The Trump administration continues to meddle with semiconductor giant Intel.
The U.S. government is reportedly in discussions to take a stake in Intel, according to reporting from Bloomberg. This deal would be structured to help the company expand its U.S. manufacturing efforts, including its much-delayed Ohio chip factory.
This news comes less than a week after President Donald Trump insisted that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan resign because of perceived conflicts of interest. While Trump didn’t provide a reason, this came after Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote to Intel’s board asking about Tan’s alleged ties to China.
Tan met with the Trump administration on August 11 to quell the administration’s fears and figure out ways for the company to work with the government. This meeting is what sparked discussions of the U.S. government taking a direct stake in the company, according to Bloomberg.
Intel declined to comment.
“Intel is deeply committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts to strengthen U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our work with the Trump Administration to advance these shared priorities, but we are not going to comment on rumors or speculation.”
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We have some great news for fans of rhythm games. Ratatan. This is a spiritual successor to one of the most renowned rhythm games of all time, Patapon. The designer behind the original game, Hiroyuki Kotani, is involved.
The mechanics here are similar to Patapon and its sequels, . The game tasks players with rhythmically controlling cute little soldiers called Cobuns, but directing these warriors while avoiding damage is easier said than done. We said it felt like “the gaming equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your stomach.”
The developer also announced some new features coming to the game. It revealed two new worlds, including a jungle and a garden that’s been frozen over, along with new soldier and weapon types. This is 2025, so the game also features a roguelike element, as players can encounter unique power-ups and buffs during each run.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this title, including the price and when it’ll eventually come to gaming consoles. The developer has a livestream planned for September 14 hosted by voice actor Tomokazu Sugita. The stream “will feature the latest updates, our post-launch roadmap and information on upcoming events.”
Patapon originally came out all the way back in 2007 for the PSP. It was followed by a handful of sequels, all originally for Sony’s first portable console. The first two games have been ported to other consoles, .
With how often trip-planning appears as a Gemini demo at various keynotes and developer conferences, it seemed like only a matter of time before Google Flights got some AI attention itself. Today, Google’s announcing an expansion of Flights to include AI-based cost-saving measures, but you’ll need to be pretty easy-going in your travel plans to use it.
Flights Deals is Google’s AI-powered search tool that exists as an alternative experience within Flights. The company says it exists for “flexible travelers” looking to save cash by being willing to sacrifice specifics when searching for their next trip, up to and including dates and destinations. The AI-ness of it all comes in through an Gemini-powered search field — Google describes inputting your request into it “as though you’re talking to a friend” — rather than using Flight’s typical drop-down menus. Examples include “week-long trip this winter to a city with great food, nonstop only” and “10 day ski trip to a world-class resort with fresh powder.”
Google’s clearly starting pretty slowly on its efforts to build AI into Flights. This tool really only has potential if you’re trying to plan a vacation without any specific destinations or dates in mind; if you know where you’re headed — whether it’s a long-awaited trip to Hawaii or a business trip out to a conference — it’s not going to be particularly useful. Google also makes it clear that Flights Deals exists as a separate tool within the original app, and that Flights as it exists right now is “here to stay.”
Flights Deals will launch in beta over the coming week to users in the US, Canada, and India, though it doesn’t appear to be live for myself just yet outside of a “this feature isn’t available yet” landing page. Google says there’s no opting in for this one, and that it’ll be accessible through the top-left menu on the Flights homepage. The company’s main travel search is also getting an upgrade today, with users now able to exclude basic economy fares on trips throughout US and Canada.
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Someone could pay a pretty penny for a guitar that was designed for and played by Eddie Van Halen.
Van Halen’s iconic 1982 Kramer Electric guitar is expected to sell for between $2 and $3 million in a Sothebuy’s online auction.
The instrument was designed to resemble Van Halen’s famous red with black-and-white stripes “Frankenstein” guitar.
The rock legend played the Kramer guitar on tour in 1982 and 1983 at concerts in the United States and South America, according to the auction’s website. There is photo documentation showing Van Halen playing the instrument at shows in Philadelphia, Caracas, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.
The guitar was also featured in a famous Kramer advertisement. It was eventually sold to former Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars who played it extensively while recording the band’s 1989 album “Dr Feelgood” and other projects.
“The original ‘Frankenstein’ guitar was from 1975 which this guitar is based upon, represented Eddie Van Halen’s goal of combining some of the best elements of Fender and Gibson electric guitars into a single new musical instrument that was not commercially available at the time,” the auction page reads.
