Tim Cook worked his final day as Apple's CEO today, with longtime hardware chief John Ternus set to step into the top job the following day.
In an emotional memo to staff, Cook said he takes "enormous comfort" in handing over to Ternus, praising his understanding of what it takes to build products that "change the world."
Cook made clear he isn't leaving Apple entirely, telling employees he'll continue in a new role at Apple Park, even as he steps back from a job he says he "loved deeply."
OpenAI's advertising business inside ChatGPT has reached a $1 billion annual run rate just under 200 days after launch, a figure based on multiplying its current monthly ad revenue by twelve.
Starting today, August 31, OpenAI opened beta self-serve access to its Ads Manager across 31 European markets, letting startups, small businesses and big brands build campaigns directly instead of only through agency partners.
The run rate means roughly $83 million a month, but to hit a $2.5 billion revenue target for 2026 OpenAI would need to average over $540 million monthly through the fourth quarter.
Sony Music and Warner Music have sued Anthropic in California federal court, accusing the AI company of pirating copyrighted songs on a huge scale to build and profit from its Claude models.
The 48-page complaint names CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, claiming they torrented, scraped, and downloaded thousands of musical works, and it seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages for each infringed song.
The case follows Anthropic's September 2025 deal with authors and publishers, a $1.5 billion agreement described as the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, showing the company already faced piracy accusations over its training data.
🖥️ AI labs are buying tens of thousands of Mac minis to train agents
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AI companies including OpenAI have bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to train computer-use agents, pushing Apple to refresh both desktops on August 25, weeks earlier than its usual autumn schedule.
OpenAI runs the Macs for reinforcement learning and repeatedly testing agents inside an operating system, work that leans on Apple's unified memory sharing one pool of RAM, while Anthropic rents Mac mini power through Amazon Web Services.
Apple turned away businesses asking to buy Private Cloud Compute access, and by August 30 delivery for high-memory configurations had stretched from two weeks to nearly two months, sending some buyers to Nvidia's DGX Spark.
SpaceX plans to make its own turbine blades and vanes, the hard-to-build parts inside gas turbine generators, after Elon Musk said on X the company would bring this manufacturing in-house to speed up power for AI data centers.
Musk says building the blades himself could cut delivery times by 18 months, letting xAI get new turbine generators faster instead of waiting in a queue that stretches into 2030.
Turbine blades are a major bottleneck because one batch can take 60 to 90 weeks to produce, and demand has surged as data centers buy portable gas turbines to bypass long waits for grid connections.
The European Commission has classified ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, deciding that a chatbot pulling live web results counts as a search engine rather than just a platform.
OpenAI said ChatGPT's search function averaged about 159 million monthly users in the EU for the six months ending March 2026, far above the 45 million threshold that triggers the bloc's strictest oversight rules.
ChatGPT now has until the end of November to meet obligations like annual risk assessments, independent audits, and data sharing, with breaches risking fines of up to 6% of global yearly revenue.
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First outputs from GPT-6 "Astra" model from OpenAI
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Report: Apple watch series 12 may feature always-on heart-rate tracking, new fitness app
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Nvidia invests $3.5 billion in MediaTek convertible bonds
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>Contested-fact recall shows that even the best AI models surface both sides of a genuinely disputed fact only ~52% of the time, usually parroting the more common version while silently dropping the other.
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>Cultural AI testing measures whether assistants can give practical, culturally aware help across 10 Asian regions over full conversations, not just trivia, with GPT-5 mini scoring highest and training on the data lifting related skills.
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>Text-to-SQL add-ons get a cost-benefit audit showing that only self-correction reliably pays off across systems, and that a fixed budget is often better spent improving the pipeline than upgrading to a pricier model.
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🤝 From our community: Reconciling receipts into expense rows
Priya Shah photographs each receipt and has Gemini return vendor, date, total, tax, and category as one CSV row to paste into a sheet, replacing month-end manual data entry and saving about two hours a week.
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Did you know? Intel made USB royalty-free, meaning co-inventor Ajay Bhatt earned nothing from it — though he later said his biggest regret was not making the connector reversible.
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