☕️ ChatGPT can now access your iMessages

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

💬 ChatGPT can now access your iMessages

🗽 New York overtakes SF in tech jobs

🚗 Waymo builds its own robotaxi chip

⚠️ Senators demand TikTok explain safety test

🤖 AI wrote a third of new web pages

🔍 DeepSeek launches experimental AI model

Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

💬 ChatGPT can now access your iMessages LINK

OpenAI has added a feature that lets ChatGPT on the Mac read, write, send, and search a user's iMessages, along with summarizing conversations, in a move that could raise privacy concerns for Apple.

OpenAI said the plug-in runs locally on the Mac using tools like AppleScript and Accessibility, requires the user's consent, and does not build an index of all messages, though it needs several opt-in permissions.

Setting it up means turning on Full Disk Access in the Mac's System Settings and granting access to contacts and automation, similar to what's needed for automation software like Codex Computer Use.

🗽 New York overtakes SF in tech jobs LINK

New York now has more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time, according to a report from real estate firm CBRE that has tracked tech talent for 13 years.

New York's tech workforce hit about 394,000 last year, growing more than 8% since 2022, while the Bay Area shrank 6% to roughly 376,000 as Meta, Block, and Amazon cut jobs.

New York gained workers in financial services, an early adopter of AI, plus new AI startups in Midtown South, though the Bay Area still tops CBRE's overall scorecard, with New York fourth.

🚗 Waymo builds its own robotaxi chip LINK

Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi arm, has designed its own custom chip for self-driving cars, moving away from the Nvidia and AMD chips it depended on until now, with the part already running in its newest vehicles.

The chip handles sensor data and runs the AI models that let Waymo's robotaxis read and respond to their surroundings, delivering more than 1,000 TOPS and matching Nvidia's current systems for self-driving.

Made by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process, the chip is meant to lower costs and is going into Waymo's new robotaxi, which it is building with Chinese manufacturer Zeekr.

⚠️ Senators demand TikTok explain safety test LINK

Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to TikTok's top executives demanding details about a 2021 experiment in which the company tested and, for millions of users, withheld a safety feature meant to break harmful "filter bubbles."

The feature was designed to stop the "for you" feed from pushing too much of one content type, but TikTok held it back from a control group to measure how the change affected user engagement.

The senators, both backers of the Kids Online Safety Act, gave TikTok until September 1 to respond, citing a teen, Chase Nasca, who died by suicide after his account was fed repetitive self-harm content.

🤖 AI wrote a third of new web pages LINK

A new Pew Research study found that more than a third of web pages published after ChatGPT's release show signs of being written or heavily edited by AI, echoing other reports on the internet's flood of machine-made text.

Pew studied nearly half a million English pages from Common Crawl over five years, using Open Pangram's detection tool, and found AI signs in 35% of pages once those posted before ChatGPT's November 2022 launch were removed.

By domain, .com pages showed AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov sites, which sat near 1%, while .org pages came in at about 5%, and tells like em dashes and Oxford commas rose over time.

🔍 DeepSeek launches experimental AI model LINK

DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model that reads images and screenshots and acts on them, and says its agent performance comes close to Anthropic's Opus-4.8 on its own published benchmarks.

On the eleven benchmarks DeepSeek published, the new model beats Opus-4.8 on only three, winning DeepSWE, Agents' Last Exam and ZeroBench by narrow margins, while trailing on the other eight, including a 12-point gap on the repository task NL2Repo.

The main selling point is price, since DeepSeek runs at about 87 cents per million words against roughly $50 from Anthropic, though the vision model's scores all come from DeepSeek's own testing and it was not measured against Anthropic's newer Opus 5.

Other news you might like

• Ramp launches its own AI model router, called RouterLINK

• Google is giving you more control over what shows up in your feedLINK

• Anthropic changes data retention policy after enterprise pushbackLINK

• Meta brings Pocket, an app that lets you vibe-code and share games, to US usersLINK

• Micron to launch US memory research lab with $10bn investmentLINK

• Nevada allows Uber, Tesla and Waymo to start paid robotaxi serviceLINK

• Nvidia denies report it is rolling out China AI chip by year-endLINK

• Broadcom reportedly seeking up to $100B in debt financing for AI chip dealLINK

• FDA approves robot that can find your vein, insert a needle, and draw blood without human helpLINK

• Waymo Is Bringing Chinese EVs to American StreetsLINK

• Ex-Google engineer’s espionage convictions overturned, theft convictions standLINK

• Nvidia pays Poolside $6bn to license its model factory and hire 109 staffLINK

• Apple Music to Launch Labels on AI Tracks Later This YearLINK

• Apple reportedly lays off 60 Vision employees amid shifting prioritiesLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Lifelong: manages health records, medications, and appointments for your whole household, syncs with wearables, and includes an AI assistant for logging updates.LINK

bitdrift.ai: captures on-device mobile logs and crash reports in real time, letting you remotely define what to track and debug sessions without release cycles.LINK

Zoho Cliq 7.0: a team messaging platform with collaborative spreadsheets, screen-share annotations, multi-vendor AI support, and smarter out-of-office handoffs for connected teamwork.LINK

Revy: recreates outfits you love using clothes already in your wardrobe, linking style inspiration, creators, and shopping in one place.LINK

Local: connects users with hyperlocal Q&A while letting small businesses and freelancers list services, helping locals and visitors find information fast.LINK

ProtoNote: shares HTML, image, or PDF prototypes via link where reviewers pin notes to exact spots, with Claude integration to auto-apply feedback.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Zero-to-all code generation lets an AI build an entire software project from a plain-English description while keeping it well-organized, passing up to ~30 points more tests than the strongest rival approach.LINK

Coding agents mostly read and write their own instruction files and working notes, which make up ~61% of documentation use, while barely touching the API references and manuals written for human developers.LINK

Grid code compliance gets an automated assistant that reads the tangled rules governing power grids and answers questions about them, improving answer quality by ~26% and boosting relevant-document recall more than tenfold.LINK

Post-event crowd simulation teaches a language model to move virtual pedestrians realistically using only privacy-safe headcounts, cutting the error in where crowds go by ~25% after real baseball games ended.LINK

Software's shaky foundations get a fix as this manifesto urges developers to write machine-checkable specifications alongside code, giving both AI and human coders sharper feedback and cutting the mounting risk that AI-generated code piles up.LINK

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