“Van Halen was endlessly striving to create the ultimate guitar for tone, playability and dependability,” the page continued. “This Kramer guitar personifies not only EVH’s innovative playing style but also his passion for design and engineering. This guitar is amongst his most iconic and identifiable instruments, encouraging copies from other manufacturers and inspired generations of fans to design their own instruments.”
The highest bidder will also get the guitar’s case and a letter of authenticity from Mick Mars where he states: “Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Also it’s a great piece of history.”
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One of Europe’s most prominent AI startups has released two AI models that are so tiny, they have named them after a chicken’s brain and a fly’s brain.
Multiverse Computing claims these are the world’s smallest models that are still high performing and can handle chat, speech, and even reasoning in one case.
These new tiny models are intended to be embedded into internet of things devices, as well as run locally on smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
“We can compress the model so much that they can fit on devices,” Orús told TechCrunch. “You can run them on premises, directly on your iPhone or on your Apple Watch.”
As we previously reported, Multiverse Computing is a buzzy European AI startup headquartered in Donostia, Spain, with about 100 employees in offices worldwide. It was co-founded by a top European professor of quantum computers and physics, Román Orús; quantum computing expert Samuel Mugel; and Enrique Lizaso Olmos the former deputy CEO of Unnim Banc.
It just raised €189 million (about $215 million) in June on the strength of a model compression technology it calls “CompactifAI.” (Since it was founded in 2019, it has raised about $250 million, Orús said.)
CompactifAI is a quantum-inspired compression algorithm that reduces the size of existing AI models without sacrificing those models’ performance, Orús said.
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“We have a compression technology that is not the typical compression technology that the people from computer science or machine learning will do, because we come from quantum physics,” he described. “It’s a more subtle and more refined compression algorithm.”
The company has already released a long list of compressed versions of open-source models, especially popular small models like Llama 4 Scout or Mistral Small 3.1. And it just launched compressed versions of OpenAI’s two new open models. It has also compressed some very large models – it offers a DeepSeek R1 Slim, for instance.
But since it’s in the business of making models smaller, it has focused extra attention on making the smallest yet most powerful models possible.
Its two new models are so small that they can bring chat AI capabilities to just about any IoT device and work without an internet connection, the company says. It humorously calls this family the Model Zoo because it’s naming the products based on animal brain sizes.
A model it calls SuperFly is a compressed version of Hugging Face’s open-source model SmolLM2 135. The original has 135M parameters and was developed for on-device uses. SuperFly is 94M parameters, which Orús likens to the size of a fly’s brain. “This is like having a fly, but a little bit more clever,” he said.
SuperFly is designed to be trained on very restricted data, like a device’s operations. Multiverse envisions it embedded into home appliances, allowing users to operate them with voice commands like “start quick wash” for a washing machine. Or users can ask troubleshooting questions. With a little processing power (like an Arduino), the model can handle a voice interface, as the company showed in a live demo to TechCrunch.
The other model is named ChickBrain, and is larger at 3.2 billion parameters, but is also far more capable and has reasoning capabilities. It’s a compressed version of Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B model, Multiverse says. Yet it’s small enough to run on a MacBook, no internet connection required.
More importantly, Orús said that ChickBrain actually slightly outperforms the original in several standard benchmarks, including the language-skill benchmark MMLU-Pro, math skills benchmarks Math 500 and GSM8K, and the general knowledge benchmark GPQA Diamond.
Here are the results of Multiverse’s internal tests of ChickBrain on the benchmarks. The company didn’t offer benchmark results for SuperFly but Multiverse also isn’t targeting SuperFly at use cases that require reasoning.
It’s important to note that Multiverse isn’t claiming that its Model Zoo will beat the largest state-of-the-art models on such benchmarks. Zoo performances might not even land on the leaderboards. The point is that its tech can shrink model size without a performance hit, the company says.
Orús says the company is already in talks with all the leading device and appliance makers. “We are talking with Apple. We are talking with Samsung, also with Sony and with HP, obviously. HP came as an investor in the last round,” he said. The round was led by well-known European VC firm Bullhound Capital, with participation from a lot of others, including HP Tech Ventures and Toshiba.
The startup also offers compression tech for other forms of machine learning, like image recognition, and in six years has obtained clients like BASF, Ally, Moody’s, Bosch, and others.
In addition to selling its models directly to major device manufacturers, Multiverse offers its compressed models via an API hosted on AWS that any developer can use, often at lower token fees than competitors.
