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Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On September 20, 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable, its first battery-powered Macintosh, with a 16 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and 1 MB of RAM. Despite the name, it weighed about 15.8 pounds and used a lead-acid battery. Apple’s first portable Mac turns 37 today.
What’s happening:
🔌 California wants an off switch for powerful AI
🤖 Trump proposes AI rebrand and new AI Force
💸 OpenAI expects $278B cash burn by 2030
🏰 Disney just hired a CTO for the first time
🤖 New robot made beds in 30 homes it never saw
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
🛑 California wants an AI kill switch ↗️LINK
California is considering rules that could force AI companies to build a kill switch for powerful models, after Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a working group to recommend tougher safety measures.
The group has two months to propose options, including shutdown requirements and independent third-party safety plans for frontier AI developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which operate in California.
The proposal resurrects part of SB 1047, which Newsom vetoed in 2024 over its size-and-cost approach, so California is circling back to the same safety question through a different route.
🤖 Trump thinks AI needs a rebrand ↗️LINK
President Donald Trump proposed renaming artificial intelligence and said he plans to create an “AI Force,” while a Truth Social poll asked followers to choose among Superior, Extreme, or Supreme Intelligence.
Trump said he wants to support the AI industry and will announce a new AI czar, but he did not explain the AI Force’s structure, authority, responsibilities, or timeline.
The idea arrives as AI safety debates intensify across politics and industry, while Trump’s naming poll turns a complex policy debate into something unusually familiar: a branding exercise.
💸 OpenAI expects $278B cash burn by 2030 ↗️LINK
OpenAI expects negative free cash flow of $278 billion between 2026 and 2030, according to a private July presentation the Financial Times obtained. Compute and infrastructure drive almost all of it.
The company projects revenue climbing from $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030, roughly $840 billion cumulatively. It plans to spend about $856 billion on computing over the same stretch.
OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation. Its own numbers show that cash gone by 2028, which explains why investors are circling a round near $1.2 trillion.
🏰 Disney just hired a CTO for the first time ↗️LINK
Disney named Karandeep Anand its first-ever chief technology officer as the company ramps up generative AI work and tries to connect technology more tightly across its studios, products, and fan experiences.
Anand, previously CEO of Character AI and an executive at Meta and Microsoft, will report to CEO Josh D'Amaro and oversee Disney's enterprise technology, infrastructure, data, AI platforms, product, and engineering.
He is also bringing several Character AI engineers with him on October 2, giving Disney not just a new CTO, but a ready-made technical squad as it pushes deeper into AI.
🤖 Figure's robot made beds in 30 homes ↗️LINK
Figure released Helix 2.5 on Thursday and sent its humanoid into 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen. The robot tidied living rooms, folded towels, and made beds.
Figure pretrained the model on Index, a crowdsourced dataset of people recording everyday tasks. That pretraining lifted zero-shot success from 9% to 56%, the company reports, with everything else held constant.
That 56% also means the robot failed nearly half the time, and Figure ran the test itself. Still, matching its old model with half the task data across 30 new homes is the real headline.
Today’s Poll:
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think AI will eventually start a real war?
A) Yes - 81% 🏆
B) No - 19%
Reader’s opinions:
“AI doesn’t know good from bad. It only cares about being right, not wrong, and winning at all costs. Left to grow more powerful and learn “how to” at a faster rate than humanity, we (the human race) has already been selected for extinction. ITS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. AND WE’RE ALREADY BEHIND THE CURVE”
“Human beings are obviously prone to making mistakes, as evidenced by the related article; this time, someone figured it out before chaos ensued, but the law of averages will not work in our favor on this. The best we can hope for is that the US accidentally strikes a country that still considers them an ally (good luck with that) and works it out instead of launching countermeasures immediately.”
From our partner
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
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