Tim Cook says goodbye as Apple CEO

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🍎 Tim Cook works final day at Apple

💰 OpenAI's ChatGPT ads hit $1B run rate

🎵 Music labels sue Anthropic over piracy

🖥️ AI labs are buying tens of thousands of Mac minis to train agents

🏭 SpaceX to make own turbine blades

🇪🇺 EU classifies ChatGPT as a search engine

Plus: 🎁 16 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🍎 Tim Cook works final day at Apple LINK

Tim Cook worked his final day as Apple's chief executive, with longtime hardware leader John Ternus set to take over the top job tomorrow.

In an emotional memo to staff, Cook said he takes "enormous comfort" handing off to Ternus, praising him as brilliant and capable of building products that change the world.

Cook stressed he is not leaving Apple entirely, telling employees he looks forward to seeing them in a new role at Apple Park and around the world.

💰 OpenAI's ChatGPT ads hit $1B run rate LINK

OpenAI's advertising business inside ChatGPT has reached a $1 billion annual run rate just under 200 days after launch, a figure based on multiplying its current monthly ad revenue by twelve.

Starting today, August 31, OpenAI opened beta self-serve access to its Ads Manager across 31 European markets, letting startups, small businesses and big brands build campaigns directly instead of only through agency partners.

The run rate means roughly $83 million a month, but to hit a $2.5 billion revenue target for 2026 OpenAI would need to average over $540 million monthly through the fourth quarter.

🎵 Music labels sue Anthropic over piracy LINK

Sony Music and Warner Music have sued Anthropic in California federal court, accusing the AI company of pirating copyrighted songs on a huge scale to build and profit from its Claude models.

The 48-page complaint names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, claiming they torrented, scraped, and downloaded thousands of musical works, and it seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each infringed song.

The case follows Anthropic's September 2025 deal with authors and publishers, a $1.5 billion agreement described as the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, showing the company already faced piracy accusations over its training data.

🖥️ AI labs are buying tens of thousands of Mac minis to train agents LINK

AI companies including OpenAI have bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to train computer-use agents, pushing Apple to refresh both desktops on August 25, weeks earlier than its usual autumn schedule.

OpenAI runs the Macs for reinforcement learning and repeatedly testing agents inside an operating system, work that leans on Apple's unified memory sharing one pool of RAM, while Anthropic rents Mac mini power through Amazon Web Services.

Apple turned away businesses asking to buy Private Cloud Compute access, and by August 30 delivery for high-memory configurations had stretched from two weeks to nearly two months, sending some buyers to Nvidia's DGX Spark.

🏭 SpaceX to make own turbine blades LINK

SpaceX plans to make its own turbine blades and vanes, the hard-to-build parts inside gas turbine generators, after Elon Musk said on X the company would bring this manufacturing in-house to speed up power for AI data centers.

Musk says building the blades himself could cut delivery times by 18 months, letting xAI get new turbine generators faster instead of waiting in a queue that stretches into 2030.

Turbine blades are a major bottleneck because one batch can take 60 to 90 weeks to produce, and demand has surged as data centers buy portable gas turbines to bypass long waits for grid connections.

🇪🇺 EU classifies ChatGPT as a search engine LINK

The European Commission has classified ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, deciding that a chatbot pulling live web results counts as a search engine rather than just a platform.

OpenAI said ChatGPT's search function averaged about 159 million monthly users in the EU for the six months ending March 2026, far above the 45 million threshold that triggers the bloc's strictest oversight rules.

ChatGPT now has until the end of November to meet obligations like annual risk assessments, independent audits, and data sharing, with breaches risking fines of up to 6% of global yearly revenue.

Other news you might like

• OpenAI has started letting some customers pay only when the AI worksLINK

• SB Energy gave OpenAI $5.5bn in warrants to sign a 20-year leaseLINK

• Anthropic warns infostealer malware is hijacking Claude sessions to drain usageLINK

• China's top DRAM maker CXMT sues Pentagon over its blacklistingLINK

• OpenClaw 2.0 Adds Multiplayer Sessions Its Docs Say Are Not a Security BoundaryLINK

• Apple Maps still shows Lake Ontario as Google Maps changes nameLINK

• Europe has ordered a €388M AI supercomputer from its own state-owned championLINK

• Instagram will demote AI-generated influencers if they don't clearly label their accountLINK

• Bank of England chief warns new AI models threaten global financial stabilityLINK

• Taiwan investigates major Nvidia and Intel supplier Unimicron over alleged relabeling of China-made circuit boardsLINK

• Anthropic is cutting Claude Code's current weekly limits by 17%LINK

• A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming historyLINK

• The Rise and Fall of Agent CivilizationsLINK

• First outputs from GPT-6 "Astra" model from OpenAILINK

• Report: Apple Watch Series 12 may feature always-on heart-rate tracking, new Fitness appLINK

• Nvidia invests $3.5 billion in MediaTek convertible bondsLINK

🧰 Trending tools

BrandJet: unifies outreach across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Instagram with one inbox and AI sentiment analysis to track brands, competitors, and leads.LINK

EP-2350 FX, MIC: handheld performance mic with onboard effects, four custom sample slots, and a mod lever for shaping vocals and triggering sounds live.LINK

ChordWeaver: builds chord progressions, harmonizes melodies by genre, and teaches music theory through interactive lessons and story mode, all free.LINK

Prequel: a macOS screen recorder that auto-generates click-following zooms, frames your webcam, adds backgrounds, and exports finished 4K MP4s without manual editing.LINK

RIP MY BUILD: publish honest postmortems for dead side projects with a permanent page that preserves the link, cause of death, and lessons learned.LINK

Retro Y2K Theme: restyles any website with 90s and Y2K aesthetics, adding custom cursors and classic UI elements for nostalgic browsingLINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Document-reading AI checks can be fooled by models that fabricate answers without opening the source, so this tracks every tool the AI actually uses, catching all 50 planted cheats while flagging none of 207 honest runs.LINK

Contested-fact recall shows that even the best AI models surface both sides of a genuinely disputed fact only ~52% of the time, usually parroting the more common version while silently dropping the other.LINK

Cultural AI testing measures whether assistants can give practical, culturally aware help across 10 Asian regions over full conversations, not just trivia, with GPT-5 mini scoring highest and training on the data lifting related skills.LINK

Text-to-SQL add-ons get a cost-benefit audit showing that only self-correction reliably pays off across systems, and that a fixed budget is often better spent improving the pipeline than upgrading to a pricier model.LINK

Bangla health chatbot answers medical questions for Bangla speakers, a language with almost no such tools, drawing on a curated database of ~4,500 answers across 506 diseases with 95% accuracy in testing.LINK

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