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SPACEX TO ACQUIRE THE AI CODING STARTUP CURSOR FOR $60 BILLION

SpaceX is buying AI startup Cursor for $60 billion worth of stock. Cursor, which has a popular AI coding tool that has experienced explosive growth since the company's founding in 2022, crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue in November. SpaceX has yet to provide investors with details on Cursor's customer list, momentum, or revenue. The merger is expected to close during the third quarter, subject to requisite regulatory approvals.

APPLE PLANS CAMERA AIRPODS ALONGSIDE UPGRADED FOLDABLE IPHONE IN 2027

Apple's camera-equipped AirPods are scheduled to launch in late 2027. The device will be released around the same time as the foldable iPhone and a 20th anniversary iPhone model. All three products have reached advanced stages of development. Apple intends the release to be its biggest wave of new products yet.

STARTUP BACKED BY EX-GOOGLE CEO DEBUTS ROBOT, LG PARTNERSHIP

Genesis AI, a startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has unveiled a general-purpose robot called Eno. The robot can reason, adapt, and own outcomes beyond predefined tasks. Genesis AI is working with LG Group's consulting and services arm to deploy the robot to industrial customers by the end of the year. The startup is currently raising funds to finance its next steps.

SNAP UNVEILS $2,195 AR GLASSES AS CEO EVAN SPIEGEL BETS ON POST-SMARTPHONE FUTURE

Snap's Specs, at $2,195 with a $200 refundable deposit, are expected to ship later this year in the US, UK, and France. The augmented reality glasses bring digital visuals into a user's field of vision, creating a new way to use computing in shared experiences in the real world. Snap's earlier attempt at a similar product, the $130 camera only Spectacles that debuted in 2016, never became a hit. Meta has more recently found some success with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and Google plans to launch AI-powered glasses developed together with Samsung.

AMAZON S3 ANNOTATIONS: ATTACH RICH, QUERYABLE CONTEXT DIRECTLY TO YOUR OBJECTS

AWS has a new metadata capability for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) that enables users to attach rich, large-scale business context directly to their objects. The annotations feature allows users to store up to 1,000 named annotations per object, each up to 1 MB in size, in flexible formats like JSON, XML, YAML, or plain text. Annotations can be modified or deleted at any time without rewriting objects. The feature is available now in all AWS regions.

WHY IS META DESTROYING ITS ENGINEERING ORGANIZATION?

Meta has been known over the last two decades for being a unique, high-performance engineering organization. It had a 'move-fast-and-break-things' culture where engineers were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and balance business interests with solid engineering. This has all changed in the past few weeks. This post looks at how bad things have become since April, what's happened, what's going through the minds of leadership, and the other factors causing the organization to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible.

LEAKED FINANCIAL DOCS SHOW OPENAI IS LOSING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR

Audited financial statements obtained by an independent journalist show that OpenAI's reported revenue grew from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. However, its expenses grew from $7.81 billion in 2024 to $19.18 billion in 2025. These numbers reflect the high costs OpenAI has incurred in training new models. The losses point to a concerning direction for a company that is telling investors that it hopes to be profitable by 2030.

ANTHROPIC, TRUMP OFFICIALS SEEK DEAL ON RESTORING POWERFUL MODEL ACCESS

Anthropic and Trump administration officials are still in talks to resolve the security concerns that pushed the White House to restrict access to its latest models. Both parties are working quickly to resolve the issue. The White House is under pressure to show it can responsibly oversee the rapidly developing AI industry. The latest issue stems from a workaround to Fable's guardrails discovered by Amazon researchers.

_Eliminating Print Servers_ whitepaper

REVIEWS HAVE BECOME EXPENSIVE, REWRITES HAVE BECOME CHEAP

Preparation is more valuable, and the cost of iterating is lower.

APPLE ADDS KEYLOGGER TO IOS APP STORE FOR TARGETED ADVERTISING: TIED TO YOUR ACCOUNT AND UNENCRYPTED

The iOS App Store now records every tap users make (and a lot of other information) and then sends it unencrypted to Apple, with all information fully tied to user accounts.

AWS ANNOUNCES AWS BLOCKS, AN OPEN-SOURCE FRAMEWORK FOR COMPOSING APPLICATION BACKENDS ON AWS (PREVIEW)

AWS Blocks is an open-source TypeScript framework for application developers who want backend capabilities on AWS that removes the need to learn infrastructure tools.

