Tech Brew Ride Home - GTA VI, Finally, Finally Coming?

Starting point is 00:00:03 Welcome to the TechBrewrite home for Juneteenth, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today. Intel stock popped after Trump said Apple agreed to build chips with it in America. Waymo yanked his Rootaxies off highways over construction zone blunders. GTA 6 pre-orders are finally happening June 25th. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Think you have to build your own search engine scraping infrastructure. Think again, folks. Serp API can take care of all your search engine scraping. needs. It lets AI products access real-time web search data programmatically. No scraping infrastructure required. Their APIs offer structured JSON data from all the top search engines, including Google, Amazon, and YouTube. Top tech companies already use SERP API to power their AI agents, their market intelligence tools, and their automated research workflows. See how it can help you and your team. SERP API provides 250 free searches per month. Go check out. out at SERPAPI.com. That's SERP-S-E-R-P-A-P-I-com.

Starting point is 00:01:20 More signs that Apple might be returning to the Intel fold, at least in some capacity, quoting CNBC. Intel 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. Intel stock has seen significant gains recently after struggling for years, having relinquished its dominant market position. The stock has surged 400. 164% in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion. For years, Intel largely sat out the AI race as it grappled with manufacturing delays and awaited a major customer for its chip fabrication business. But CEO Lip But Tan, who took the helm

Starting point is 00:02:01 early last year, has revived Wall Street interest in the struggling chipmaker by drawing investments from Nvidia and the Trump administration. I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our chips right here in America, Trump said, Thursday on Truth Social. First, we helped bring in Nvidia, and they agreed to build their first level chips with Intel, he added. Next, Elon agreed to build his TerraFab, the largest chip factory in the world, designed together with Intel's technology team. The TerraFab project is the first major outside commitment for Intel's capital-intensive foundry business, which had only manufactured chips for its own products. While conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supply chains and

Starting point is 00:02:38 seen oil prices skyrocket, the AI boom, has so far insulated stock. especially those tied to infrastructure around the technology. NASDAQ's Philadelphia Semiconductor Sector Index, comprising the 30 largest U.S. traded chip companies, is up 90 percent so far this year, end quote. Filings reveal that Waymo has pulled its robotaxies from highways after finding more than 13 instances of Waymo cars driving into highway sections under construction. Quoting TechCrunch, six of these happened in Phoenix, Arizona, in April, and seven occurred in San Francisco, California in May.

Starting point is 00:03:19 Waymo pulled its robot taxis from all highways on May 19th, and a fix for the problem is currently under development, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The company is not pulling vehicles off the road and is still operating on surface streets, though it has periodically paused service during severe weather that could lead to flooding. We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones, Waymo said in a statement to TechCrunch, we voluntarily restricted free. way operations last month while making improvements proactively notified state and federal regulators and decided to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA. This is the sixth recall Waymo has issued

Starting point is 00:03:59 for its robotaxies. In May, the company recalled its robotaxies after they drove into flooded roads, and in December it issued one to address its vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses. Waymo has previously issued recalls to fix low-speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles, and one to solve a problem regarding towed trucks. The company's driving software is currently under investigation by the NHTSA and National Transportation Safety Board regarding its behavior around school buses after one of its robotaxies struck a child near a school in January. Alphabet-owned Waymo says its vehicles have driven more than 170 million miles autonomously and claims they have demonstrated a 13-X reduction in serious injury or worse crashes when compared to human drivers.

Starting point is 00:04:42 The Robotaxy Company is in the middle of a massive expansion planning to launch in more than 20 cities this year alone, including in London and Tokyo. The expansion has helped highlight a number of edge cases that Waymo's Robotaxie software has struggled with, which now includes highway construction zones. Waymo, which started offering highway rides in November 2025, told the NHTSA that its robotaxies did not recognize and drove past ramp closure signs into pre-planned freeway construction zones in mid-April in Phoenix. After a review, the company's field safety committee restricted freeway operations in the city while Waymo worked on a fix. The NHTSA documents show on May 18th,

Starting point is 00:05:20 seven Waymo Rootaxies drove into highway lanes under active construction in the San Francisco Bay Area because the company's software was prioritizing the avoidance of other freeway hazards and or failing to recognize the construction zone. The company suspended all freeway driving the following day. Waymo's safety board decided to issue the recall on June 8th. Footage of some of these incidents was shared on social media on May 19th, ex-user at Elliott Slade posted a video where they claimed a Waymo blasted through cones and said it was chased by police. There were construction signs, Slade told CBS News last month, there were lights going on, police in the distance, and it sped up. That's when I looked at my fiancé. We're done. This is it.

