Tech Brew Ride Home

Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68B to settle state claims it hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram, with teen time limits attached. Z.ai unmasked Ox Alpha, Amazon killed Mechanical Turk, and Reuters detailed Zuckerberg's aborted AI-native purge.

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Filing: Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68B to settle US states' claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers, and more (Reuters)

The deal ends the bellwether Oakland federal trial where four states sought roughly $200B; Meta pays ~$12B upfront and $5B more only if Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also settle (The New York Times)

The remedies include age assurance with linked-account checks, push notifications disabled during school hours, productive pauses at 60 and 90 minutes, and no cosmetic filters or likes for teens (The Verge)

Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series and says it will release the weights for it tonight; Ox Alpha topped OpenRouter's leaderboard (Bloomberg)

AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, "following an assessment"; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans (CNBC)

Investigation: Meta explored slashing many teams by ~60% to become "AI native", but pulled back after staff revolted and data showed AI agents were ineffective (Reuters)

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Apple refreshed the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra and gave the Mac mini M6 silicon, at higher prices. OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beat Nvidia on efficiency, Perplexity went fully local, WhatsApp toughened logins, and Uber livestreamed teen rides.

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Apple updates the Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra, with up to 4.3x faster AI performance, faster graphics, and up to 512GB of unified memory for $2,499+ (Apple Newsroom)

Apple unveils a Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro, with up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics, for $899+ and $1,699+, with preorders today and shipping September 22 (The Verge)

Apple's M6 is its first 2nm chip with a 12-core CPU and GPU, while the M5 Ultra fuses two dual-die M5 Max chips into a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU "most powerful chip ever" (The Verge)

OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5x-1.9x more AI work per watt and 1.7x-3.6x lower latency than Nvidia chips across GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2.5 1T (The Verge)

WhatsApp upgrades its two-step verification, letting users replace the six-digit PIN with a longer alphanumeric password, and adds support for multiple passkeys (TechCrunch)

Perplexity launches Portable Computer, a local AI agent platform running fully on-device with zero token costs, starting with Nvidia DGX Spark and RTX Linux PCs (VentureBeat)

Uber launches an optional safety feature allowing parents or guardians to watch a livestream of their teen's ride via the driver's front-facing phone camera (Bloomberg)

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Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs.

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Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Business Insider)

Delangue has said Hugging Face is close to profitability and barely touched its 2023 round, and it turned down a $500M Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation earlier this year (TechCrunch)

President Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Axios)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" and deserve the backlash, after ordering an audit that has stalled roughly 1,800 projects (Fortune)

Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (Financial Times)

Nvidia plans to use its $6B licensing deal with Poolside to build one of the world's most powerful open-weight models, to compete with DeepSeek and Kimi K3 (The Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Bloomberg)

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In this episode, we explore Onix, a platform that enables experts to train their own AI models to help millions with health, wellness, and personal development. Founders Nicholas Nadeau and David Bennahum discuss how their domain-specific, trust-based approach is reshaping AI and expertise sharing.

Stripe made the OpenRouter deal official at $7.5B. Unitree's Shanghai debut popped 460% past a $50B market cap, YouTube dangled millions to keep creators off Netflix, Slack launched Slack Code, and Binance turned AI agents loose on trading.

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Stripe agrees to acquire NYC-based OpenRouter; a source says Stripe is paying $7.5B, with $1.5B going to the startup's founders and $6B to its investors (The New York Times)

Collison frames tokens as the central currency for companies building with AI, capping two years of Stripe buying the plumbing under AI spending, from Metronome to Bridge (SiliconANGLE)

Hangzhou-based humanoid robot maker Unitree's stock surges 460% in its Shanghai trading debut, giving it a $50B+ market cap, after it raised ~$904M in its IPO (Bloomberg)

Unitree says its new "Superman" humanoid can hit 12.66 meters per second, faster than Usain Bolt's top speed, and leap two meters, ahead of the World Humanoid Robot Games (Futurism)

The 30-second video of Unitree's "Superman" robot jumping and sprinting down a track (Unitree Robotics on X)

Sources: YouTube is offering top creators millions to post videos exclusively on YouTube for a period and will penalize those that post to Netflix concurrently (Bloomberg)

Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all Slack plans (The Verge)

Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (TechCrunch)

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