☕️ Tim Cook says higher prices are "unavoidable" because of AI

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In today's Techpresso:

📱 Tim Cook says higher prices are "unavoidable" because of AI

🩻 Midjourney is developing a full-body ultrasonic scanner

🤝 Google Gemini co-lead leaves for OpenAI

🇺🇸 Top AI CEOs want America to lead the world

🍎 Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel

🦊 Firefox's bold new plan as users flee by the millions

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

📱 Tim Cook says higher prices are "unavoidable" because of AI LINK

Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that the company will raise prices because the cost of memory and storage chips has surged, driven by demand from artificial intelligence companies.

Cook would not say when the increases will start, how large they will be, or which products they will hit, but he said the prices for these chips have quadrupled over the past year.

Apple, one of the world's largest chip buyers, now has to "wait in line" behind AI companies, and Cook called the situation a "hundred-year flood" he has never seen in over 40 years.

🩻 Midjourney is developing a full-body ultrasonic scanner LINK

Midjourney, the company behind the text-to-image AI tool, has announced the Midjourney Scanner, a medical machine designed to scan a person's entire body in just 60 seconds using ultrasonic waves.

After stepping onto a platform, you are lowered into water at 2 inches per second through a ring of half a million tiny squares, each emitting ultrasonic waves and recording the ripples that bounce back.

The scanner produces a 3D map of your body down to a fraction of a millimeter, resembling an MRI but nearly 100 times faster, with Midjourney building spas in San Francisco to house the machines next year.

🤝 Google Gemini co-lead leaves for OpenAI LINK

Noam Shazeer, who served as co-lead of Google's Gemini and is regarded as one of AI's top researchers, is leaving the company to join OpenAI.

Shazeer's move comes just two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him and part of his CharacterAI team aboard, showing how acqui-hires can lose their value once retention periods end.

His hiring counts as a major win for OpenAI in the AI talent wars, as the company races to catch up with rival Anthropic's most advanced models ahead of both firms' anticipated IPOs.

🇺🇸 Top AI CEOs want America to lead the world LINK

At the G7 summit in France, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis pushed for a U.S.-led coalition to set global rules and standards for artificial intelligence, with President Trump and other heads of state present.

Amodei told the group that cooperation should cover structured access to frontier models and trade of chips and critical components that excludes China, plus joint work on risks in cyber, bioterrorism, and intelligence.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who also attended, called for an international forum to set globally accepted testing standards, while Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed the U.S. could lead such an AI coalition.

🍎 Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel LINK

President Trump announced on Truth Social that Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and make chips inside the United States, though Apple itself said nothing and confirmed none of the details.

Trump's post gave no volumes, timeline, dollar figure, or which chips were involved, and it followed a preliminary deal the two firms reportedly reached in May after more than a year of talks.

The Trump administration owns a roughly 10 percent stake in Intel and committed about $10bn to its factories, while Apple seeks a second source beyond TSMC, possibly using Intel's 18A process.

🦊 Firefox's bold new plan as users flee by the millions LINK

Mozilla has published a new roadmap of major Firefox changes, hoping to slow the browser's steady loss of users as its desktop market share keeps falling.

The roadmap promises a Nova design refresh, mobile tab groups, customizable keyboard shortcuts, better PDF editing, a built-in VPN on mobile, and ad and tracker blocking for iOS without add-ons.

Firefox 152 already added a redesigned Settings page, experimental JPEG XL support, and HDR video on Windows and Linux, while a "Quick Answers" voice feature for chatbots is coming soon.

Other news you might like

• Epic Games just took a big step toward AI-built games with Unreal Engine 5.8LINK

• UK orders Google to improve search ranking transparencyLINK

• Waymo recalls nearly 4,000 robotaxis to stop them driving into highway construction zonesLINK

• Godfather of AI blasts Musk's xAI as 'failure,' says labs are risking a 'big bubble explosion'LINK

• Tesla Full Self-Driving is getting a major parking upgrade, Elon Musk saysLINK

• Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird in AI pivot, hires former AWS executive as CEO; shares soarLINK

• "Dangerous" AI models are coming no matter whatLINK

• NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceXLINK

• Anthropic ships major Claude Design overhaul with design system imports, code round-trips, and a fix for its token-burning problemLINK

• ‘No poaching’ our people, China's AI behemoth DeepSeek reportedly tells investorsLINK

• Mastodon looks to newsletters to help revive the open social webLINK

• Apple to Merge Private Mail Domains for Sign In and Hide My EmailLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Elvin: aggregates your emails, meetings, and tasks to auto-draft follow-ups and build a daily action plan, reducing coordination overhead.LINK

Agentic videos by D-ID: turn static images and text into interactive AI video personas for marketing, customer engagement, and content workflows via API or studio.LINK

Otty: a GPU-accelerated terminal designed to run multiple AI coding agents in parallel, keeping your development workflow fast and organized.LINK

Locofy: design-to-code agents: converts Figma and Adobe XD designs into production-ready frontend code, reducing handoff friction between designers and developers.LINK

Ploy.ai: automates digital marketing by building pages, running ads, personalizing content, and syncing CRM data without manual intervention.LINK

Genie Mentions: tracks friends' interests, travel plans, and life updates using AI so you never lose touch with your social circle.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Content feeds read by AI agents can quietly steer those agents' decisions, a study of 2,785 test runs shows, with one-sided feeds shifting uncertain choices from 5% to 100% agreement.LINK

Chrome ad blockers still work just as well after Google's controversial browser extension update, with some even blocking privacy trackers slightly better than before.LINK

Python's speed problem is now measured head to head against C, C++, Rust, Go, and Julia across five common tasks, revealing Python runs 315x slower than C while Rust trails C by only 9%.LINK

Inside large language models, researchers replaced 25% of the decision-making components with simple readable code, causing only a 16% performance drop, making AI behavior far easier for humans to inspect and understand.LINK

Apple's on-device AI chip can now be programmed directly in Python, bypassing Apple's own tools, running a full image-recognition model in 0.33ms and even handling training, not just inference.LINK

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