Tech Brew Ride Home

Meta launched $299 in-house Adventurer and Fury smart glasses plus a $399 Kylie Jenner Starfire. Trump signed two quantum-computing executive orders. South Korea's Kospi cratered 10% in a tech selloff, ByteDance debuted Seedance 2.5, and Meta paused its laptop-tracking program.


Meta unveils Meta Adventurer and Fury glasses, each priced at $299, its first under its own brand, and a $399 Starfire model in collaboration with Kylie Jenner (Bloomberg)


HEADLINE TBD — couldn't read it (The Verge)


President Trump signs two executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers and mitigating the security threats they present (WSJ)


South Korea's tech-heavy Kospi index falls 10%, dragged down by SK Hynix and Samsung; STMicro and ASML fall ~7%, and US tech stocks fall in pre-market trading (CNBC)


ByteDance unveils Seedance 2.5, saying the AI video model can generate up to 30-second clips from up to 50 reference materials, up from 12 for Seedance 2.0 (The Information)


ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 breaks the 30-second barrier for AI video generation (The Decoder)


Meta says it is pausing its employee-tracking program meant for training AI models after internal security issues exposed sensitive data from employees' laptops (Wired)

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Meta poured $900M into India's Cred and tapped founder Kunal Shah to run WhatsApp. Google lost Nobel winner John Jumper to Anthropic. Getty soared on an OpenAI deal, JD.com warned robots would replace its couriers, and Toto pivoted toward chips.


Meta invests $900M into Indian fintech Cred for a ~20% stake, and plans to appoint Cred founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart (Bloomberg)


The departure of John Jumper, a key member of Google's AI coding development team, further strains Google's efforts to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI (Bloomberg)


Getty signs a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features; GETY jumps 150%+ pre-market (Bloomberg)


JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700K delivery workers "sooner or later", and it will help retrain them in robot maintenance (FT)


Toto, Japan's largest toilet maker, plans to invest $495M by 2030 to expand its semiconductor materials unit, targeting R&D for next-gen 1nm chip production (Nikkei Asia)


Japanese toilet maker Toto plans $496M push into chip tech (Tech in Asia)


A look at "humanizer" and "autotyper" apps that help students evade AI-detection software by slowly auto-typing essays and making AI text sound less robotic (The New York Times)


A speculative scenario titled "Europe 2031" projects economic and political instability in the EU if it fails to keep pace with the US and China in the AI race (The Guardian)

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Intel stock popped after Trump said Apple agreed to build chips with it in America. Waymo yanked its robotaxis off highways over construction-zone blunders. Rockstar dated GTA VI pre-orders to June 25, and GLM-5.2 grabbed the open-weights crown.


Intel's stock jumps 10.64% after Trump said "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America"; INTC is up 520%+ in the past year (CNBC)


Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction (TechCrunch)


Rockstar Games announces that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will go live on June 25; TTWO closed up 4.93% (Kotaku)


GLM-5.2 is the leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, scoring 51, only behind Fable 5's 60, Opus 4.8's 56, and GPT-5.5's 55 (Artificial Analysis)


GLM-5.2 becomes the top open-weight model on Artificial Analysis (Implicator)

Longreads


Google Is Using Nvidia's Playbook to Build a Rival AI Chip Business (WSJ)


AI Is Splitting the Job Market in Two, PwC Study Shows (Bloomberg)


Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness (The Verge)

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Tim Cook warned Apple price hikes are unavoidable as AI gobbles up memory chips. Noam Shazeer bolted from Google to OpenAI. Midjourney unveiled a bizarre full-body ultrasound scanner, and businesses piled into Kalshi to hedge real-world risk.


In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are "unavoidable" to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and "the situation has become unsustainable" (The Wall Street Journal)


Star Google AI Researcher Shazeer Joins OpenAI (The Information)


Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort (The Verge)


Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 (The New York Times)

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Snap unveiled its $2,195 standalone Specs AR glasses. Google rolled out Android 17 and Wear OS 7. Trump officials mulled equity stakes in AI firms, Apple's camera AirPods slipped to 2027, and TikTok was drowning in AI slop.


Snap is finally about to ship AR glasses — and they cost a fortune (The Verge)


Android 17 launches with new multitasking tools as Google expands Gemini features (TechCrunch)


Trump advisers weigh structure of potential AI stakes (Semafor)


Apple Plans Camera AirPods, iPhone Foldable 2, 20th Anniversary iPhone in 2027 (Bloomberg)


Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds (TechCrunch)


TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds (Search Engine Journal)

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