Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🤖 Apple's next big thing is a $1000 home robot
🤔 X’s AI image generator allows users to create uncensored images
⚖️ Judge vows to dismantle Google’s app store monopoly
🤷♂️ Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’
❌ FTC finalizes rule banning fake reviews, including those made with AI
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 2 handpicked research papers and tools
🤖 Apple's next big thing is a $1000 home robotLINK
Apple is reportedly working on a new smart home project featuring an iPad attached to a robotic arm that can twist and rotate, designed as a home "command center" with AI capabilities.
The initiative, backed by CEO Tim Cook and head of hardware engineering John Ternus, has involved hundreds of staff and follows the cancelled Apple-brand electric car project.
According to Bloomberg, the device is expected to be released around 2026 or 2027, potentially costing about $1,000, and will use a modified version of iPadOS.
🤔 X’s AI image generator allows users to create uncensored imagesLINK
xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, announced the beta release of two language models, Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, which allow subscribers of his social media platform, X, to create largely uncensored photorealistic images using the connected Flux image synthesis model.
The Verge reported that Grok's image generation capabilities come with minimal safeguards, enabling the creation of potentially controversial content, such as fake photographs of political figures in compromising situations, copyrighted characters, and scenes of violence.
xAI claims Grok-2 outperforms several leading competitors in recent benchmarks, highlighting improvements over its predecessor in various areas, including graduate-level science knowledge and document-based question answering, though the model's deep link to X can sometimes result in the use of irrelevant information.
⚖️ Judge vows to dismantle Google’s app store monopolyLINK
Judge James Donato declared that Google must dismantle its Android app store monopoly, emphasizing the necessity to open up the Play Store to rival stores despite Google's objections about difficulty and cost.
Epic Games requested the court to force Google to let rival app stores coexist within Google Play and have access to every app, allowing Android users to choose their preferred app store.
Judge Donato plans to avoid micromanaging Google but will establish a technical compliance and monitoring committee from both Epic and Google to ensure implementation, with the court receiving progress reports every 90 days.
🤷♂️ Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’LINK
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that successful AI startups can initially steal intellectual property and later hire lawyers to resolve legal issues if their product gains traction. Schmidt used a hypothetical example of copying TikTok to illustrate how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs might prioritize rapid growth over legal considerations. Schmidt's comments, made during a talk at Stanford, were later removed from the university's YouTube channel after drawing media attention.
❌ FTC finalizes rule banning fake reviews, including those made with AILINK
The FTC has introduced a final rule this fall prohibiting companies from producing or selling fake reviews, including AI-generated ones, and can now penalize companies that ignore the regulation.
The rule targets deceptive practices such as incentivizing feedback, undisclosed insider reviews, company-controlled review sites, intimidation to remove negative feedback, and the trade of fake followers or views.
Although the FTC first proposed the fake review ban last year, there are concerns about enforcing it on global marketplaces like Amazon, where numerous fraudulent reviews come from businesses outside the U.S.
Other news you might like
Apple opens up NFC transactions to developers, but says there will be ‘associated fees’.LINK
Google confirms an Iranian group is trying to access emails linked to both US presidential campaigns.LINK
Anthropics prompt caching makes your long prompts much cheaper.LINK
Actors can license AI voice clones in union deal.LINK
AltStore PAL drops its annual subscription thanks to a grant from Epic.LINK
Kim Dotcom is being Megauploaded to the US for trial.LINK
Disney argues that signing up for Disney+ means you can never sue the company over anything—ever.LINK
Latest research and tools
Nomad Network: enables off-grid, encrypted communication using a variety of mediums like packet radio or fiber optics, without requiring internet access, ensuring users maintain complete control and ownership with forward secrecy and extreme privacy.LINK
COBOL-REKT: a toolkit designed for analyzing and reverse-engineering COBOL code, incorporating features like embedding comments, analyzing data structures, and integrating with AI for summarization, supporting various exports and custom analyses through Neo4J and other tools.LINK
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