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APPLE IS ABOUT TO MAKE HIDE MY EMAIL USELESS

Both Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email aliases will soon be issued on the @private.icloud.com subdomain, making it easier to ban them.

AI AND THE GREAT CMS UNBUNDLING

AI is unbundling creation from control, making CMS more important wherever content is shared, reused, approved, or trusted across systems.

ANDROID 17 STARTS HITTING PIXEL PHONES AND WATCHES TODAY

Android 17 adds a small set of features and lays the groundwork for the future.

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_*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC._

GLM-5.2

Z.ai launched GLM-5.2 with a 1 million-token context window, new reasoning controls, and support for long-horizon coding tasks across entire codebases. The company made the model available immediately to Coding Plan users and plans to release API access, chatbot support, technical details, and MIT-licensed open weights the following week. Z.ai positions GLM-5.2 as a coding-first upgrade focused on agentic software engineering, though it did not publish benchmark results at launch.

DEEPSEEK BECOMES CHINA'S MOST VALUABLE AI STARTUP AFTER $7.4 BILLION FUNDRAISE

DeepSeek raised more than $7.4 billion in a funding round that valued the company at more than $50 billion. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, invested around $3 billion in the fundraise. He previously held nearly 90% of the company before the financing round. A government-backed fund invested around $150 million. DeepSeek plans to use the new capital to advance R&D and expand computing infrastructure.

ANDROID 17 EXPANDS AI AGENT INTEGRATION

Android 17 introduced new AI-focused capabilities centered on AppFunctions and Android MCP, enabling apps to expose orchestratable tools that on-device agents can discover and execute. Google positioned the release as part of a broader shift toward an “intelligence system” with deeper AI integration across the platform.

LEVIATHAN WAKING

The US government spent a long time being complacent about AI regulation. Anthropic's development of advanced models has caused a stir. The administration's response was incomprehensibly strict and risk-averse, especially after its previous attitude towards risk in the industry. It has been unclear about its policies, and disputes about policy and politics between the administration and Anthropic remain unresolved.

SIMULATING MODEL DEPLOYMENTS BEFORE RELEASE

OpenAI described Deployment Simulation, a pre-release evaluation method that replays real conversation contexts with candidate models to estimate deployment-time behavior and uncover new safety issues.

RETHINKING FRONTIER AI EVALUATIONS (45 MINUTE VIDEO)

OpenAI's Tejal Patwardhan discussed how frontier evaluations are evolving as existing benchmarks become easier for advanced models. The conversation covered benchmark saturation, evaluation design, forecasting model progress, and the challenges of measuring increasingly capable AI systems.

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CURSOR ORIGIN

Cursor Origin is an attempt at an agent-native GitHub competitor. The Git-compatible forge is built around the assumption that lots of AI agents will be cloning, branching, committing, rebasing, reviewing, and fixing failures in parallel. Cursor is trying to own the whole AI software factory. GitHub was built for human-scale development, but Origin was built for agent-scale.

OPENAI RELEASED CDP SUPPORT FOR BROWSER USE ON CODEX

OpenAI's Codex now supports Chrome DevTools Protocol, enabling live browser access to profile JavaScript performance and modify websites in real time. This early-stage feature, available via opt-in settings but excluded from the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, faces performance issues and requires careful prompting. Recent OpenAI moves, such as acquiring Ona, aim to create persistent cloud environments, highlighting a push toward an AI-driven web.

FASTEST, LARGEST, STRONGEST: NVIDIA BLACKWELL SWEEPS MLPERF TRAINING 6.0

NVIDIA's Blackwell platform dominated MLPerf Training 6.0 benchmarks, achieving the fastest training times and the largest-scale training with 8,192 GPUs. Blackwell's NVLink and NVFP4 innovations enhance performance by efficiently routing MoE models and enabling rapid, large-scale training. Reliability features like the Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability Engine and NVIDIA Resiliency Extension ensure minimal downtime and faster recovery in large-scale AI environments.

QWEN'S EMBODIED WORLD MODELING

Qwen-RobotWorld is a language-conditioned video world model that uses natural language as a unified action interface across robotics, navigation, driving, and other embodied domains.

ANTHROPIC “PAUSES” TOKEN-BASED BILLING FOR ITS CLAUDE AGENT SDK

Anthropic has paused the pricing changes it announced last month, just before they were set to take effect. The change would have treated Claude Agent SDK usage separately from standard Claude usage. Outside SDK usage will now be billed at Anthropic's prevailing API rates. Anthropic is working to update its plans to better support how users build with Claude subscriptions.

