Tech Brew Ride Home - Never Got Flying Cars, But We Do Have An Instagram iPad App, Finally

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Mark Gurman lays out how Apple intends to jump into AI search as soon as this Spring. You’ll never guess who’s one of the biggest players in quantum computing. The Browser Company gets a soft landing, and after a decade and a half of waiting, we finally have the iPad app for Instagram you say you always wanted. Links: Apple Plans AI-Powered Web Search Tool for Siri to Rival OpenAI, Perplexity (Bloomberg) Nvidia’s Venture Arm Invests in Honeywell’s Quantinuum (Bloomberg) Atlassian agrees to acquire The Browser Co. for $610 million (CNBC) Roblox expands use of age-estimation tech and introduces standardized ratings (TechCrunch) New AI model turns photos into explorable 3D worlds, with caveats (ArsTechnica) Instagram is coming to iPad, 15 years later (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Thursday, September 4th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Mark German lays out how Apple intends to jump into AI search as soon as this spring. You'll never guess who's one of the biggest players in quantum computing. The browser company gets a soft landing, and after a decade and a half of waiting, we finally have the iPad app for Instagram. You say you always wanted. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Mark German says that early next year, Apple is planning to release an AI search.

tool called, weirdly, world knowledge answers as part of a big Siri revamp. And it looks like the bakeoff is nearing its end because Apple and Google have apparently agreed to test a Google AI model for Siri. Quote, the idea is to make Siri and Apple's operating systems a place where users can look up information from across the internet in a similar fashion to chat GPT, AI overviews in Google Search, and a crop of new apps. The approach will rely on large language models or LLMs, a key technology underpinning generative AI. The underlying technology enabling the new Siri could come in part from Alphabet's Google, Apple's longtime partner in internet search. The companies reached a formal agreement this week for Apple to evaluate and test a Google developed AI model to

help power the voice assistant, the people said. Apple's new search experience will include an interface that makes use of text, photos, video, and local points of interest, according to the people. It will offer an AI-powered summarization system designed to make results more quickly digestible and more accurate than what's offered by the current Siri. As part of the Long Promise Siri revamp, the digital assistant will be able to tap into personal data and on-screen content to better fulfill queries. It also will be able to more precisely navigate users' devices via voice.

But now Apple is looking to go further with the update. A technology overhaul for Siri, dubbed Linwood and LLM Siri, lays the groundwork for the AI search feature. Apple aims to use a similar underlying search system for both the World Knowledge Feary, and the already announced but delayed ability to more precisely search through a user's device. The tool should let people more quickly find specific images, files, and other types of information. Though Apple is mainly looking to weave a new search system into existing features, it has also weighed the idea of building a chatbot-like app for search.

Bloomberg reported last month that Apple is hiring staff for a new Answers, Knowledge, and Information, or A-K-I team, which is contributing to the search work. The new Siri and search changes are currently slated for an upcoming software update known internally as Luck E. That corresponds to iOS 26.4, which is scheduled for release as early as March. Apple is rebuilding Siri around three core components, a planner, the search systems for the web and devices, and a summarizer. The planner interprets voice or text input and decides how to respond. The search system scans the web or user data, and the summarizer pulls it all together into an answer. In a major shift, Apple is considering powering the new Siri, at least in part with third-party

AI models via a project that is called Glenwood. The current version of Siri runs entirely on Apple technology. Apple has been recently leaning towards using a custom-built Google Gemini model for the summarizer, the people said it would run on Apple's own private cloud compute servers. The search engine giant already delivered the technology to Apple, and both companies are now collaborating on fine-tuning and testing it. Apple is considering using the Google model for the plan. planner function as well, but it also continues to evaluate relying on Anthropics Clod or in-house models.

Apple and Google also haven't ruled out eventually using the Gemini model to handle additional AI and search-related features. As of now, the iPhone maker plans to retain its own technology called Apple Foundation models for searching user data. That should help the company preserve user privacy because customer information won't be processed with third-party technology. Google wasn't initially the frontrunner on the Siri project, Anthropic had previously been in the lead for a deal with Apple's internal evaluations indicating that Claude was ahead of Gemini in terms of quality. But Anthropic demanded a high price for using its technology more than $1.5 billion a year. And Google was open to more favorable financial terms, according to the people. That led Apple to ask Google to create a model to power Siri as Bloomberg reported last month, end quote. If AI hype is so last week's

