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🤖 Robots beat Usain Bolt's 100m record
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- A humanoid robot called Tiangong Ultra, built by Beijing's X-Humanoid, ran the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt's human record of 9.58 seconds from 2009.
- A second Chinese robot named Lightning, made by phone maker Honor, also topped Bolt's mark with 9.47 seconds in the final, though both machines lost control afterward, with Tiangong veering off track and Lightning carried away.
- The five-day Beijing event drew over 2,000 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries for 51 events, from soccer to warehouse logistics, with more than 40% of contests requiring the robots to operate on their own.
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🏠 Apple revamps stores for smart home push
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- Apple is redesigning its retail stores this fall, rearranging sections and adding accessory bays, to prepare for a wave of new home devices arriving later this year.
- The lineup includes an upgraded Apple TV set-top box, a new HomePod mini, and a long-rumored home hub with a display that runs a fresh system and interface for controlling smart home gadgets.
- The store changes let shoppers try the home hub in person, a useful move since it enters new territory for Apple at a time when prices across its product range are climbing.
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🏭 Most Americans oppose nearby data centers
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- Three-quarters of Americans say they don't want a data center built near them, according to a new poll from Heatmap, with 64% strongly opposed and only 15% in favor of a nearby facility.
- The turn against data centers spans age, gender, income, party, and the rural-urban split, with the facilities running 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 with independents, and 75 with Democrats.
- Opposition has swung 33 points in a year across four surveys using the same wording, rising from 42% last August to 75% now, and a July Redfin poll found similar results, with 53% opposed.
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🕵️ Anonymous AI coding model wows devs
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- A mysterious AI coding model called Ox Alpha has shown up on OpenRouter as an anonymous, free-to-use release, and developers testing it have been impressed by its performance on programming and agent tasks.
- The model offers a context window of just over a million tokens, and the open-source agent OpenCode said it would be free for a week with its provider handling up to 100 trillion tokens a day.
- Nobody knows who made it, with guesses ranging from China's Z.ai to Microsoft's MAI family, and OpenRouter warns that prompts and completions are kept by the unnamed provider, a problem for European firms under data protection law.
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💰 Nvidia hikes AI server prices over 15%
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- Nvidia has warned its biggest customers that servers built around its AI chips will cost more than 15% extra, with the higher prices hitting Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year.
- The exact increase depends on the chip generation and memory setup, and it stems from soaring DRAM prices, with contract makers building servers for Microsoft, Google, and Oracle already telling their customers about the coming jumps.
- A 15% rise on rack-scale systems costing several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands per rack, and with TSMC unable to meet demand, buyers have little room to push back against Nvidia's roughly 75% margins.
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⚖️ Twitch sued for training AI on streamers
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- A Connecticut streamer named Warren Pandiscia has filed a class action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, saying the companies used his streams and videos to train AI models without getting his permission or a license.
- The complaint claims Twitch and Amazon broke their contract by treating streamers as "free training stock" for separate commercial AI products, and that creators lost money or property because of the practices.
- Earlier this month Twitch added a setting to opt out of AI training, but it's on by default, and product chief Mike Minton said on a Patch Notes stream that "if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in."
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