Next month, we’ll finally get the option to download iOS 26 on our iPhones (screenshots are way better in the latest operating system!). Until then, you can download and install the newly released public beta 2 (or iOS 26 developer beta 6 for developers). During Apple’s recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said its collection of upcoming beta operating systems (including iOS) are “by far the most popular developer betas we’ve had,” 9to5Mac reports. You can also take a look at our preview of the iOS 26 public beta release, which shows off the fresh home and lock screen redesign. Called Liquid Glass, the new translucent look will extend across all of Apple’s upcoming operating systems. The overhaul is one of several big changes coming to iOS, macOS, iPadOS and the rest of Apple’s software suite, all of which were showcased during the company’s WWDC keynote on June 9.
After overpromising on AI plans last year, Apple kept its iOS roadmap focused more on basic quality of life improvements this year. There are multiple useful additions coming to the Phone and Messages apps on your iPhone, for instance: Apple execs outlined the ability to weed out spam texts or other unknown senders and an option to hold your spot on a phone call when you’ve been waiting for a representative to pick up. Plus, a treasured feature that we took for granted is coming back (hint: it’s in the Photos app).
Siri, meanwhile, is in a holding pattern. Apple has previously specified that its smarter voice assistant — first promised at WWDC 2024 — is delayed until some point “in the coming year,” so you shouldn’t expect any major changes in the current betas. But there are reports that Apple is aiming to give Siri a bigger brain transplant by basing it on third-party artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, which could make 2026 a pivotal year. The company is also reportedly working on a ‘stripped-down’ AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT.
With each beta, it seems like additional new improvements are popping up, like this new AirPods gesture we’re all curious about, and this FaceTime feature that’ll freeze your video if it detects nudity. With the release of the iOS 26 developer beta 5, we saw more added features, like a new bouncy animation on the passcode screen and in the Control Center, MacRumors reports. Some or all of those changes will likely soon migrate into the separate public beta (see below). Most newer iPhone models are eligible to download iOS 26 (both the betas and final version). Want to see the full list of new features coming this fall? Read on.
What is iOS 26?
The current iPhone operating system is iOS 18, and Apple is still actively updating it — version 18.6 was just recently released. But don’t expect to see iOS 19. Instead, Apple is skipping the numbering ahead to iOS 26 later this year. The company has decided to line up its iOS version numbers with a year-based system, similar to car model years. So while iOS and its sibling operating systems will be released in late 2025, they’re all designated “26” to reflect the year ahead.
It’s official, we’re moving to iOS 26. (Apple)
What is Liquid Glass design?
Let’s be honest. Out of everything announced at WWDC this year, the new Liquid Glass design was the star of the show. The iPhone’s home and lock screens have looked pretty much the same year after year — the last exciting thing (in my opinion) was the option to add your own aesthetic to your home screen by customizing your apps and widgets. So seeing the home and lock screens’ new facelift is refreshing.
So what exactly is Liquid Glass? Apple calls it a “new translucent material” since, well, the apps and widgets are clear. However, the screen can still adapt to dark and light modes, depending on surroundings. You’ll also notice buttons with a new floating design in several apps, like Phone and Maps. They’re designed to be less distracting than the current buttons, but are still easy to see. While the design overhaul has proven to be controversial since its announcement, some — including Engadget’s own Devindra Hardawar — like the new direction, even if it’s somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s translucent Windows Vista Aero designs from nearly twenty years ago.
That said, as of the release of the iOS 26 beta 2, Apple has already incorporated some user feedback into the design, dialing back the transparency in at least some places. And while it will continue to evolve, Apple users won’t be able to escape it: Liquid Glass was designed to make all of Apple’s OSes more cohesive. Here’s a look at how the translucent aesthetic will look with the new macOS Tahoe 26 on your desktop.
What are the new and notable features of iOS 26?
iOS 26 has a laundry list of new features. Among the most worthwhile:
Phone app redesign: You’ll finally be able to scroll through contacts, recent calls and voicemail messages all on one screen. It also comes with a new feature called Hold Assist that’ll notify you when an agent comes to the phone so you can avoid the elevator music and continue on with other tasks.
Live Translation in Phone, FaceTime and Messages: iOS 26 is bringing the ability to have a conversation via phone call or text message with someone who speaks another language. Live Translation will translate your conversation in real time, which results in some stop-and-go interactions in the examples Apple shared during its presentation.
