OpenAI's Jalapeño doubted, Gemini Flash hits 88.4%, DeepMind bleeds to Anthropic

Sources

OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized inference chip openai.com

OpenAI and Broadcom introduce Jalapeño, a custom AI chip built for LLM inference to improve performance, efficiency, and scale across AI systems.

OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom techcrunch.com

Named Jalapeño, the new processor was designed specifically for the unique needs of OpenAI’s inference systems.

OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño theverge.com

OpenAI has just revealed a new “intelligence processor” chip for AI servers made in partnership with Broadcom. The chip, called Jalapeño, is designed to power current and future large language models, according to an announcement on Wednesday. Jalapeño is an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), meaning it’s designed for a specific purpose: AI inference. With AI […]

OpenAI and Broadcom announce chip designed for LLM inference at scale arstechnica.com

The silicon race is heating up amid the struggle to keep up with demand.

Introducing computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash deepmind.google

AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals techcrunch.com

Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, following departures from top scientists Noam Shazeer and John Jumper.

The $27 million Al proxy war over Alex Bores ends in a draw theverge.com

New York Assemblyman Alex Bores narrowly lost the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional district, ending a $27 million spending battle between Anthropic and OpenAI-aligned super PACs. Bores’ polling actually surged after a pro-AI PAC targeted him over his state-level AI safety record.

Cerebras stock plunges after earnings as CEO says margin outlook was misunderstood techcrunch.com

The AI chipmaker’s stock dropped sharply after it forecast narrower gross margins in its core business during its debut earnings report as a public company. CEO Andrew Feldman argued investors misread the outlook, but the sell-off underscores scrutiny on Nvidia challengers.

Figma adds code layers, support for animations, more AI features in new update techcrunch.com

At its annual Config conference, Figma unveiled a reimagined canvas optimized for full-stack development, alongside motion graphics, shader tools, and the ability to spin up custom plugins from natural-language prompts. The push positions Figma against Cursor and Vercel in AI-native design-to-code workflows.

Figma now has AI motion graphics and shader tools theverge.com

Figma has revealed some new design and coding product updates at its annual Config conference that aim to help creatives “push their ideas further” and automate tedious tasks with AI. Part of this is a reimagined canvas that’s now optimized for full-stack development, according to Figma, bringing teams, AI agents, tools, and materials “together in […]

Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal techcrunch.com

The humanoid robotics startup, spun out of Oregon State in 2015, expects to raise roughly $620 million in proceeds from the deal. Agility’s Digit robot is already deployed at GXO and Amazon warehouses, giving it a revenue story rivals like Figure lack.

The memory chip crunch is paying off for this US company techcrunch.com

Revenue at the US memory maker quadrupled year-over-year to $41.45 billion, while profit surged from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion. HBM demand from Nvidia and hyperscaler AI buildouts has tightened DRAM supply industry-wide, pushing pricing and margins sharply higher.

Why the Frontier Ecosystem must be Open — Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, Databricks latent.space

In a joint interview, Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia and chief architect Reynold Xin lay out why every enterprise will need to build its own Agent Cloud, and why open models and infrastructure are the precondition for that shift away from closed frontier labs.

AI was supposed to kill engineering jobs, but new data suggests they’re the most resilient techcrunch.com

SignalFire data shows software engineers making up a growing portion of new startup hires, contradicting predictions that coding assistants would gut the role. Junior hiring remains weak, but mid and senior engineers are the most resilient white-collar cohort tracked in the report.

Companies are scrambling to stop employees from maxing out AI budgets with small tasks techcrunch.com

The tokenmaxxing era was brief. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing.

Congresswoman denies staff used AI to write defense funding amendment theverge.com

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) says her staff used AI for “spellcheck” in an amendment summary for a major defense bill, but denies it was used for the bill text itself and says “NO Legislation is ever drafted with AI.” Luna issued the response after accounts on X began sharing screenshots of an amendment summary […]

Former Infosys chief has a new startup that wants to challenge the IT services world techcrunch.com

Backed by Mayfield and Aramco Ventures, Vishal Sikka’s new venture brings together veterans from SAP, Infosys, and VianAI.

Facebook rolls out an AI companion app for creators techcrunch.com

The new app, which is currently being tested with select creators, will have Facebook’s recently launched AI creator assistant built into it.

(AINews) Claude Tag: Multiplayer, Proactive, Persistent Agents in Slack latent.space

Claude finally gets a Slackbot upgrade

The emergence of the web data infrastructure layer for AI technologyreview.com

AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models. To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed…

The Google Home Speaker sounds good and looks great — but it’s finicky theverge.com

Right out of the box, the new Google Home Speaker passed a couple of important tests. Even with the volume at 100 percent and music blaring out of the speaker, it quickly ducked the audio and listened every time I said “Hey, Google.” In fact, in two days of testing, the speaker’s three microphones haven’t […]

Record a skill bensbites.com

5.5-cyber vs mythos

3 days left to save up to $190 on your TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 pass techcrunch.com

You have just 3 days left to save up to $190 on your pass to TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 before Early Bird rates end on June 26 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register today.

