Zuckerberg rejects AI slowdown

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In today's Techpresso:

❌ Zuckerberg rejects AI slowdown

⚖️ FTC chair doubts AI antitrust waiver

🚀 SpaceX targets first Starship orbit

💰 Senate blocks crypto rules over Trump ties

💾 SK Hynix may partner with Intel

👓 Meta may launch camera-free smart glasses

Plus: 🎁 15 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

❌ Zuckerberg rejects AI slowdown LINK

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI labs don't need an industry-wide deal to slow development when safety worries come up, arguing instead that each company should move at whatever pace lets it train models safely.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said market pressure will turn trust and alignment, making sure AI follows what users want, into a competitive edge, and warned that any lab ignoring alignment will fall behind.

He pointed to Meta holding back its Muse model for several months to improve safety without asking rival labs to do the same first, saying, "We just did it," as Anthropic and others push for coordinated pauses.

⚖️ FTC chair doubts AI antitrust waiver LINK

The head of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, said "everyone should be deeply suspicious" of AI companies asking Washington for both antitrust exemptions and new regulations, warning the combination could shield big firms from competition.

Ferguson's remarks, made at Georgetown University, were the first sign of how the Trump administration views Anthropic's request, after CEO Dario Amodei asked last week for a narrow waiver letting rivals coordinate a slower, safer pace of AI development.

Antitrust experts and rivals pushed back, saying existing law already permits coordination to prevent catastrophic risks; Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez called the plan another attempt by Silicon Valley incumbents to shape AI rules in their favor.

🚀 SpaceX targets first Starship orbit LINK

SpaceX is aiming to send Starship into a real orbit for the first time on its 14th test flight, targeting September 22, after all 13 earlier missions flew shorter suborbital arcs that reentered within the hour.

If it works, Starship will circle Earth about six times at roughly 275 kilometers over ten hours, then splash down in the Pacific west of Chile, and it will try to release working Starlink V3 satellites into orbit.

Each V3 satellite carries about one terabit per second of downlink, so a good drop would be SpaceX's biggest bandwidth gain yet, though Flight 14 skips a tower catch of the ship, with only the Super Heavy booster attempting recovery.

💰 Senate blocks crypto rules over Trump ties LINK

The Senate on Tuesday failed to advance a bill setting new rules for cryptocurrency, with Democrats blocking it on a 49-50 vote after demanding tighter ethics limits on President Trump's own crypto holdings.

Trump offered concessions, including barring elected officials from launching digital assets like the meme coins he and Melania released, but Democrats said the plan lacked enforcement and a requirement for presidents to sell off large holdings.

Trump reported over $1.4 billion from crypto last year, including more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial, and Republicans warned the bill, called the Clarity Act, could now stall until after the November midterm elections.

💾 SK Hynix may partner with Intel LINK

SK Hynix is in talks to make memory chips in the US for the first time, possibly by leasing part of Intel's Ohio site or forming a joint venture with Intel and cloud providers, according to Reuters.

No deal has been reached, and both companies stayed quiet, though front-end memory production could begin within five years, adding to SK Hynix's $4 billion packaging plant already being built in West Lafayette, Indiana.

The push follows a warning from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers could face tariffs of up to 100% without US operations, and after the report Intel rose about 5% and SK Hynix's US shares about 3%.

👓 Meta may launch camera-free smart glasses LINK

Meta is working on a pair of smart glasses called Luna that leaves out the camera, and it could start shipping the new model as soon as next month, according to The Information.

Instead of a camera, Luna will pack six microphones and speakers aimed at the user's ears, plus a side button that quickly wakes up Meta's AI chatbot for hands-free talking.

Coming in two styles named Clubmaster and Burbank, Luna will have slimmer temples that make it look like ordinary eyewear, and Meta may show it off at its Connect conference next week.

Other news you might like

• Meta expands subscription push with new AI-focused plansLINK

• ChatGPT pioneer launches Jev model for programmatic logicLINK

• Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and PeopleLINK

• DOJ says companies used Binance to funnel $1.5 billion in crypto to IranLINK

• Mistral and Mozilla are bringing open, private and multilingual AI to your web browserLINK

• Smaller phone and laptop makers dig in for years of memory scarcityLINK

• If you let it, Apple Intelligence will train itself on your data in iOS 27LINK

• Trump administration orders Kalshi to scrap AI price tracker over national security concernsLINK

• Nitter and XCancel are dead (again) after X’s latest legal actionsLINK

• Apple Details How Reference Image Proves a Photo is RealLINK

• The European Union wants to ban chatbots and online games for kids under 15, not just social mediaLINK

• GM Is Already Bringing Apple CarPlay Back After Discontinuing ItLINK

• OpenAI investors have approached the company about a new funding roundLINK

• AWS says it can't restore service to Bahrain, UAE facilities 6 months after Iran strikesLINK

• Google’s new speech model Gemini 3.8 Live supports real-time reasoningLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Expand Board for macOS: a spatial canvas for arranging text, images, files, and shapes, with nested boards you can enter and navigate via breadcrumbs.LINK

Fide Island: turns your MacBook notch into a command surface for media, calendar, files, clipboard, and quick calculations without breaking focus.LINK

Project Feed: a collaborative workspace for game teams to share updates, review media, manage tasks, and gather client feedback, free for up to three editors.LINK

CreatorHat: finds outperforming videos, researches YouTube keywords, tracks rankings, and transcribes uploads locally on your Mac to suggest titles and descriptions.LINK

PeakHour 6: monitors your Mac's network in real time, grading connection quality with an on-device AI, plus Wi-Fi details, speed tests, and outage alerts.LINK

PhraseVault: local snippet manager for reusable replies, SQL, and templates, with variable expansion, cross-app insertion, and optional PIN locks for sensitive phrases.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Agent-skill marketplaces exploded then cooled in 2026, and this audit finds ~78% of listings got zero human review while ~85% request risky system access, with security scanners catching at most ~61% of threats.LINK

Coding-agent leaderboards can no longer reliably rank their top systems, since the two leaders each solve 396 of 500 tasks and statistical tests separate none of the 29 closest pairs, making tiny score gaps meaningless.LINK

AI code-fixing confidence gets more trustworthy reliability scores, so developers know when to accept or reject a model's automated program repairs instead of blindly trusting flawed suggestions that waste time.LINK

Robot navigation lets robots plan routes by imagining future camera views guided by a top-down map, roughly doubling maze success and hitting 70% in narrow passages where rival methods fail.LINK

Autonomous coding agents tend to fake success or invent physically impossible designs during early system planning, so a new external checker strips their self-grading power and eliminates this cheating, making automated architecture design more trustworthy.LINK

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