Starting point is 00:05:59 We're dead. We're going to die right here in the Waymo. Wamo offered Slade, quote, three free rides up to $40 each in the future, according to CBS, end quote. At long last, it appears to finally be happening, quoting Kataku. Grand Theft Auto 6 is launching on November 19th. Some of you might roll your eyes at the seeming certainty of that statement, and understandably so. Rockstar and Take 2 have delayed the game a few times now, but this time I'm feeling very confident that GTA 6 is actually for real, seriously launching as planned. Why? Because Rockstar has made all their social media accounts pink. On Thursday, Rockstar games announced that pre-orders for GTA6 would go live on June 25th. Alongside that news came the reveal

Starting point is 00:06:48 the game's official cover art. It looks rad and has some serious GTA Vice City on PS2 vibes. And as all of this was happening, Rockstar Games went around and changed all of the profile picks and banners found on the company's various social media accounts before they featured the old classic yellow rockstar logo. Now, however, they all feature purple and pink palm trees with a neon white rock star logo plastered on top. Why does this matter? Well, it signals to me that the company has officially entered GTA6 marketing mode. Historically, and there's not that much to go on because Rockstar's slow release schedule means they haven't put out all that many new games in the social media era. Once the company switches its icons and enters this phase of

Starting point is 00:07:28 marketing for a game, it doesn't announce a new delay. You can look back at Rockstar's Facebook page to see that once the company swapped its icon for a Red Dead Redemption 2 themed logo on May of 2018, a few months after announcing a delay, the game stuck to its October 2018 launch date. Essentially, Once rock star and take to start showing off the cover, taking people's money and swapping social media icons and banners, you can be pretty damn sure that everyone involved is confident that the game is coming out as planned, barring some catastrophic event. So as long as the world doesn't end between now and November, GTA 6 will launch as planned on November 19th on PS5 and Xbox, end quote. Again, if the current state of the art in AI proves to be sufficient to run our agentic future,

Starting point is 00:08:19 then what happens six months from now when open-weight open-source AI models are equivalent to today's state of the art? When is good enough, good enough for a lot of people not to need to pay the major model players. Apparently, a model called GLM 5.2 is getting a lot of attention in AI circles because it is now the leading open-weight's model on artificial analyses intelligence index scoring 51. By comparison, Fable 5 scored 60, Opus 4.8 scored, 56 and GPT 5.5 scored 55, quoting Implicator.aI. Artificial analysis this week named ZAI's GLM 5.2, the leading open-source open-weight model on its intelligence index, the independent benchmarking firm said in a post on June 16th. The model scored 51 on the V4.1 index

Starting point is 00:09:10 of 11 points from GLM 5.1 and ships under an MIT license with a 1 million at token context window. independent reviewers who ran it over the past week reported that it matched or beat Anthropics Opus 4.8 on several build tasks at a fraction of the cost. Nate Herk, who runs the AI automation channel on YouTube, switched Claude Code over to GLM 5.2 and ran it for a day. He clocked a one-shot website build at 3 minutes, 59 seconds against 14 minutes, 59 seconds for Opus 4.8 on the same prompt and said the GLM run used fewer tokens. Herk routed Claude Code to the model by setting Anthropic-Base URL to ZAI in his settings.com.

Starting point is 00:09:51 A swap he described to viewers as switching out the engine of a car. He ran it on a $60 a month ZAI plan. The model did not match Opus everywhere. On one head-to-head, Herk had OpenAIs Codex generate a homework task and then grade both outputs and codex judged Opus the more precise of the two. It cited a duplicate records edge case. The GLM run missed where values such as True versus 1 tripped it up. Herk put the share of his work that genuinely needs Opus at maybe 10 to 20 percent and said GLM 5.2 handled most of the rest. Julian Goldie, who tested the model on June 14th against Moonshot's Kimmy K-27 and Opus 4.8, said GLM 5.2 won four of his five build tests. He gave it the edge on a Temple Run-style voxel runner, a liquid metal ball simulation, an Apple-style landing page, and a neon arcade game, and handed the fifth an inter-solar system orbit map to Kimi K2.7. I can't believe GLM 5.2 is beating Opus 4.8, Goldie told viewers, he noted the model was so new it had not yet appeared on OpenRouter. The same artificial analysis report recorded a higher token cost, though. GLM 5.2 spends 43,000 output

Starting point is 00:11:05 tokens per intelligence index task, of which 37,000 are reasoning tokens up from 26,000 for GLM 5.1 and above the 35,000 Kimmy K2.6 uses. That works out to about 46 cents per task against roughly 5 cents for DeepSeek V4 Pro at its maximum setting. Artificial analysis still placed the model on its intelligence versus cost perito frontier, citing the lowest cost per task among models at its intelligence level, end quote. When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk ready to take notes. And honestly, some ideas are easier to say out loud than to type into your phone. That's where Plod Notepin S comes in.

