Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🚀 Blue Origin sends first wheelchair user to space
🤖 ChatGPT will now let you pick how nice it is
💸 Court restores Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package
⌛️ Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini
💰 SoftBank races to fulfil $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end
💥 Google sues SerpApi for scraping search results
🎁 + 14 other news you might like
🧰 + 6 trending tools
📚 + 2 trending papers
🚀 Blue Origin sends first wheelchair user to space LINK
Blue Origin launched a New Shepard rocket today carrying European Space Agency engineer Michaela Benthaus, making her the first wheelchair user to ever fly above the internationally accepted boundary of space.
The company spent years working to improve accessibility at its facilities, which included adding an elevator to the seven-story launch tower with guidance from an internal resource group named New Hawking.
The NS-37 mission took the six-person crew past the 100-kilometer altitude mark for a few minutes of zero-gravity before the capsule descended to a parachute-assisted touchdown in the West Texas desert.
🤖 ChatGPT will now let you pick how nice it is LINK
OpenAI is rolling out a new update that finally lets you manually dial up or down the warmth and enthusiasm levels shown by ChatGPT to better match your own preferences.
You can now go into the personalization settings to control how often the AI uses emoji, headers, and lists, or even pick a personality that is quirky, professional, or cynical.
The company also added tools for writing emails that allow you to highlight chunks of text and ask for specific changes directly instead of typing out a separate prompt.
💸 Court restores Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package LINK
The Delaware Supreme Court overturned a Chancery Court ruling to reinstate Elon Musk’s 2018 pay package, stating the cancellation left the CEO uncompensated for his time and efforts over six years.
Adjusted for the current stock price, this compensation is now worth about $140 billion, meaning Tesla will likely revoke a separate $29 billion offer meant as a hedge against the appeal.
This unanimous decision concludes a years-long battle that pushed Musk to move company incorporation to Texas after a shareholder with only nine shares argued the award involved conflicts of interest.
⌛️ Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini LINK
Google has pushed back its plans for replacing the old Google Assistant with the Gemini AI app on Android devices, confirming the full switch will now take place in 2026.
The company says this adjustment ensures a seamless transition, meaning the old Google Assistant will continue working on older Android phones and tablets instead of stopping by the end of 2025.
This process is happening across other platforms too, as Gemini is expected to become the default on Android Auto by March 2026 while Google updates smart home gadgets going back 10 years.
💰 SoftBank races to fulfil $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end LINK
SoftBank is scrambling to secure $22.5 billion to meet its funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end, forcing the group to liquidate holdings and stop other investments to support artificial intelligence.
CEO Masayoshi Son has already sold a $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia and offloaded T-Mobile U.S. shares, while now requiring his direct approval for any Vision Fund deal exceeding $50 million.
The conglomerate may also tap margin loans backed by Arm Holdings, having recently boosted its unused borrowing headroom to $11.5 billion after the stock surged to nearly three times its IPO price.
💥 Google sues SerpApi for scraping search results LINK
Google is suing SerpApi for allegedly bypassing security protections to scrape search results and sell access to licensed content that the search giant pays third parties to use in features.
The complaint accuses SerpApi of ignoring website directives by disguising crawlers, rotating fake bot identities, and using large bot networks to pull data even when specific site owners explicitly opt out.
The company argues it is acting as a rights holder because the service takes images and real time data that is licensed, then resells that restricted information to others for a fee.
Other news you might like
- Netflix acquires gaming avatar maker Ready Player MeLINK
- Cursor continues acquisition spree with Graphite dealLINK
- 2025 LLM Year in ReviewLINK
- Strava puts popular “Year in Sport” recap behind an $80 paywallLINK
- Want to link from Google’s app store to your app? That’ll be $2–4 per installLINK
- Google's boomerang year: 20% of AI software engineers hired in 2025 were ex-employeesLINK
- Google Cloud announces deal with Palo Alto Networks approaching $10 billionLINK
- Sam Altman says he’s ‘0%’ excited to be CEO of a public company as OpenAI drops hints about an IPO: ‘In some ways I think it’d be really annoying’LINK
- Firefox will add an AI "kill switch" after community pushbackLINK
- FTX, Alameda Execs Will Be Barred From Wall Street Roles for Up to 10 YearsLINK
- Roomba's bankruptcy may wreck a lot more than one robot vacuum makerLINK
- Investment in data centers worldwide hit record $61bn in 2025, report findsLINK
🧰 Trending tools
NOIZ AI: converts text messages into emotionally expressive voice recordings using emoji cues to adjust tone, helping communicate feelings when you can't be present.LINK
hq0: a white-label video conferencing platform that lets businesses host sales calls and meetings under their own brand instead of Zoom or Google Meet.LINK
NoteGPT: transforms unstructured content like podcasts, meetings, and interviews into structured summaries and actionable insights using AI-powered note-taking.LINK
FrontierScience by OpenAI: a benchmark testing AI models on expert-level scientific reasoning across physics, chemistry, and biology to evaluate research-grade problem-solving capabilities.LINK
Wave Browser: a Chromium-based web browser that automatically funds ocean plastic cleanup through 4ocean partnerships while you browse, requiring no behavior changes from users.LINK
Loom for Mobile: a mobile app for recording demonstration videos with screen capture and camera overlay functionality.LINK
📚 Trending papers & reports
Symbolic graphs guide AI reasoning steps: researchers created a system that uses flowchart-like diagrams to control how AI models think through problems, preventing endless loops.LINK
LLMs struggle with real scientific discovery tasks: researchers tested AI models on actual research problems and found they fail at key steps like forming hypotheses and designing experiments.LINK
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