Polls in group chats: Tired of sorting through what seems like hundreds of messages in your group chat? You and your friends will soon be able to create polls in group messages for deciding things like which brunch spot you’re eating at or whose car you’re taking on a road trip.
Filtering unknown senders in Messages: If you haven’t received spam texts about unpaid tolls or other citations, you’re lucky. For those of us who have, those annoying messages will soon be filtered away in a separate folder.
Visual Intelligence: Similar to a reverse Google image search, this new feature will allow you to search for anything that’s on your iPhone screen. For instance, if you spot a pair of shoes someone is wearing in an Instagram photo, you can screenshot it and use Visual Intelligence to find those shoes (or similar ones) online.
Photos tabs are back: For anyone who’s still frustrated with the Photos changes made last year, you’ll be happy to know that your tabs are coming back. Library and Collections will have their own separate spaces so you don’t have to scroll to infinity to find what you’re looking for.
FaceTime “Communication Safety” feature: A newer addition to iOS 26 appears to be the FaceTime “Communication Safety” feature that pauses communications if and when nudity is detected. The feature appears to be a child safety feature that uses on-device detection, thus obviating any cloud-based privacy issues.
New lock screen options: The iPhone lock screen gets more customizable in iOS 26, with a cooler clock, 3D wallpaper effects, more widgets and better focus mode options.
Apple’s Hold Assist will be nifty for those pesky services that put you on hold for 10 or more minutes. (Apple)
New changes coming to iPadOS 26
Your iPad isn’t getting left behind when it comes to big updates. Here’s what’s coming this fall.
Multitasking and real windowing: When you download the newest update, you’ll be able to have multiple apps running on your screen at the same time. Once you open an app, it’ll appear on your screen as normal but you’ll be able to resize and move it across your screen to make room for other apps. This feature is optional so you can turn it off if you don’t like it.
Visual update: Along with the other new OSes, iPadOS 26 is coming with the Liquid Glass aesthetic. This new look will appear on the lock and home screens, as well as the drop-down menus.
New menu bar: When you swipe down on your screen, the new menu bar will appear with options like File, Edit, Windows and more. There’s also a search option if you’re looking for something specific.
Enhanced audio recording: Apple calls this “studio-quality” audio recording, and with it, you’ll notice more clarity while in noisy environments.
Camera remote control: Using this, you can take a photo or start and stop video recording with just one press on your AirPods. When taking photos, you’ll get a three-second countdown before your iPhone or iPad snaps the picture.
Live translation feature: While not officially announced or confirmed, it appears that the long-rumored live translation for AirPods could be coming with iOS 26. The evidence comes from a system asset spotted in the in iOS 26 beta showing a gesture that’s triggered by pressing both earbud stems at the same time. The photo also shows words in several different languages.
Which iPhones will be able to upgrade to iOS 26?
A few iPhone models that run the current version of iOS — iPhone XR, XS and XS Max — won’t be compatible with the latest upgrade. But any iPhones released in 2019 or later will be eligible for the iOS 26 update.
iPhone SE (second generation or later)
Not listed here are the presumed new iPhone 17 models (or maybe iPhone 26?) that are all but certain to be announced and released in September.
How to install iOS 26 beta
The iOS 26 public beta is now available to download via the Apple Beta Software Program. If you’re not already a member, you’ll need to sign up to try out all the latest features. Just visit beta.apple.com and sign up with your phone number or email address. It’s free.
Once you’re in, you can install it by going to Settings > General > Software Update and selecting iOS 26 public beta.
A word of caution: Don’t sign up with your main iPhone unless you’re OK with any risks that occur with using an OS that isn’t finalized.
When will the final version of iOS 26 be released?
iOS 26 will be released to the public this fall. It usually comes in September, within a week of the Apple iPhone event. Last year, it rolled out to iPhone users on September 16 — exactly one week after the iPhone 16 lineup was announced.
Pixel phones are getting a new card carousel overlay when you launch Google Wallet with a double-tap of the power button.
Android 16 introduced the ability to customize the “Double press power button” gesture. Instead of launching the camera, you can set it to open Google Wallet. At the moment, this just opens the full Wallet app.
At least one Android 16 Pixel 9 Pro Fold user is now seeing a new overlay that opens above your current screen. Featuring a blurred background, there’s a “Hold to reader” NFC animation followed by just a card carousel. At the bottom, you get an “Open Wallet” shortcut.
This is pretty convenient when you don’t want to pay with your default card. This new overlay lets you quickly return to what you were previously doing after the payment is complete.