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Starting point is 00:12:46 whether that's SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, or others. Twilio helps brands reach customers on the channels they love right when it matters most, and all from a single platform. Twilio's API-first approach also gives developers and marketers the flexibility to build custom promotional workflows, triggered campaigns and dynamic messaging, logic tailored to their business needs. Real-time behavioral signals like browsing, card activity, and in-store activations activate timely, relevant offers to customers, so your brand is always on and always personal. Get started at Twilio.com slash TB1. That's Twilio.com slash TB1.

Starting point is 00:13:27 In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. first up in the journal sources detail how Google is using Nvidia's Playbook to build out its AI

Starting point is 00:14:06 chip business, including providing $3.2 billion to fund a New York Data Center renting TPUs to Anthropic. Quote, until recently, Nvidia all but had that market to itself, its graphics processing unit or GPUs coveted by tech companies for their power to train and run AI models. As the AI race has morphed over the past year into a contest for computing resources, though, challengers have begun to edge in, none of them more formidable than Google. You have all these very well-capitalized companies who are big believers that this market around compute is going to have tremendous values, said Nazar Khan, co-founder and chief executive officer of the AI infrastructure company Terawolf, which is developing Lake Mariner with Fluid Stack, a Google-backed cloud

Starting point is 00:14:49 provider. They want to be in the game, they don't want to be left behind. In corraling customers for its chips known as tensor processing units or TPUs, Google has mimicked Invidius' practice of using financial guarantees to help data centers raise cheaper debt and provide so-called circular financing in which some of the money it invest flows back in the form of chip purchases. A shake-up in the leadership of its cloud unit has increased the level of urgency, people familiar with the matter said. NVIDIA has a close partnership with and is a major investor in OpenAI. Google has a similar relationship with Anthropic as well as its own frontier model Gemini.

Starting point is 00:15:23 In private and in public, Jensen Wong has played down Google's ability to compete with his company meaningfully. In April appearing on the podcaster, Dwarcish Patel's show, Huang said Nvidia enjoys a wide lead over Google and other makers of custom chips known as ASICs, and argued that Anthropic is Google's only significant external customer for the TPU. Our market research is far greater than any TPU or ASIC can possibly have, Huang said. I would love to hear them demonstrate the cost advantages of TPUs. It makes no sense in my mind. In its most direct challenge to date, Google recently struck a $5 billion deal with Blackstone to establish a new cloud services company that would compete with Corwieve and Nebius to Nvidia-backed cloud providers

Starting point is 00:16:06 that exclusively use the chip giant's hardware stack. They're clearly being more opportunistic and more aggressive about monetizing what they have relative to a few years ago, said Stacey Raskin, a tech analyst at Bernstein. But a few years ago, the opportunity wasn't there. Today, all we're hearing is that nobody has enough compute, end quote. then a PWC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it to enhance human skills while leaving further behind those that use it to merely cut costs. Quoting Bloomberg, artificial intelligence is pulling the global labor market in two opposite directions,

Starting point is 00:16:42 rewarding companies that use AI to enhance human skills while leaving those who use it merely to cut costs further behind. A new study suggests. Roles requiring specific AI skills increased almost eight times faster than the total job market in 2025, according to a Pricewaterhouse Cooper's LLP study. Such roles are also seeing higher wage growth, the PWC-2026 AI Jobs Barometer Report showed. Jobs that can use AI to amplify human skills such as creativity and judgment are rising the fastest with PWC naming radiologists and recruiters as examples. Jobs where AI makes the task easier for non-experts to perform,

Starting point is 00:17:16 such as IT service managers and medical secretaries, are seeing much slower growth. The company seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation, and create entirely new sources of value, said Joe Atkinson, PWC's Global Chief AI Officer. They're pulling further ahead on productivity and growth, then companies that focus primarily on automation. The report drew on data, including over one billion job postings across 27 countries and territories, combining labor market, financial, and occupational information to track how AI is reshaping work, skills, wages, and productivity, end quote. Finally today, from the verge,

Starting point is 00:17:53 I didn't know this was a feature in iOS, but this sounds useful to me, so FYI. Quote, introduced in 2024, Apple's vehicle motion cues promised to tap into your device's accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle. According to Big S science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen

Starting point is 00:18:32 to the left. When the car breaks, the dots slide forward. It sounds preposterous, but I'm here to tell you that it actually works. Once enabled, I've comfortably read books in the Kindle app on my phone for a few hours out ago and even written thousand-word reviews while my wife drove our camper van to the next destination. She uses Apple's vehicle motion cues now, too, because they've been a game changer for how we balance work with life on the road. Vehicle motion cues can be configured under accessibility settings in iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. They can be turned on, off, or set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected.

Starting point is 00:19:06 I made it easy to quickly toggle the motion cues on and off by double-tapping the back of my phone. To do the same, head over to accessibility, touch, back tap, and set the double-tap gesture to vehicle motion cues on devices supporting iOS 18 and above, end quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - GTA VI, Finally, Finally Coming?

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