References

Tom’s Hardware tomshardware.com

OpenAI’s first chip is a massive reticle-sized ASIC built in an ultra-fast nine-month development cycle… performance claims remain ‘on paper’ until independent benchmarks are released.

Enverus — ‘Stargate Scales Back’ enverus.com

A planned 600-megawatt expansion in Texas was abandoned as power-grid interconnection backlogs delayed large-scale energization, and an 8,000-GPU UK build was paused over energy costs.

Kavout (citing BofA’s Vivek Arya) kavout.com

Broadcom’s growth may simply reflect an ‘expanding AI pie’ rather than a direct displacement of Nvidia; past custom-silicon efforts by Microsoft and Meta have struggled to match CUDA’s developer ecosystem.

TrendForce on Microsoft Maia roadmap trendforce.com

Microsoft’s Maia 200 (Braga) faced a minimum six-month delay into 2026 after design modifications requested by OpenAI caused simulation instabilities; an interim Maia 280 is now slated for 2027.

beri.net analysis (HN-style critique) beri.net

A nine-month from-scratch tape-out is ‘completely impossible’; the chip is likely an evolution of existing Broadcom IP, and hardware lead Richard Ho’s prior TPU work with Broadcom provided a significant head start.

Crypto Briefing cryptobriefing.com

Broadcom (AVGO) gained roughly 9–11% on the deal while Nvidia slipped about 3%; KeyBanc cites the 10-gigawatt scale as a long-term tailwind, but Broadcom’s customer concentration in OpenAI is flagged as a risk.

r/AI_Agents thread: ‘WebVoyager is broken’ reddit.com

many teams ‘manually correct’ results or remove ‘impossible’ tasks to inflate scores, making direct comparisons between models functionally meaningless… a simple agent relying primarily on Google Search shortcuts can solve over 50% of the benchmark

OpenReview paper on WebVoyager auto-evaluation openreview.net

auto-evaluators (typically GPT-4V or GPT-4o) … often have low agreement with human judgment and struggle with Type-I (false positive) errors … teams may manually review ‘unknown’ or ‘failure’ labels to find hidden successes but fail to audit ‘success’ labels

SafeBreach Labs research safebreach.com

a ‘Fake Context Alignment’ technique where malicious instructions hidden in message notifications (from WhatsApp or Slack) could silently force Gemini’s voice assistant to control smart home devices or poison long-term memory

Evolink.ai pricing analysis evolink.ai

$1.50 per 1M input tokens and $9.00 per 1M output tokens … the ‘real-world’ cost can be 3x to 5.5x higher than Gemini 3 Flash … attributed to 3.5 Flash’s tendency to ‘burn’ more output tokens during complex agentic reasoning turns

Google AI Developers Forum — independent multi-turn capture-risk eval discuss.ai.google.dev

Gemini 3.5 Flash could be steered into issuing moral verdicts or amplifying user grievances during complex interactions, which differs from the behavior of its ‘Pro’ counterparts

Google AI Developers Forum complaint thread discuss.ai.google.dev

‘3.5 Flash worst model and worst IDE for coding’ … ‘extremely error-prone,’ reporting frequent hallucinations, ignored system instructions, and ‘sloppy execution’ as prompts approach the 1M token context limit

Search Engine Journal (citing SignalFire 2025/2026 data) searchenginejournal.com

DeepMind engineers are approximately 11 times more likely to move to Anthropic than the reverse… Anthropic maintains an industry-leading 80% employee retention rate, surpassing DeepMind (78%), OpenAI (67%), and Meta (64%)

TipRanks / Jefferies note (Brent Thill) tipranks.com

Jefferies characterizes the recent wave of departures as an industry-wide ‘musical chairs’ dynamic… Google does not need to possess the ‘absolute best’ AI model to win — its competitive advantage lies in its massive distribution network with five applications each boasting over 3 billion users.

Outlook Business outlookbusiness.com

Shortly before Shazeer’s exit, Google reportedly reassigned computing power from one of his experimental projects to a London-based team to streamline pre-training for the flagship Gemini model.

SynBioBeta synbiobeta.com

Anthropic has opened internal wet labs to conduct basic biological research and acquired the biotech-focused startup Coefficient Bio… training specialized versions of Claude on vast datasets of structural biology and clinical filings with the goal of compressing drug development timelines by a factor of ten.

The Decoder (quoting Arthur Conmy) the-decoder.com

Existing models like Claude possess ‘extraordinary’ capabilities but are not yet sufficiently aligned to safely manage the development of AGI… his new role at Anthropic involves ‘triaging signs of misalignment’ during training, seeking root-cause fixes rather than surface-level patches.

Taipei Times (Hassabis at Cannes Lions) taipeitimes.com

Hassabis characterized the talent movement as the most intense in the history of the tech industry but maintained that DeepMind continues to ‘win its fair share’ of top-tier talent due to its massive research bench.