricane warningsLINK

• Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing environment, researchers sayLINK

• FCC votes in favor of lifting limits on TV station ownershipLINK

• Google says hackers are calling financial firm employees to hack and extort victimsLINK

• OpenAI and four rivals just agreed on one standard for AI agentsLINK

• Deepmind's talent drain likely comes down to chip shortages, a conflict of interest, and Google's bureaucracyLINK

• OpenAI announces unlimited GPT-5.6 Luna access for ChatGPT free usersLINK

• Adobe Plugin Comes to ChatGPTLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Merge: a shared to-do list app for couples to coordinate and manage household tasks together on a private network.LINK

Reference: a social recruiting network using short videos and in-app messaging to connect recruiters with Millennial and Gen Z job seekers for free.LINK

Whop CLI: manages your entire Whop business from the terminal, letting you create products, set pricing, run ads, and move money via command line or AI agent.LINK

AndroMeld: mirrors Android apps into resizable Mac windows, syncs notifications and clipboard, and browses phone storage via Finder over USB or Wi-Fi.LINK

DataBlur: automatically blurs sensitive data like emails, cards, and API keys in real time during screen shares, calls, or recordings-runs entirely locally with no cloud processing.LINK

StepShot: captures every mouse click and screen action automatically, then generates step-by-step tutorials with editable descriptions, saving hours on documentation.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Bengali chatbot accuracy checks reveal top language models score wildly differently on making things up, from ~7.7% to ~55% on a new calibrated test, exposing a major blind spot for the sixth most spoken language.LINK

Farm robot instructions get a built-in double-check system where two separate AI models verify each other's translation of plain-English commands into precise mission plans, catching ambiguous or wrong instructions before robots act on them.LINK

Action-value learning speeds up how quickly game-playing systems learn which moves are worth taking, by sharing knowledge across similar choices instead of scoring each one separately, boosting performance across 57 Atari games while cutting overconfident value errors.LINK

STEM education research reviewed a decade of studies (242 papers, 2015-2025) and found the field has shifted from AI tutoring software to using AI as a support tool that helps students learn skills like inquiry and computational thinking, not just facts.LINK

Quadruped robots now detect a locked leg or a 5 kg added weight within half a second and adjust their gait in real time, keeping walking stable where older non-adaptive control methods fail outright.LINK

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