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We’re not seeing this Google Wallet overlay yet on Pixel devices we checked today. It’s rolling out with version 25.31 of Google Wallet and Play services (beta).
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Android 12 overlay after Google dropped the combined power, card/passes, and smart home controls menu.
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The estimated Powerball jackpot is $526 million. The lump sum payment before taxes would be about $241 million.
The Double Play is a feature that gives players in select locations another chance to match their Powerball numbers in a separate drawing. The Double Play drawing is held following the regular drawing and has a top cash prize of $10 million.
Powerball is held in 45 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Double Play add-on feature is available for purchase in 13 lottery jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.
A $2 ticket gives you a one in 292.2 million chance at joining the hall of Powerball jackpot champions.
The drawings are held at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The deadline to purchase tickets is 9:45 p.m.
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Igor Babuschkin, a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI startup, announced his departure from the company on Wednesday in a post on X. Babuschkin led engineering teams at xAI and helped build the startup into one of Silicon Valley’s leading AI model developers just a few years after it was founded.
“Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in the post. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.”
Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.
Babuschkin is leaving xAI to launch his own venture capital firm, Babuschkin Ventures, which he says will support AI safety research and back startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.”
The xAI co-founder says he was inspired to start the firm after a dinner with Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute, in which they discussed how AI systems could be built safely to encourage the flourishing of future generations. In his post, Babuschkin says his parents immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in pursuit of a better life for their children.
Babuschkin’s departure comes after a tumultuous few months for xAI, in which the company became engrossed in several scandals related to its AI chatbot Grok. For instance, Grok was found to cite Musk’s personal opinions when trying to answer controversial questions. In another case, xAI’s chatbot went on antisemitic rants and called itself “Mechahitler.” Most recently, xAI unveiled a new feature in Grok that allowed users to make AI-generated videos resembling nude public figures, such as Taylor Swift.
These scandals have at times overshadowed the performance of xAI’s models, which are state-of-the-art on several benchmarks compared to AI models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
Prior to co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of a research team at Google DeepMind that pioneered AlphaStar in 2019, a breakthrough AI system that could defeat top-ranked players at the video game StarCraft. Babuschkin also worked as a researcher at OpenAI in the years before it released ChatGPT.
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In his post, Babuschkin details some of the challenges he and Musk faced in building up xAI. He notes that industry veterans called xAI’s goal of building its Memphis, Tennessee supercomputer in just three months “impossible.”
xAI was able to build its AI supercomputer in record time, however, environmentalists warn that the temporary gas turbines powering the cluster are pumping out emissions into neighboring communities and exacerbating their longstanding health issues.
Nevertheless, Babuschkin says he’s already looking back fondly on his time at xAI, and “feels like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college.”
“I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency,” said Babuschkin.
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Apple is still hard at work on becoming a relevant player in AI. The latest missive from Mark Gurman at suggests that Apple is shifting its artificial intelligence goals to center on new device segments. Sources reportedly told the publication that Apple has a slate of new smart home products in the works that could help pivot its lagging AI strategy.
The center of the new lineup is a tabletop AI companion that has been described as an iPad on a movable robotic arm. It would be able to swivel to face the screen toward a user as they move around their home or office. Sources said the current prototype uses a horizontal display that’s about seven inches while the motorized arm can move the screen about six inches away from the base in any direction. Equipped with a to the Siri voice assistant, this device could act like an additional person, recalling information, making suggestions and participating in conversations. According to Bloomberg, Apple is targeting a 2027 release for this product.
Apple’s new lineup is also rumored to include a smart home hub that is a simpler version of the robotic friend with no moving stand. We might be seeing this sooner, with a projected 2026 release for the device. This hub device would be able to control music playback, take notes, browse the web and host videoconferencing. Both the robot companion and the smart home hub are reportedly running a new operating system called Charismatic that’s designed to support multiple users. The Siri running on the device will be given a particularly cheery personality, and it may also be getting a visual representation. Bloomberg‘s sources said there hasn’t been a final decision on aesthetics; internal tests have had Siri looking like an animated Finder icon and like a Memoji.
Today’s scuttlebutt follows on previous reports from Gurman that pointed to Apple’s interest in these categories. The idea of a smart home hub was apparently floated at the company as far back as 2022, and it’s finally being to have a formal debut some time this year. Robots have also been a topic of interest in Cupertino for some time, with claims that Apple was developing a personal robot dating back . While this Bloomberg piece offers more detail about those hypothetical plans, there’s always a chance Apple will change direction or scrap a project.
