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💬 ChatGPT can now access your iMessages
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- OpenAI has added a feature that lets ChatGPT on the Mac read, write, send, and search a user's iMessages, along with summarizing conversations, in a move that could raise privacy concerns for Apple.
- OpenAI said the plug-in runs locally on the Mac using tools like AppleScript and Accessibility, requires the user's consent, and does not build an index of all messages, though it needs several opt-in permissions.
- Setting it up means turning on Full Disk Access in the Mac's System Settings and granting access to contacts and automation, similar to what's needed for automation software like Codex Computer Use.
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🗽 New York overtakes SF in tech jobs
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- New York now has more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time, according to a report from real estate firm CBRE that has tracked tech talent for 13 years.
- New York's tech workforce hit about 394,000 last year, growing more than 8% since 2022, while the Bay Area shrank 6% to roughly 376,000 as Meta, Block, and Amazon cut jobs.
- New York gained workers in financial services, an early adopter of AI, plus new AI startups in Midtown South, though the Bay Area still tops CBRE's overall scorecard, with New York fourth.
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🚗 Waymo builds its own robotaxi chip
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- Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi arm, has designed its own custom chip for self-driving cars, moving away from the Nvidia and AMD chips it depended on until now, with the part already running in its newest vehicles.
- The chip handles sensor data and runs the AI models that let Waymo's robotaxis read and respond to their surroundings, delivering more than 1,000 TOPS and matching Nvidia's current systems for self-driving.
- Made by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process, the chip is meant to lower costs and is going into Waymo's new robotaxi, which it is building with Chinese manufacturer Zeekr.
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⚠️ Senators demand TikTok explain safety test
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- Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to TikTok's top executives demanding details about a 2021 experiment in which the company tested and, for millions of users, withheld a safety feature meant to break harmful "filter bubbles."
- The feature was designed to stop the "for you" feed from pushing too much of one content type, but TikTok held it back from a control group to measure how the change affected user engagement.
- The senators, both backers of the Kids Online Safety Act, gave TikTok until September 1 to respond, citing a teen, Chase Nasca, who died by suicide after his account was fed repetitive self-harm content.
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🤖 AI wrote a third of new web pages
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- A new Pew Research study found that more than a third of web pages published after ChatGPT's release show signs of being written or heavily edited by AI, echoing other reports on the internet's flood of machine-made text.
- Pew studied nearly half a million English pages from Common Crawl over five years, using Open Pangram's detection tool, and found AI signs in 35% of pages once those posted before ChatGPT's November 2022 launch were removed.
- By domain, .com pages showed AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov sites, which sat near 1%, while .org pages came in at about 5%, and tells like em dashes and Oxford commas rose over time.
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🔍 DeepSeek launches experimental AI model
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- DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model that reads images and screenshots and acts on them, and says its agent performance comes close to Anthropic's Opus-4.8 on its own published benchmarks.
- On the eleven benchmarks DeepSeek published, the new model beats Opus-4.8 on only three, winning DeepSWE, Agents' Last Exam and ZeroBench by narrow margins, while trailing on the other eight, including a 12-point gap on the repository task NL2Repo.
- The main selling point is price, since DeepSeek runs at about 87 cents per million words against roughly $50 from Anthropic, though the vision model's scores all come from DeepSeek's own testing and it was not measured against Anthropic's newer Opus 5.
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