Techmeme
June 18, 2026, 3:40 PM

Top News

Kai Nicol-Schwarz / CNBC:
Intel's stock jumps 10%+ after Trump said “Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America”; INTC is up 500%+ in the past year  —  Intel's stock rose 10% on Thursday, after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal with Apple to design and build chips in the U.S.
Hugo Lowell / Wired:
Sean O'Kane / TechCrunch:
Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction  —  Waymo has recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 robotaxis to restrict them from driving on highways while it figures out how to make the vehicles behave around construction zones.
Richard Lawler / The Verge:
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 AI image generator says this side project will be ‘in many ways superior to even MRI machines.’
Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac:
Apple opens iOS to alternative app marketplaces in Brazil and changes App Store commission structure following a settlement with competition watchdog CADE  —  Starting today, app developers will be able to distribute apps through alternative app marketplaces in Brazil, as part of a broader set …
The Information:
Noam Shazeer leaves Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research; he rejoined Google as a Gemini co-lead in 2024 during the $2.7B Character.AI deal  —  Noam Shazeer, the Google DeepMind researcher whose work underpinned the generative AI boom, is joining OpenAI, the AI firm told staff on Wednesday.
Ashley Gold / Axios:
Zack Zwiezen / Kotaku:
Rockstar Games announces that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will go live on June 25; TTWO jumps 5%+  —  If you were worried about another delay, you can probably stop worrying … Some of you might roll your eyes at the seeming certainty of that statement, and understandably so.
Wired:
Sources: the White House's move to restrict Mythos 5 came after it ordered Anthropic to revoke South Korea-based SK Telecom's access over alleged ties to China  —  Days before Anthropic took its most advanced AI models offline, the White House ordered the company to revoke SK Telecom's access …
Artificial Analysis:
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  —  Z ai's GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scoring 51 and it sits on the Pareto frontier of Intelligence vs Cost per Task
Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer:
An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, 30% to 50% of engineers on core teams reassigned to data labeling, and more  —  Hi - this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.  In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech …
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in talks to raise $300M from Jeff Bezos and others at a $2B+ valuation  —  General Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time …
More: The Next Web
Pew Research Center:
A survey of US adults: 49% reported using chatbots in 2026, up from 33% in 2024, 24% said that they use chatbots on a daily basis, and 44% said they use ChatGPT  —  More Americans are using chatbots, and some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers.  But views about AI …
Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:
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 CEO tells the Journal in an exclusive interview that soaring costs make price increases ‘unavoidable’

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More News

Anhata Rooprai / Reuters:
Galit Altstein / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Todd Bishop / GeekWire: