☕️ China debuts biggest AI model trained on local chips

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In today's newsletter:

🇨🇳 China debuts biggest AI model trained on local chips

🧠 Meta's new AI turns your thoughts into text

🔒 Apple rushes security updates to beat AI hackers

⚖️ Supreme Court reins in police phone tracking

💬 WhatsApp now lets you reserve usernames

💳 UK may force Apple to allow Apple Pay rivals

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

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• Meituan launched LongCat-2.0 on Tuesday, a 1.6-trillion-parameter model the company says is the first of its size to be trained entirely on domestically developed chips, a direct response to US export controls.
• The model carries a context window of one million tokens, completed end-to-end training and inference on a 50,000-chip domestic compute cluster, and Meituan says its performance matches Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro, released in February.
• Meituan open-sourced the model, releasing the weights so the community can run LongCat-2.0 against the cited benchmarks, though the training-hardware claim is harder for outsiders to confirm since it rests on Meituan's own account.

• Meta has introduced Brain2Qwerty v2, an AI system that turns brain activity into text using non-invasive brain recordings, aiming to help people who lost the ability to communicate because of brain lesions.
• The system records brain activity with a helmet-like magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner, then feeds the raw neural signals into an end-to-end AI model that reconstructs sentences a person is trying to type.
• Trained on roughly 22,000 sentences from nine volunteers, Brain2Qwerty reached 61% average word accuracy, far above the 8% of earlier non-invasive methods, and Meta is releasing the code and dataset openly.

• Apple is releasing security fixes earlier than its usual schedule, pulling them out of the annual iOS cycle into standalone updates, because AI is shortening the time attackers need to weaponise a known weakness.
• Apple told Reuters the change is preventive, arguing that the gap between a vulnerability becoming public and being exploited has narrowed, since AI tools can read code and summarise a diff to build a working exploit faster.
• The company said there was no evidence the newly patched vulnerabilities had been exploited, and it did not specify how much earlier updates would arrive or which categories of fix would be pulled forward.

• The US Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain location history and other phone data that people share with companies like Google and Apple.
• The 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States found that people keep a reasonable expectation of privacy from the government, extending Fourth Amendment protections to data handed over to tech companies.
• The case stemmed from a 2019 bank robbery in which police used a geofence warrant to find all devices located near the scene of the crime.

• WhatsApp is letting you reserve a username this week ahead of a full launch later this year, so you can chat with new people and join group conversations without sharing your personal phone number.
• With over three billion people on WhatsApp causing many names to overlap, reservations are opening early, and creators, small businesses, and organizations can claim their existing Instagram or Facebook username on the app.
• There's no directory or suggestions, so people need your exact username to contact you, and an optional username key lets you control who can message you while hiding your phone number from first-time contacts.

• Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority has proposed forcing Apple to let third-party rivals to the Apple Wallet app handle contactless payments, opening the door to competitors to Apple Pay on iPhones.
• Such payments require access to the NFC chip built into modern iPhones, which Apple currently blocks banks and other financial institutions from using, and the CMA wants to change that restriction.
• Apple opposes the proposal, and the article argues the case is weak because Apple’s fees are very small and users are unlikely to abandon having all their contactless payment options inside one app.

Other news & articles you might like

• Apple’s biggest leak in years shows the iPhone 18 Pro surviving a drop test LINK

• Tidal won't monetize AI slop music, company says LINK

• OpenClaw app for Android puts AI agents in your pocket and… looks like that LINK

• Gemini’s personalized AI image generation is now free for US users LINK

• Cursor now has a mobile app for guiding your coding agent on the go LINK

• UK finalizes sweeping crypto rules, raising the bar for global market standards LINK

• Anthropic and Gov. Newsom forge deal allowing California government to use Claude at half price LINK

• Amazon seeks cheaper AI alternatives as Anthropic shifts to token-based pricing LINK

• RAM prices expected to rise another 40-50% in Q3 2026, and then 30% more in Q4 as AI demand outpaces supply LINK

• Marc Andreessen joins the Pentagon’s board, and the old line blurs LINK

• Apple Design award winner acquired by Apple for new Swift tools LINK

• Meta restricts use of Claude Code and Codex to keep rival AI out of its training data LINK

• In San Francisco’s A.I. Era, Even $180,000 Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough LINK

• Drivers Are Not Happy With Their Cars' Screens LINK

• Meta secretly tested ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI with thousands of minor-perspective crisis prompts LINK

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