Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
💸 OpenAI and Anthropic release cheaper AI models
📺 YouTube lets you build feeds with AI
⌚ Apple is testing a screenless Whoop rival
🔞 Discord now auto-estimates your age
🕵️ ShinyHunters claims it hacked the FBI
🇨🇳 ByteDance rented banned Nvidia chips
Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.
OpenAI and Anthropic release cheaper AI models
Source: CNBC
- OpenAI and Anthropic both released cheaper AI models on Tuesday, as the two labs face growing pressure from lower-cost, open-weight rivals, including the Chinese firms Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek.
- OpenAI added two new tiers to its GPT-6 lineup, Sol, aimed at harder jobs like coding, and Luna, built for high-volume work such as summarizing documents, cutting API prices by half against GPT-5.6 promotional rates.
- Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5, which it says runs about 40% cheaper than Opus 5 by using fewer tokens, with product lead Dianne Penn saying the company keeps working to make the model's thinking and answers more efficient.
YouTube lets you build feeds with AI
Source: TechCrunch
- YouTube is adding a feature called custom feeds that lets you describe, in your own words, the kinds of videos you want recommended, then builds a personalized feed around that request.
- The tool runs on Google's Gemini AI, so requests can be long and detailed about what a feed should feature, exclude, or prioritize, and the result gets pinned to its own tab atop your home page.
- The custom feeds won't replace YouTube's main recommendations, and support for creating multiple feeds on web and mobile rolls out starting next month, following similar tools from Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, X, and Spotify.
Apple is testing a screenless Whoop rival
Source: macworld.com
- Apple is building early prototypes of a screenless health and fitness tracker meant to rival Whoop, though the company hasn't decided whether it will actually sell the device, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
- The band-like tracker would drop the screen to simplify what it does, lower the price, and stretch battery life, following Whoop, whose 5.0 model lasts 14 days versus the roughly 24 hours of the Apple Watch Series 12.
- The effort is still an internal "technology investigation," and even if it leads to a real product, Gurman says a release is unlikely before 2028, filling a gap below the Apple Watch line that starts at $249.
Discord now auto-estimates your age
Source: TechCrunch
- Discord will start rolling out age checks to everyone starting today, using existing account data to guess whether a user is an adult, teen, or unconfirmed, rather than requiring an ID or biometric scan.
- The company says more than 90% of users won't need to verify, since a machine learning model reads signals like account age, device, and activity patterns, though it insists it doesn't judge age from message content or profile details.
- Users flagged as possibly underage can appeal by sharing a credit card or age data from their App Store or Google Play account, while teen accounts get blocked from age-restricted servers and see stranger messages sent to a separate inbox.
ShinyHunters claims it hacked the FBI
Source: The Register
- The hacking group ShinyHunters says it broke into the FBI and took more than 2 TB of data on current, former, and would-be employees, demanding the agency retract earlier statements about the group rather than seeking a payment.
- The gang told The Register it used an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day flaw on the FBI jobs page to run code on the servers, then defaced the site and moved onto FBI servers hosted on AWS GovCloud.
- ShinyHunters claims it grabbed 2 TB to 3 TB tied to services like human resources, MedLink, and Criminal Justice Information Services, angry over a May 15 FBI bulletin accusing it of swatting, threats, and faking compromising material.
🇨🇳 ByteDance rented banned Nvidia chips
Source: The Decoder
- ByteDance's Singapore arm Spring rented 2,304 Nvidia B200 chips through UK cloud firm Nscale's data center in Norway, a legal setup that used loopholes in U.S. export rules meant to keep advanced AI chips from China.
- The deal surfaced only in Nscale's IPO filing, where a $105 million loan from Macquarie named Spring as a big customer, bringing in $24 million of Nscale's $33 million in 2025 revenue while risking scrutiny from Washington.
- Macquarie made Nscale watch how Spring used the chips and flag any suspicious setups, and after huge new deals with Microsoft and Anthropic, Nscale says the Spring contract now drops below 20% of its revenue.
Other news you might like
- US criticises Australia's feed-control law, warns it risks 'facilitating censorship' Firstpost
- Bessent eyed for Trump’s ‘AI czar’ Semafor
- OpenAI hires Patreon co-founder Sam Yam to lead a new Creator Product division The Decoder
- China Probes DeepSeek, Moonshot AI Over Anthropic’s Claims They Route Requests to Claude Gizmodo
- UK competition watchdog wants to give Android and Chrome users more search engine choices Engadget
- Andreessen Horowitz Wants Teens to Skip College for Its New Academy Instead Gizmodo
- Anthropic and OpenEvidence Team to Expand Reach of Medical AI PYMNTS
- Comma’s hands-off driving tech under investigation after 2 fatal crashes TechCrunch
- Trump Media sued for ‘insider trading’ over early access to Truth Social posts The Independent
- Binance buys $100 million Circle stake in five-year USDC promotion deal CoinDesk
- Microsoft opens its Maryland quantum research center Constellation Research
- Apple Puts AirTag-Sized AI Pin on Hold MacRumors
- Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence TechCrunch
- Qualcomm launches two new smartphone chips with emphasis on AI TechCrunch
Trending tools
Pitchfire for Startups: matches your pitch deck to relevant VCs using AI, then handles email introductions to three suitable investors per day for free. pitchfire.com
cubicles.lol: a browser-based multiplayer metaverse where you claim and customize a cubicle to showcase projects, meet builders, and play mini-games. cubicles.lol
Contextberg: local memory app that captures screens, browser history, and agent chats into a searchable archive, feeding relevant context to Codex, Claude, and Cursor via MCP. contextberg.com
Jev Wrapped: analyzes a public Telegram channel's last year of posts, classifying type, ads, clickbait, and fear or anger tactics with linked examples you can verify yourself. wrapped.ivanhabor.com
QuietHint: transcribes Mac calls on-device and suggests short replies in a live overlay as questions are asked, using your own Anthropic key. quiethint.com
ReallyFree: color-codes your search results before you click, flagging which tools are genuinely free, conditionally free, or paid, with no account or tracking. reallyfree.app
Trending papers & reports
CivBench tests how well AI agents make long-term strategic decisions in the game Civilization V, scoring their odds of eventually winning rather than just final wins, revealing distinct strategic styles across 7 models. arXiv
HybridFlow robot control generates movement plans in just two passes through its model, hitting 95% task success versus 78% for a faster baseline while running about eight times quicker than a common alternative on standard robot hardware. arXiv
Robot skill training gets better at improving on flawed practice data by teaching AI to rank actions by quality, lifting robot task success rates by up to ~38 points over the next best method. arXiv
Multi-agent planning lets teams of AI agents map out coordinated moves in one or a few steps instead of many, running ~13x faster while cooperating ~11% better than the baseline on standard tests. arXiv
Networks that change over time can be understood more accurately by weighing each connection alongside its own history in one step, improving predictions of future links by up to ~18% over the best prior methods. arXiv
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