QUALCOMM WANTS TO BE THE CHIP INSIDE WHATEVER REPLACES YOUR SMARTPHONE, AND IT JUST ANNOUNCED TWO PRODUCTS TOWARD THAT END

Qualcomm is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices. It has announced a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed-reality glass and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready toolkit, a combination of hardware models and a software stack for AI devices. The company is aiming to position itself as the foundational silicon layer for whatever is coming after the smartphone. It is experimenting with a range of potential form factors that can work with AI technologies.

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NEVER WASTE A TOKEN

Crashes waste tokens when the provider connection lives inside the thing that crashed, so move it out.

OPENAI PREPARES MAJOR CHATGPT VOICE UPGRADE WITH GPT-BIDI-1

GPT-Bidi-1 is a bidirectional audio model for ChatGPT's voice mode designed to listen and speak at once, absorb interruptions, and adjust mid-sentence.

WHY WEIBO'S TINY VIBETHINKER-3B HAS THE AI WORLD ARGUING OVER BENCHMARKS AGAIN

The 3B parameter model put up coding benchmark scores in the same league as Claude Opus 4.5.

MICROSOFT TESTS PHI SILICA FOR WINDOWS AI ON NVIDIA GPUS

Microsoft's Phi Silica small language models are explicitly engineered to run locally on the Neural Processing Units of Windows Copilot+ PCs.

SPACEX TO ACQUIRE CURSOR FOR $60B IN STOCK, DAYS AFTER BLOCKBUSTER IPO

SpaceX has agreed to acquire AI coding startup Cursor in a $60 billion stock deal just days after its blockbuster IPO. The acquisition is meant to strengthen SpaceX's AI division, built around xAI, as the company tries to recover from leadership exits, product controversies, and legal risks tied to Grok. Cursor's rapid growth and coding AI expertise are now central to SpaceX's pitch that AI infrastructure and enterprise applications can unlock a massive new market.

EVERYTHING NEW COMING TO APPLE WALLET IN IOS 27

iOS 27 significantly expands Apple Wallet, turning it into a more comprehensive digital hub. New features include the ability to digitize physical loyalty and membership cards, richer and more interactive passes with real-time updates, smarter hotel keys that provide trip and amenity information, AI-powered receipt scanning for splitting bills, a redesigned Apple Pay checkout experience, and Tap to Share for exchanging payment and loyalty details with merchants. The update also adds support for more barcode formats, lets users top up eligible cards directly from Wallet, and improves Wallet integration on Apple Watch by proactively surfacing relevant passes, tickets, keys, and transit cards based on time and location.

ALL ABOUT THE SPECS AR GLASSES, WITH SNAP CEO EVAN SPIEGEL

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the new Specs AR Glasses at AWE 2026, positioning them first for developers before expanding to early adopters and people with specific use cases like work, gaming, retail, translation, and sports training. The $2,195 glasses are designed as standalone AR devices without a tether or computing puck, using Snap's own display technology to support immersive overlays, private large-screen viewing, and shared 3D computing experiences. Spiegel said Snap's early-mover advantage is in making AR glasses wearable while still powerful enough to bring computing directly into the glasses.

THE UI IS STILL NOT THE POINT

AI tools can now generate interfaces from intent alone, making the "can machines design screens?" question obsolete. The real shift is toward ephemeral, adaptive UIs that assemble themselves live for each user and moment. Designers' new craft becomes building the components, constraints, and written intentions that guide agents toward outcomes worth putting their name on.

DESIGN FOR REAL PEOPLE, NOT BRAIN MYTHS

Widespread brain myths — like the goldfish attention span or the left-brain/right-brain divide — lead designers toward flawed solutions that hurt user experience. Game UX strategist Celia Hodent explains which misconceptions are most costly and what science actually says about how the brain works. Designers who can distinguish neurohype from peer-reviewed research make better UX decisions, waste less time on dead ends, and build on evidence rather than assumptions.

DESIGN'S ALIVE AND KICKING. IT JUST GOT SOME FLASHY NEW NAMES

AI isn't killing design — it's spawning specialized roles like the Embedded AI Design Consultant, the Agentic UX Architect, and the Trust Designer, among others. Rather than replacing designers, the shift moves the craft away from pixel production and toward cognitive psychology, systems thinking, and business orchestration. The premium designers of the next decade will be valued for choreographing how humans and intelligent agents collaborate.