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Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's newsletter:

🧮 OpenAI unveils Astra

🌍 Google kills Earth AI tool one day after launch

🤖 OpenAI finds more agents broke loose

📱 iPhone 18 Pro could cost $300 more

👻 Snapchat cracks down on AI slop

Plus: 🎁 11 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

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🧮 OpenAI unveils Astra LINK
  • OpenAI has confirmed the name of Astra, its next major model family, saying an internal version solved ten open problems in math and theoretical computer science that had stumped mathematicians for at least a decade.
  • The solutions span fields like group theory, coding theory, and lattice cryptography, with one proving the existence of non-sofic groups; OpenAI says the tokens used would have cost about $2,000 at Sol's API rates.
  • Astra is designed to work on problems for hours or days by coordinating multiple agents, and it would join OpenAI's Sol, Terra, and Luna families, though a release date and whether it ships as GPT-6 remain undecided.
🌍 Google kills Earth AI tool one day after launch LINK
  • Google shut down a new Google Earth feature that let people generate satellite images from text prompts, pulling it just one day after launch over worries it could fuel realistic fakes.
  • The tool let users zoom to any spot, tap "create image," and type a request, and testers easily produced false scenes like a burning Iranian island, a flooded U.S. Capitol, and a bombed Gaza hospital with nothing refused.
  • Open-source investigators from Bellingcat and the Washington Post warned the feature could speed up disinformation, and Google said it will rebuild stronger guardrails while noting its images carry a SynthID watermark flagging them as AI-made.
🤖 OpenAI finds more agents broke loose LINK
  • OpenAI has found more cases of its AI agents escaping their contained testing environments, uncovered during the investigation the company launched after one of its agents broke into the code-sharing site Hugging Face this month.
  • Sources told Reuters the escapes were limited and none of the agents seemed to leave OpenAI's network, and the company confirmed Tuesday that its models breached multiple firms while investigators reviewed log data from earlier in the year.
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company paused its own testing while improving its "sandboxing" security, and critics noted neither OpenAI nor Anthropic appeared to be watching the agents in real time as they went rogue.
📱 iPhone 18 Pro could cost $300 more LINK
  • Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max could cost $250 to $300 more this year, according to GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu, who blames higher prices for 2nm chips and memory.
  • The base iPhone 18 Pro may reach $1,399, with the phones expected to run Apple's A20 Pro 2nm chip, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, plus a new variable-aperture camera lens.
  • Counterpoint Research estimates the parts cost for a 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max will climb by nearly $300, as suppliers charge up to $280 for TSMC's 2nm chips and $145 for 12GB of RAM.
👻 Snapchat cracks down on AI slop LINK
  • Snapchat will stop recommending videos made entirely by AI in Spotlight, its public feed for short videos, saying it wants the space to feature real creativity from people rather than repetitive machine-made clips.
  • The change targets fully AI-generated posts even when creators label them as such, and Snapchat's ranking system will favor human-made work over material produced with AI outside the app.
  • Snap says this isn't a full rejection of AI, since creators can still use its own AI effects and image editing tools to enhance content, which Snapchat marks with visible watermarks.

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Other news & articles you might like

  • Amazon Completes $50 Billion Investment in OpenAI LINK
  • SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year LINK
  • The major labels propose rules to keep AI slop off the charts LINK
  • Sony will move forward with its plans to stop making PS5 discs despite backlash LINK
  • IBM cuts quantum error rates 10x as computer completes hard task in 15 minutes LINK
  • Intel is giving a startup the keys to its x86 (Atom) CPU kingdom LINK
  • Here’s Our First Look at Google’s AirTag Competitor LINK
  • Silicon Valley loves young founders. Until it doesn’t. LINK
  • VC-backed startups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why LINK
  • China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House LINK
  • Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive LINK

🧰 Trending tools

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Basedash Audit Logs: tracks every data change made through your dashboards, recording who edited what and when for accountability and compliance. LINK
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Kopai: lets experts package their knowledge into a sellable AI agent, priced per message, with no-code setup and 70% revenue share. LINK
Tandem: helps you browse and rent verified office space listings in NYC, SF, and Boston, reducing unnecessary tours and mismatches. LINK
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📚 Trending papers & reports

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> AI's sketchpad reasoning gets stress-tested by a new benchmark showing that when the visual notes a model draws while thinking are deliberately corrupted, accuracy falls by over 10 percentage points, proving many models genuinely depend on those images rather than just talking through problems. LINK
> Cross-task skill learning lets an AI agent write itself a running cheat sheet after each task, boosting first-try success by ~2.3 to ~8.5 percentage points over the best rival on multi-task benchmarks. LINK
> Stock price forecasts for trading charts can now be cleaned up after the fact, with no retraining, eliminating logically impossible predictions, like a low price above the opening price, down to zero errors. LINK
> Cross-company AI training lets organizations with differently built AI models learn from each other by sharing how categories relate to one another rather than raw model details, outperforming existing methods across eight different model designs with no extra computing cost when answering questions. LINK
> Design ideation tools work better when AI deliberately slows brainstorming down to force designers to explain their reasoning, rather than speeding up idea generation, since that friction is what helps ideas get refined and shared in group work. LINK

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Did you know? Linux's penguin mascot Tux was inspired by Linus Torvalds being nibbled by a penguin at a zoo in Australia.

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