Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has a riff on how incoming Apple CEO John Ternus will give the company's industrial design team more say. Ternus takes over for Tim Cook at a time when many argue that Apple's product lineup has stagnated.
Intel named former SK Hynix CEO Seok-Hee Lee as executive vice president of Intel Foundry. Lee will report directly to CEO Lip-Bu Tan. In a statement, Intel said Lee will "lead all advanced packaging, system integration, back-end technology development, and back-end manufacturing, strengthening Intel’s ability to deliver differentiated, system-level innovation for customers."
Tan said Intel Foundry is establishing an advanced packaging business because systems integration is critical to Intel Foundry growth.
Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president of Intel Foundry, will lead front-end technology development and front-end manufacturing and continue to report to Tan. Executive vice president Navid Shahriari will be retiring after 37 years at Intel.
Is it just me or is that a lot of EVPs for one press release?
Z.ai released GLM-5.2, its latest flagship model designed for long-horizon tasks and agentic coding with a 1M-token context. The model, which has an MIT open-source license, is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and leads MiniMax-M3, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K2.6.
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The Pragmatic Engineer has a good read on how Meta's engineering culture has taken a hit. The article is food for thought for those enterprises and leaders looking to overindex on AI.
"For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year. For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, it had a “move-fast-and-break-things” culture, and in the early 2020s this shifted to a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” one. Engineers I know at the company were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and to balance business interests with solid engineering.
But in the past few weeks, all that has changed, as if the leadership has been following detailed blueprints on how to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible."
Midjourney, which is best known as an AI image generator, launched its hardware efforts with Midjourney Medical. The device, which will be part of a broader Midjourney spa effort, is a full-body ultrasound scanner. In a post that could be confused for a spoof if it weren't April Fool's, reads in part:
"It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body.
The goal is for this process to take no more than 60 seconds.
You go into the water, you come out of the water, and you're done."
I'm probably done thinking about this one until I see one of these spas in San Francisco.
Midjourney said:
"The next 12 months are about refining our algorithms and hardware on a daily basis. We’ll be doing research trials to show off the raw capabilities of our system, moving towards a 2nd generation hardware design, and we’ll do build-out for our first “research spa” which will become the promethean site that enables mass-scale health scanning.
Around the end of 2027 we’ll open up the Spa, and we’ll begin getting real world knowledge of what this infrastructure is going to be like."
Noam Shazeer, who invented the transformer and mixture of experts scaling architectures for large language models, is leaving Google Deepmind for OpenAI. Shazeer announced the move on X. Shazeer had been at Google for most of his career in two stints. He left Google to be CEO at Character.ai and then was acquired by Google for $2.7 billion. Since August 2024, Shazeer was VP of Engineering and Gemini Co-Lead.
South Korean content generated 12.1 billion hours of Netflix viewing globally from April 2025 to March 2026 and ranked second only to the US among content origins on Netflix, according to Omdia.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the company will be raising its prices. The price increases are unavoidable. Cook said:
"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."
Cook didn't say when prices would increase or note the products affected.
OpenAI's ChatGPT market share has fallen to 46.4% with Gemini commanding 27.7% market share and Anthropic's Claude at 10.3%. Other assistants such as Grok, Perplexity and Meta AI are less than 5% in terms of market share, according to a Sensor Tower report.
ChatGPT did become the fastest app to hit 1 billion users though.
Google dropped Android 17, which appears on Pixel devices first. Here's a look at the productivity, security and connectivity features.
SpaceX said it has exercised its option to buy Cursor for $60 billion. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter. The news isn't surprising given it was telegraphed leading up to the SpaceX IPO.
Plaud said it has gone from $1 million in ARR to $100 million in ARR within two years. Plaud is making a go of a business that sites in the middle of AI, hardware and notetaking. The company said it now has more than 2 million customers in 170 million countries.
Plaud, known for its Plaud Note, Plaud Note Pro, Plaud NotePin S, pairs hardware with subscriptions.
