Archive for June 16, 2026

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

SpaceX Acquires xAI, Goes Public, Acquires Cursor

Elon Musk (February, Hacker News):

SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.

[…]

Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment.

In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.

There are potential environmental and energy benefits to putting data centers in space, and Blue Origin’s Bezos also thinks this makes sense, but many are convinced that the numbers just don’t work (Reddit).

Kirsten Korosec and Russell Brandom:

But in its 24-year history, nothing quite compared to its initial public offering. Everyone seemed interested — perhaps because of the sheer size of the IPO. The company priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion, making it the largest IPO in history and turning Musk into the world’s first trillionaire. That total raised figure would end up ballooning to $85.7 billion raised.

[…]

SpaceX shares opened June 12 at $150 on the Nasdaq public exchange, an 11% pop for the most anticipated debut in history. And it has continued to rise. The shares kept rising too. In midday trading, SpaceX shares soared 30%. SpaceX shares closed at $160.95, up 19%.

Sean O'Kane:

SpaceX passed Amazon to become the fifth-most valuable company in the world, after its stock price climbed 20% on Monday and more than 8% in early trading Tuesday, pushing its valuation past $2.7 trillion.

Reuters (Hacker News):

SpaceX is buying the startup behind the popular AI coding agent Cursor, Anysphere, for $60 billion in an all-stock deal to boost its presence in the lucrative enterprise AI tools market.

Previously:

Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27

Apple (MacRumors):

Apple today introduced the next generation of Apple Intelligence, powered by a bold new architecture that integrates the latest Apple Foundation Models deep into Apple’s platforms and is uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy.

[…]

The next generation of Apple Intelligence also helps power Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri.

[…]

Image Playground offers new powerful ways for users to bring their imagination to life. They can create high-quality images in virtually any style, now including photorealistic, thanks to a new generative model that runs on Private Cloud Compute. This is a major transformation for image generation across platforms. And generated images will automatically include a hidden SynthID watermark to identify them as AI-generated.

[…]

Now Messages offers one-tap suggestions based on the context of users’ conversations, making it easier than ever to get things done, such as creating a reminder or a note.

[…]

Apple Intelligence powers even more enhancements across operating systems. With automatic proofreading, users receive improved suggestions for spelling and grammar as they type across the system.

Damien Petrilli:

Apple WWDC26 “big features”: selling a rebranded gemini.

John Gruber:

What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.

Google creating the model, Apple figuring out how to integrate it and make it easy to use. Are we back to Apple and Google each focusing on what they do best?

Dave B.:

This is my favorite Apple event in a long time.

Instead of bombarding you with a million new features that mostly feel half-assed, this feels like it’s actually catered to the user experience instead of to marketing checklists.

Matt Ronge:

All of these AI additions to MacOS/iOS look like nice improvements, but somehow it all feels unambitious given the current state of AI.

But I suppose it’s better for them to underpromise given what happened with Siri last year…

Christina Warren:

As I expected, Apple is going to punt the “on-device” story for Apple Intelligence and push towards the “private cloud compute” story for the models that you’ll actually want to use. I’m glad on-device isn’t going away, but it’s clear a hybrid approach is absolutely necessary

Hartley Charlton:

Apple’s most advanced on-device AI model in iOS 27 requires a minimum of 12GB of unified memory, meaning the standard iPhone 17 is excluded.

Alex Rosenberg:

The 16 Pro was explicitly sold as having Apple Intelligence-capable hardware.

Juli Clover:

Apple today said it is expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC) beyond its data centers, partnering with Google and NVIDIA to run Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud.

[…]

All server components and software are part of a trusted computing base subject to verifiable transparency and no-privileged-access guarantees, plus Apple has a cryptographically verifiable ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks. PCC on Google Cloud also uses many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon.

John Siracusa:

PSA: Remember that Apple Intelligence is disabled in macOS if you boot from an external drive.

See also: Mac Power Users Talk.

Previously:

Apple Foundation Models in appleOS 27

Apple:

At the heart of this architecture is our third generation of Apple Foundation Models (AFM), a family of five foundation models custom-built in collaboration with Google. These span from on-device models to server-based models running on Private Cloud Compute.

Apple Foundation Models are built to unlock a wide range of helpful experiences for our users, like an entirely new Siri and intelligent tools that make everyday apps smarter and more useful.

Hartley Charlton:

“The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none,” Federighi said, explaining that Apple uses none of the Gemini models deployed to Google’s customers, none of Google’s client-side code, and no Google Search infrastructure as the knowledge backbone.

Federico Viticci:

The cloud models hosted on Private Cloud Compute are interesting: they’re not “Gemini” models; they’re Apple Foundation Models trained using proprietary data via RL, which were then “refined” with data from Google’s “frontier” models.

[…]

I’ve been covering the AFM family of models for a while now, and AFM Core Advanced is one of the most interesting on-device models I’ve read about in a while, especially in the context of model size for mobile devices and built-in multimodality with support for text, images, and audio. I’m very keen to play around with this model and understand how it holds up in practice. I wonder if the new CLI (!) for AFM will let you test this one.

Awni Hannun:

It’s very cool that Apple shipped a 20B parameter on-device.

You can’t put 20B parameters in RAM at any reasonable precision. To make it work they are using pretty exotic architecture by today’s standards.

A small model predicts from the query (or prompt) which experts to load from Nand into RAM. The key distinction from a typical MoE is that you do this once per query and then generate all the tokens with the same experts (instead of switching the experts for every token).

Greg Pierce:

Looks like there’s still a 4K context size on local FoundationModels. Pretty limiting.

Kyle Howells:

Really disappointed SwiftUI’s result builder syntax has infected FoundationModels API too.

