☕️ Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users

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In today's Techpresso:

📈 Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users

🤖 SpaceXAI launches Grok Bot

📱 Google reveals 2026 hardware lineup

🇨🇳 China forces Meta to unwind Manus deal

🎥 Zoom bug let callers hijack your device

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

📈 Gemini hits 1 billion monthly users LINK

Google's Gemini app has passed 1 billion monthly users, a milestone reached less than a month after the company reported 950 million users, putting it closer to OpenAI's ChatGPT, which hit the same mark in May.

Google said 63% of people now speak to Gemini instead of typing, one in five interactions involve screen sharing or live camera feeds, and Apple users account for over 100 million of the app's monthly active users.

The company said Gemini generates 150 million images each day, a tool growing popular with small businesses, and noted that macOS users prompt roughly twice as often as people on other platforms.

🤖 SpaceXAI launches Grok Bot LINK

SpaceXAI, the SpaceX division once called xAI, has launched an early beta of Grok Bot, agents that sign into a user's apps and websites to finish real work rather than just answering prompts.

Each Bot runs on its own computer around the clock, learns routines by watching users demonstrate tasks, remembers preferences, and can hand jobs to other Bots, including a "Chief of Staff" Bot that directs specialist ones.

Available today for macOS, Windows, Linux and iOS, Grok Bot costs $200 a month for individuals through Cursor Ultra and $120 per seat monthly for teams, with organizations otherwise pointed to a waitlist.

📱 Google reveals 2026 hardware lineup LINK

Google unveiled its 2026 Pixel hardware, including the Pixel 11 phones, an updated Pixel Watch 5, and the Pixel Tag, the company's first in-house tracker, with orders for all the new devices opening today.

The Pixel 11 line closely follows last year's design first seen on the Pixel 9, adding only minor tweaks, a handful of new hardware features, and more Gemini-powered AI across the phones.

The standout addition is HiLight, a ring of RGB LEDs in the flash assembly on the back of the Pro models that glows when you talk to Gemini, so you know the AI heard you without checking the screen.

🇨🇳 China forces Meta to unwind Manus deal LINK

Manus said it will soon go back to running as an independent company after Chinese regulators ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion purchase of the AI agent startup, ending a deal announced in December.

China's National Development and Reform Commission issued the order in April, investigating whether the acquisition broke rules on foreign investment amid tighter export controls on cross-border tech deals during the US-China AI race.

As part of the split, Manus told some users they must back up any data they created on or after December 29, 2025, the date Meta first announced the takeover, to meet regional regulatory demands.

🎥 Zoom bug let callers hijack your device LINK

Researchers found flaws in Zoom that let attackers silently take over a target's device during any screen-sharing call, hitting either the host or participants with no warning and no action needed from the victim.

The bugs affected Zoom on every operating system it supports, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, and the company put out a security advisory Tuesday with fixes it has already started rolling out.

A Security says it found the flaws in early June using freely available AI models, needing fewer than 20 prompts, work that its cofounder Omer Gull said would once have taken a five-person team roughly six months.

Other news you might like

• Samsung is Starting to Catch Up to Apple on Hearing HealthLINK

• Why you might want an AI phone with a robot armLINK

• FlightAware sues Kalshi over flight cancellation prediction marketsLINK

• CoreWeave stock pops 12% as revenue doubles on accelerating AI infrastructure demandLINK

• ‘It’s still day zero’: Lovable is worth $13.3bn, and the EU just became a shareholderLINK

• Amid RAM price hikes, Microsoft reportedly raises Windows license cost, forcing OEMs to hike prices even further on hardwareLINK

• Google is testing a new homepage that buries the search button for AILINK

• Elon Musk says every future Tesla will have Starlink, starting with the CybercabLINK

• Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the appLINK

• Google’s new AI boss inherits a race to catch OpenAI and AnthropicLINK

• Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni reportedly knew Phia was ‘cookie stuffing’ for monthsLINK

• Foxconn now makes more money from AI servers than from everything else combinedLINK

• Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIsLINK

🧰 Trending tools

RightCard: recommends which card to use at checkout, auto-activates bank offers, tracks rotating 5% categories, and alerts you before credits or fees renew.LINK

Media Sharing: lets developers share and compare visual screenshots across builds, catching pixel-level UI regressions before code reaches production via GitHub integration.LINK

Nearfield: a native Mac app that merges two Apple Studio Displays into one stereo output, adding volume control, balance adjustment, and app-based audio routing.LINK

Grok Bot: an autonomous AI agent team that operates its own computer to complete tasks continuously, handling work without human intervention or downtime.LINK

tash: lets you buy shares of professionally managed collectible card indexes, bringing ETF-style diversification and discipline to card investing.LINK

Lettertrace: an open-source, bring-your-own-key tool that tracks how your brand appears in AI assistant answers, monitoring topics and benchmarking competitors.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Automated planning systems can now flag action sequences that lead to unsafe or forbidden outcomes and automatically rewrite the fewest possible rules so those bad outcomes become impossible to reach.LINK

Automated trial-and-error training lets reinforcement learning systems decide on their own how much to explore versus exploit, hitting reliable accuracy without manual tuning or arbitrarily large hidden costs.LINK

Self-teaching AI skills lets agents write their own multi-file how-to packages for complex tasks, beating five rival methods on SkillsBench without needing humans to hand-author or grade them.LINK

Fact-checking viral posts with multiple images and languages gets a system that hits ~42% accuracy on real-world misinformation, beating rival tools while cutting verification costs by up to ~80%.LINK

Visual attention mimicry lets a smaller image-reasoning system copy where a bigger teacher model actually looks, not just what it says, boosting complex reasoning scores by up to ~17 points and letting a compact model beat larger rivals and GPT-4o.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!