news for you, there's still time to jump on the quantum computing hype bandwagon. And do you know who is actually a big player in the space, it's Honeywell. Honeywell's Quantinium has raised $600 million from Quanta, NVenture's investment arm, and others at a $10 billion pre-money valuation up from a $5 billion valuation when it raised $300 million back in January of 2024. Quoting Bloomberg, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's chief executive officer this year reset his forecast for quantum computing, saying in June that the technology is reaching an inflection point that is becoming a practical computing technique sooner than previously expected. Nvidia now provides software that will help its chips work with quantum devices positioning the

company to take advantage of advances that could disrupt its dominance of computing and data centers. Quantum computing will be powerful enough in the coming years to help, quote, solve some interesting problems globally, Wong said. He said, Nvidia's entire quantum algorithm stack will be available and accelerated on its Grace Blackwell 200 chip. Quantinium is already a partner with NVIDIA on that company's accelerated Quantum Research Center, a facility in Boston's design to advance the technology. Honeywell, which owns about 54% of Quantinium, is participating in the fundraising alongside QED investors, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amgen. The statement didn't provide details on what portion of the $600 million

round is being invested by NVIDIA's venture arm, which is part of the company's wide-ranging investments in AI. Led by Chief Executive Officer Reggie. Hesra. Quantinium develops powerful so-called quantum computers capable of solving complex tasks that are beyond the abilities of traditional computing. Quantum computers are designed to process information faster than regular computers since they can calculate in parallel rather than sequentially. Quantinum is developing platforms to be used in fields such as chemistry, machine learning, cybersecurity, finance, and drug discovery. The company was formed in 2021 by the merger of Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions. It has more than 500,000,

spread across the U.S., the UK, Germany, and Japan, end quote. Oh, this is an interesting end to this whole story. Atlassian has agreed to acquire the browser company for $610 million in cash, with the deals set to close by December. That startup develops the DIA browser, now in beta, you might recall. Quoting CNBC, established in 2019, the browser company has gone up against some of the world's largest companies, including Google with Chrome and Apple, which includes Safari on its computers running macOS.

The startup debuted Arc, a customizable browser with a built-in whiteboard and the ability to share groups of tabs in 2022. The Dia browser, a simpler option that allows people to chat with an AI assistant about multiple browser tabs at once, became available in beta in June. Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Kennan Brooks said he sees shortcomings in the most popular browsers for those who do much of their work on computers. Whatever it is that you're actually doing in your browser is not particularly well-served by a browser that was built in the name to browse, he said in an interview.

It's not built to work. It's not built to act. It's not built to do. Cannon Brooks said ARC has helped him feel like he can manage his work with its ability to organize tabs and automatically archive old ones. But only a small percentage of people who used the browser company's arc adopted the program's special features. Quote, our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool like a video editor

than a mass market consumer product, which we aspired to be. closer to Josh Miller, the browser company's co-founder and CEO, said in a newsletter update, the startup stopped building new features for ARC, leading to questions of whether it would release the browser under an open source license. AI search startup perplexity, which offered Google $34.5 billion for Chrome talked with the browser company about a possible acquisition in December, the information reported. OpenAI also held talks with the browser company, according to the report. Perplexity has been providing early access to its own AI browser, which is named Comet. The browser company was valued at $550 million last year.

Investors include Atlassian Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The browser is central for those using Atlassian products, such as the Gira project management software, which shows existing support requests on the web. But the plan isn't simply to make it nicer to work with Atlassian's products online. It's really about taking ARCS SaaS application experience and power user features and Dia's AI and elegance and speed and sort of svelte nature and Atlassian's enterprise know-how and working out how to put all that together into Dia or into the AI part of the browser, Ken and Brooks said, end quote. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get

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Roblox announced on Wednesday that it's expanding its age estimation technology to all users and partnering with the International Age Rating Coalition IARC to provide age and content ratings for the games and apps on its platform. The company said that by years end, the age estimation system will be rolled out to all Roblox users who access the company's communication tools like voice and text-based chats. This involves scanning users' selfies and analyzing facial features to estimate age. This age estimation tech is combined with other systems including ID age verification and verified parental consent to provide more accurate measure of a user's age, Roblox says, especially when compared with simply having kids type in a birth year

when they create an account. The company notes that it's also planning to launch systems that will further limit communications between adults and minors on its platform. Meanwhile, the company's partnership with IARC will see Roblox replacing its own content and maturity labels with those used by rating agencies worldwide. That means users in the U.S. will see rating from the ESRB, while other countries will see those used by their own ratings authorities. This system is meant to help parents better understand what sort of games their kids are playing based on factors that could raise concerns like whether game content features blood or gore, violence, substances, gambling, adult language, and more.