How did a million modifier methods become the default way to build APIs?

It’s horrible for discoverability, code completion, documentation.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

FoundationModels is one of the highlights of this WWDC; I think it’s now finally what we hoped we were getting two years ago, and thought we were getting last year (just the models themselves were barely up for it then). I finally feel like I can build features with it, though I really don’t like the Sword of Damocles Apple is holding above Private Cloud Compute and how it can permanently lock you out of using the models forever across all your apps if you hit a download threshold. Poison pill

John Gruber (Mastodon):

These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits.

[…]

The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released.

Chad Podoski:

Is there a real time count somewhere of total lifetime downloads for a developer account, so one can plan if they at risk of the switch tripping? Reminds me of the small business qualifications. I had to try to figure out if an employers developer account was going to exceed the revenue threshold for the year. I was left trying to determine it from sales reports, not to mention sales date versus pay out date confusion. I think I botched the calculation in the end.

Anthropic (Hacker News):

Claude for Foundation Models is a Swift package that makes Claude available as a server-side language model in Apple’s Foundation Models framework. The package conforms Claude to the framework’s LanguageModel protocol, so you drive it with the same LanguageModelSession API you use for Apple’s on-device model: respond(to:), streaming, guided generation, and tool calling all work the same way.

Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses. Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing.

Previously:

Agentic Password Updates

Hartley Charlton (9To5Mac):

Apple today announced that the Passwords app can now automatically update weak and compromised passwords using Apple Intelligence and Safari to take action on a user’s behalf.

[…]

Apple describes the system as agentic, with Apple Intelligence and Safari securely navigating through websites, signing in, and upgrading accounts to strong passwords without the user needing to intervene beyond an initial tap.

Craig Hockenberry:

Raise your hand if you’re going to trust an AI agent with your passwords.

Maybe it’s architected so that the agent doesn’t see the actual passwords, but I find the idea of this ghost surfing through sites, logged in as me, really troubling.

Rob Mathers:

I still see Safari failing to save generated passwords in some cases.

Previously:

Photos AI in appleOS 27

Apple (MacRumors):

With Spatial Reframing, users can improve the composition of a photo after it’s been taken. Spatial Reframing builds on Apple’s deep understanding of spatial models thanks to Apple Vision Pro, so users can touch and drag a photo and preview in real time how the perspective shifts — as if they’d repositioned the camera in the original scene. Using powerful image models, Spatial Reframing will only generate new content where the perspective has been shifted, ensuring the reframed photo stays consistent with the original scene.

Users can also expand images with the Extend tool to give their subjects more breathing room. For example, they can straighten a crooked horizon without cropping out anything important, or adjust the aspect ratio, and Extend will fill in the missing pieces. Additionally, the popular Clean Up tool gets a major upgrade, so users can remove distractions with better quality and more realistic infill, even when the scene is complex.

These seem like useful features. I think it’s fine for Apple to offer them, but they do seem somewhat at odds with its previous preening about how they believe in the sanctity of photos that actually happened.

Kuba Suder:

“Reframing photos with AI” - I don’t like this at all 👎

Kind of the crosses the line to cheating about reality too much for me… it’s one thing to lighten or darken or colorize pixels, but another thing to reposition them against each other.

Louie Mantia:

“Deep respect for photography” right after a demo on generating images bc they do not respect art.

Jeff Carlson (Mastodon):

Generative AI is a technology that photographers are distancing themselves from (or should be), thanks to all the AI slop being produced everywhere. And yes, that includes creations from Apple’s Image Playground app, the image generator that the company also showed off during the WWDC keynote.

But generative AI doesn’t need to mean full images created from text prompts. When applied to selective areas, like erasing a piece of trash next to a subject’s feet, generative AI can do some of the menial work of replacing pixels that photographers would otherwise spend time retouching in an app like Photoshop. Google’s Pixel phones include a similar Magic Eraser tool.

Spatial Reframing is a great example of how the technology can be used to enhance real photos you capture.

Brian MacDuff:

I can personally confirm that Apple’s Photos “Clean Up” feature is DRASTICALLY improved in iOS 27. 😳

John Siracusa:

This is a bit hyperbolic and unkind, so I hope you can forgive me for venting. And, hey, who knows? Maybe the fancy new AI-powered reframing feature will actually get broad use. (But I doubt it…)

See also: MacRumors.

Previously:

AI-Generated Shortcuts

Hartley Charlton:

Apple today announced that users can now describe a shortcut in natural language, with Apple Intelligence automatically building the automation in the background.

Marcus Mendes:

Users can simply describe what they want, such as “when I’m leaving work, text my wife with my expected ETA,” and Shortcuts will actually build the shortcut to make it work.

This sounds great in that I find creating shortcuts annoying. It’s not always clear which building blocks I should be using, and stringing them together properly seems tedious and fiddly. On the other hand, I dislike how AppleScript doesn’t get first-class support for the functionality and triggers that are available to Shortcuts.

Simon B. Støvring:

Data Jar got sherlocked, and that genuinely makes me happy.

Simon B. Støvring:

Apple should let users filter out and maybe even rewrite notifications from any app using Shortcuts.

[…]

The new notification automation trigger in Shortcuts is super cool. As far as I can tell, it won’t let me modify the notification content or filter out notifications based on the content, but it’s still a quite powerful addition.

[…]

Third-party automation triggers in Shortcuts are now possible. Sort of.

Just send a notification containing data meant for the new notification trigger to consume.

Anders Borum:

iOS 27 allows 3rd party shortcuts actions to run for longer than 30 seconds making me publish 2 actions that have been hidden behind feature flags for years.

Create cloud servers, run commands and destroy them again right from Shortcuts.

Previously:

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