Robots beat Usain Bolt's 100m record

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In today's Techpresso:

🤖 Robots beat Usain Bolt's 100m record

🏠 Apple revamps stores for smart home push

🏭 Most Americans oppose nearby data centers

🕵️ Anonymous AI coding model wows devs

💰 Nvidia hikes AI server prices over 15%

⚖️ Twitch sued for training AI on streamers

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

🤖 Robots beat Usain Bolt's 100m record LINK

A humanoid robot called Tiangong Ultra, built by Beijing's X-Humanoid, ran the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt's human record of 9.58 seconds from 2009.

A second Chinese robot named Lightning, made by phone maker Honor, also topped Bolt's mark with 9.47 seconds in the final, though both machines lost control afterward, with Tiangong veering off track and Lightning carried away.

The five-day Beijing event drew over 2,000 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries for 51 events, from soccer to warehouse logistics, with more than 40% of contests requiring the robots to operate on their own.

🏠 Apple revamps stores for smart home push LINK

Apple is redesigning its retail stores this fall, rearranging sections and adding accessory bays, to prepare for a wave of new home devices arriving later this year.

The lineup includes an upgraded Apple TV set-top box, a new HomePod mini, and a long-rumored home hub with a display that runs a fresh system and interface for controlling smart home gadgets.

The store changes let shoppers try the home hub in person, a useful move since it enters new territory for Apple at a time when prices across its product range are climbing.

🏭 Most Americans oppose nearby data centers LINK

Three-quarters of Americans say they don't want a data center built near them, according to a new poll from Heatmap, with 64% strongly opposed and only 15% in favor of a nearby facility.

The turn against data centers spans age, gender, income, party, and the rural-urban split, with the facilities running 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 with independents, and 75 with Democrats.

Opposition has swung 33 points in a year across four surveys using the same wording, rising from 42% last August to 75% now, and a July Redfin poll found similar results, with 53% opposed.

🕵️ Anonymous AI coding model wows devs LINK

A mysterious AI coding model called Ox Alpha has shown up on OpenRouter as an anonymous, free-to-use release, and developers testing it have been impressed by its performance on programming and agent tasks.

The model offers a context window of just over a million tokens, and the open-source agent OpenCode said it would be free for a week with its provider handling up to 100 trillion tokens a day.

Nobody knows who made it, with guesses ranging from China's Z.ai to Microsoft's MAI family, and OpenRouter warns that prompts and completions are kept by the unnamed provider, a problem for European firms under data protection law.

💰 Nvidia hikes AI server prices over 15% LINK

Nvidia has warned its biggest customers that servers built around its AI chips will cost more than 15% extra, with the higher prices hitting Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year.

The exact increase depends on the chip generation and memory setup, and it stems from soaring DRAM prices, with contract makers building servers for Microsoft, Google, and Oracle already telling their customers about the coming jumps.

A 15% rise on rack-scale systems costing several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands per rack, and with TSMC unable to meet demand, buyers have little room to push back against Nvidia's roughly 75% margins.

⚖️ Twitch sued for training AI on streamers LINK

A Connecticut streamer named Warren Pandiscia has filed a class action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, saying the companies used his streams and videos to train AI models without getting his permission or a license.

The complaint claims Twitch and Amazon broke their contract by treating streamers as "free training stock" for separate commercial AI products, and that creators lost money or property because of the practices.

Earlier this month Twitch added a setting to opt out of AI training, but it's on by default, and product chief Mike Minton said on a Patch Notes stream that "if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in."

Other news you might like

• Hugging Face reportedly in talks to be acquired for $13BLINK

• Thomson Reuters launches proprietary AI model for legal workLINK

• AliExpress caught using silent audio to fingerprint visitors’ browsersLINK

• Claude outage hits multiple models againLINK

• New Zealand to ban social media for kids under 16LINK

• Walmart is accepting tap to pay after eleven years of refusingLINK

• This startup is training an AI model on skin that stays alive for a monthLINK

• Alibaba launches Wan3.0, its 30-second video model, days after raising $10bnLINK

• Apple's Foldable iPhone Reportedly Impressed Early TestersLINK

• Taiwan reportedly indicted NVIDIA employees for exporting prohibited AI servers to ChinaLINK

• Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni, says its AI ‘teammate’ just outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating researchLINK

• Nvidia says Groq racks will be online this year following $20 billion purchaseLINK

• Xiaomi develops its own AI mobile chip in challenge to Qualcomm, MediaTekLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Antigravity Remote Control: monitors and controls long-running AI coding agents from your phone, so you can step away from your desk during refactors and test runs.LINK

Wavepocket: a pocket studio with synth, drum kit, sampler, and 4-track recorder, plus waveform slicing, a clip timeline, and per-track mixing for layered music-making.LINK

IFAH: builds and replays reproducible acoustic environments offline, sealing them as .soma Editions with a player and authoring studio for practice, performance, and research.LINK

PaymentKit: manages subscriptions and routes payments across multiple processors while unifying billing metrics, offering both no-code setup and developer-friendly APIs.LINK

Cortex by SKYNETLAB: a model-agnostic semantic memory layer that gives AI agents persistent shared context while filtering duplicates, calibrating trust, and flagging contradictions.LINK

Trama: monitors your repeated macOS actions and turns plain-English descriptions into automations, skipping the need for code or workflow diagrams.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Heart-scan predictions from a routine ECG flag which patients likely have significant artery blockages before imaging, sharpening risk triage, ruling out low-risk cases, and separating patients who later suffer major cardiac events.LINK

Chatbot tone matters, a friendly, supportive assistant left users more satisfied and more successful than a blunt one, but plain step-by-step instructions with no chatbot beat both, showing bots can add unnecessary friction to simple tasks.LINK

Explainable vision models let image-recognition systems show exactly which human-readable concepts and image regions drove their decisions, matching the accuracy of black-box systems across classification, segmentation, and captioning while making their reasoning auditable.LINK

PhotoBench is the first photo-search test built from real personal albums, showing today's tools fail when a query mixes visual details with dates, places, and people, so smarter reasoning is needed.LINK

Time-series model explanations now reveal how groups of variables interact during specific time windows, making forecasts in finance, healthcare, and energy roughly 1.7x more faithful while running about 40 percent faster.LINK

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