These updates follow earlier moves the company announced in July, designed to better protect younger users. Roblox introduced a series of safety features, including the age verification system that analyzes users' ages via video selfies. is used to prevent users younger than 13 from accessing certain features within Roblox, like the ability to voice and text chat without filters. Roblox also prevents users ages 13 to 17 from adding users to their trusted connections unless they know them in real life, something Roblox verified through contact imports or QR code scans. The move also follows the rollout

of increasingly strict laws and regulations around the world that require social platforms to verify users' ages like the UK's Online Safety Act and Mississippi's age assurance law which has already seen social network blue sky stop serving users in the state. Similar laws are in various stages in other states, including Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, Virginia, and elsewhere, end quote. 3D spaces seem to be the new hotness in the text to X AI model space. Tencent's new open weights model. Hunyan World Voyager turns a single image into a short 3D consistent video you can, quote, fly through by setting a camera path. It outputs RGB frames plus depth maps, enabling direct 3D reconstruction,

though it doesn't create true 3D assets and isn't a game engine. Each generation is 49 frames, about two seconds, and clips can be chained into sequences lasting minutes with objects holding stable positions and plausible perspective shifts. Voyager pairs your input image with a user defined trajectory forward-back strafe turn and uses a memory-efficient world cache, a growing point cloud built from prior frames. For each new frame, it projects that cache back into 2D as a guide forcing geometric consistency. Trained on more than 100,000 clips, including Unreal Engine scenes, the model still pattern matches like any transformer, so small errors accumulate over long complex moves. Compared with typical video generators like SORA that prioritize per frame plausibility,

Voyager adds a geometric feedback loop to maintain spatial coherence. Compute demands are steep, Around 60 to 80 gigabyte GPU memory for 540p with multi-GPU inference offering 6.7X speed-ups across 8 GPUs. Position for video and 3D reconstruction workflows, it complements efforts like Google's Agent Focus Genie 3 and Dynamic Labs browser-based Mirage 2, early steps toward interactive, generative worlds, again in quotes. But quoting R's Technica, on the World Score benchmark, developed by, Stanford University researchers, Voyager reportedly achieved the highest overall score of 77.62, compared to 72.69 for Wonderworld and 62.15 for Cog Video X12V. The model reportedly excelled in object control, 66.92, style consistency and subjective quality, though it placed second in camera control, 85.95 behind Wonderworld's 92.98. World score evaluates world generation approaches across

multiple criteria, including 3D consistency and content alignment, end quote. Finally today, Hell Hath finally frozen over. Meta has finally launched Instagram for iPadOS 15 years after its iOS debut. The new app is slightly different than the mobile version of Instagram, most notably, opening directly into Reels. Quoting The Verge, after years of requests from users, Instagram will finally have a dedicated app for iPad. Beginning Wednesday, September 3rd, users are able to download the new app built specifically for Apple's tablet, but it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed

to. Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly into a feed of reels, the company's TikTok competitor, perhaps a sign of the short-form video times. Back in April, reporting indicated that meta was working on an iPad app for Instagram after years of dragging its feet, in part prompted by the legally and politically iffy spot TikTok found itself in. For years, Instagram for iPad was something to tackle at some point until its biggest competitor was facing what would effectively be a ban in the U.S. From that perspective, opening the app straight to reels makes perfect sense. Other features will be available on iPad.

Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a following tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that are more resembling of the mobile Instagram experience with actual still images, including a chronological option. The bigger screen, though, means more space and fewer clicks. Comments on reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop. According to Meta, the new look is also coming soon to Android tablets. Instagram head, Adam Mosseri, has said in the past that the group of people wanting an iPad app just wasn't big enough for it to be a top priority. So what's changed in the

the last few years, perhaps the number of kids using tablets has changed the calculus, or TikTok's regulatory vulnerability bump this up on the to-do list. One thing that's obvious from this is that Instagram is not letting up on reels. It's extended the length of clips, added the ability to repost and fast-forward them, and earlier this year was trying to recruit popular TikTokers. The company sees a future for Instagram on tablets and its short form video all the way down, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th,

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