Startups & Ventures

🍏 Apple Shelved a Foldable iPhone Pencil

The prototype was a shortened Apple Pencil made for the foldable iPhone. It was designed to attach magnetically to the side of the case, where it could also charge.

Testing exposed 2 problems. The stylus was awkward to use in some positions, and its hard tip left marks on the inner display. Foldable screens are softer than regular ones.

Mark Gurman believes the accessory will not launch with the foldable iPhone expected next month. The project may also clash with Apple’s long-standing position, linked to Steve Jobs’s 2007 claim that nobody needs a stylus. The Pencil will likely remain an internal prototype.

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🧠 OpenAI Orders Tens of Thousands of Macs

The shift from traditional GPUs is tied to Apple’s unified memory architecture, which gives the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine shared access to memory, reducing data transfers during agent training.

Reinforcement learning combines inference with interaction with an environment. Many compact Macs can therefore cost less than GPU clusters built for matrix-heavy workloads.

Anthropic reportedly uses Mac mini too, renting them from AWS. Demand has stretched delivery times for high-memory Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations to weeks or months.

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✈️ Telegram Launches Gram Wallet

Gram Wallet is already available to some users. Full access is promised within the next couple of weeks.

Telegram says it will become the “largest non-custodial crypto wallet in history”. Gram rose 4.5% within minutes of the announcement.

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💻 Raspberry Pi Publishes a Guide

The official build uses a simple black case. Inside are a Pi 5 board and a Raspberry Pi flash drive. A LiPo battery sits beneath the Bluetooth keyboard.

Cyberdecks are portable computers assembled from assorted parts, including flea-market hardware and repurposed components. The guide includes a parts list and step-by-step assembly instructions.

The build is easy to reproduce, but its practical use remains unclear.

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🔍 Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash Reaches GA

Videos can now be extended in 10-second chunks up to 40 seconds. The model uses the last 10 seconds of the source, rather than only its final second. The preview will soon be unavailable.

A 360p draft mode costs $0.03 per second, compared with $0.10 for 720p. 1080p costs $0.15, while 4K costs $0.30. Both are upscales, not native generations.

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🤖 Perplexity launches a local AI agent

Portable Computer runs its models and agent system on the user’s computer. It can search local files and code, then run commands and handle long tasks without sending data to the cloud.

It uses Qwen 3.8 27B and PPLX 27B. Local tasks do not consume Perplexity credits. Internet access or a stronger cloud model requires permission first.

It supports Google Drive plus Gmail, Slack and GitHub. For now, access is limited to Pro and Max subscribers using NVIDIA DGX Spark on Linux. Support for regular NVIDIA RTX computers and Windows will come later.

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🛍️ Alibaba Launches QwenWork

Users describe a task in plain language, and the AI agent carries it out. It gradually remembers their working habits and applies them in later sessions.

QwenWork can create and launch web apps without code or server setup. It also generates media, with simpler or more advanced models available for different tasks.

The service is now in public beta worldwide. It runs in a browser and in a separate desktop app.

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🤖 OpenAI to cut Cursor off from its models

OpenAI told SpaceX it will terminate Cursor’s contract and plans to disable access to its models on 12 November 2026. Until then, Cursor users can continue using them. The models currently handle about 5% of Cursor traffic.

OpenAI says it cannot confirm compliance with its terms after Cursor came under SpaceX control, citing earlier breaches by Elon Musk’s companies. It also will not provide future models, including Astra.

Cursor’s CEO says the company is negotiating with OpenAI. Cursor had worked with OpenAI for nearly 4 years and relied on its platform as neutral infrastructure.

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🤖 ChatGPT Work Can Log Into Sites

Authentication happens separately, so the agent does not see the login or password. It then works through the browser on the authorized site.

It can book a doctor, process a return, or fill out applications. It can also move invoices from email into accounting software.

The feature is starting to roll out on the web and mobile to users on the Plus tier, Pro, or Business.

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🤖 Hugging Face Releases a $399 Robot Duck

The open-source $399 MicroDuck can walk, lift objects, recover after falling, tumble, and even roller-skate.

Its main feature is reinforcement learning in MuJoCo. Train a policy in Hugging Face Jobs or locally, then transfer it to the duck without fine-tuning. Preorders are open.

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6️⃣ GTA VI Details Point to Heavier Action

Compared with GTA V, firefights are more realistic and character movement heavier, closer to RDR 2. The demo included cinematic story missions and a major police chase.

Leonida can be explored by kayak. Stores can be robbed outside missions, alone or with both protagonists. Safehouses include small interactions, such as taking a beer from the fridge.

The wanted system has six stars. Police can track players through their car and witnesses, while appearance and clothing appear in the interface. Parachuting returns from San Andreas, gym training changes characters’ looks and stats, and the game looked and ran better than the Cyberleek leaks. Release is set for 19 November.

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🍏 Apple Sets September 9 Event

The foldable iPhone will debut at 10:00 a.m.

Apple also plans iPhone 18, new Apple Watch and iPad mini models.

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🤖 OpenAI Previews Cloud-Based Codex

In an interview, Thibault, OpenAI’s head of Codex and ChatGPT, said the current Codex may look primitive in 2-3 months. Next-generation Astra-based agents will need the cloud, where they can run more parallel processes than a typical laptop can handle.

Agent speed is also expected to rise. Today’s Ultra Fast rate of 750+ tokens per second could become the default. Codex and ChatGPT will increasingly share one harness across coding and other tasks.

The stated end goal is Personal AGI, a single personalized app whose interface changes with the user’s task.

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📊 Alibaba previews Qwen4 architecture

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open multimodal model and early preview of the architecture planned for Qwen4. It has 125B parameters, but uses only 6B for each text fragment. Another 51B sit in separate memory for frequent combinations.

The design keeps the model large while reducing compute. Alibaba says training is about 9 times cheaper than Qwen3.7-Plus, while the model already performs better on coding, tool-use tasks, and long office workflows.

Long-context support reaches 262,000 tokens by default and up to 1 million tokens in extended mode. At 1 million tokens, a new retrieval mechanism can significantly speed up processing. The weights are already open on Hugging Face.

📊@tech