It’s also rolling out a vehicle-to-grid firmware update.

OpenAI is preparing a significant overhaul of ChatGPT that shifts the platform’s emphasis away from conversational AI and towards agentic tools and coding capabilities, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The redesign, which the Financial Times reports could arrive within weeks, reflects a growing internal conviction at OpenAI that the chatbot format has run its course as the company’s primary product focus.

That conviction reportedly extends to at least one OpenAI employee describing the situation in stark terms, with the phrase “chat is dead” circulating internally as shorthand for the belief that AI agents represent a more commercially valuable direction than the text-based exchanges ChatGPT built its reputation on.

In a nutshell: Nintendo is bringing back one of its most popular games for a new run on its latest handheld, nearly 30 years after the original. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was announced during the Nintendo Direct presentation on June 9, and will be out later this year on the Switch 2.

The minute-and-a-half teaser doesn’t show any actual gameplay, nor does it provide a launch window outside of 2026. We also don’t know how much Nintendo is planning to charge for the game, although it’s probably a safe bet to assume this will be a premium title with a matching price tag. All we really know at this hour is that the game is indeed in the works and is destined for the Switch 2 later this year.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time arrived on the Nintendo 64 in late 1998 and was unlike anything seen up to that point. The 3D action adventure game was initially planned for the 64DD, but was eventually moved to cartridge when that peripheral was canceled. Despite having just 32MB of memory to work with, Nintendo put out a masterpiece that pushed the limits of storytelling, puzzle-solving, and combat to new heights.

Nintendo sold roughly 7.6 million copies of Ocarina of Time during its run, good enough for fourth on the list of best-selling N64 games behind GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64, and Super Mario 64. In 2022, the game was inducted into the Strong National Museum of Play’s video game hall of fame alongside Dance Dance Revolution, Ms. Pacman, and Sid Meier’s Civilization, cementing its place in history as one of the greatest video games of all time.

The remake is part of Nintendo’s 40th annual franchise celebration, and adds to an already stacked 2026 that includes several high-profile game launches culminating with the release of Grand Theft Auto VI this fall.

For those needing to scratch their Ocarina of Time itch a bit sooner, Nintendo already offers a version of the original game through its Switch Online subscription service.

Killian O’Driscoll, the chief commercial officer at NIBRT, said, ‘The NIBRT team is delighted to be involved in this key WHO initiative to help make the world safer from future emergencies and pandemics.’ 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has selected NIBRT, Ireland’s National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training, as its Regional Training Centre for Biomanufacturing for Europe. It will be one of seven such establishments globally forming part of the WHO’s Biomanufacturing Workforce Training Initiative (BWTI).

BWTI was first set up in 2023 as a means of addressing critical skills gaps evident in the biomanufacturing chain, and enabling countries to turn technological innovation into localised and sustainable production – particularly in areas concerning medicines and other healthcare technologies. 

Commenting on the announcement, which was first made at a media briefing in late April, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said, “Over the past few years, WHO has taken several steps to make the world safer from future emergencies and pandemics. Today, WHO announced that we have designated regional training centres in each of WHO’s six regions, to build the skilled workforce needed to sustain local production of vaccines and biologics. 

“The new training centres are in Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Ireland, Senegal and South Africa. They will operate as part of a coordinated global network, delivering context-specific training aligned with regional priorities, regulatory environments and languages.”

Future responsibilities

As the designated Regional Training Centre for the European region, it will be under NIBRT’s remit to deliver hands-on training aligned with industry needs. The network will also work in close collaboration with the WHO and the Global Training Hub for Biomanufacturing, which is located in South Korea. 

Killian O’Driscoll, the chief commercial officer at NIBRT, said, “The NIBRT team is delighted to be involved in this key WHO initiative to help make the world safer from future emergencies and pandemics. 

“This designation from WHO reflects the quality and reach of the training NIBRT has delivered over many years. As the Regional Training Centre for Europe, we will work with our partners across the region and around the world to help sustain local production of vaccines and biologics for lower and middle income countries.”

The WHO’s additional Regional Training Centres are the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal; the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa; the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil; the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute in India; the Center for Continuing Professional Development at the Egyptian Drug Authority in Egypt; and China’s Peking University. 

The life sciences space is booming of late, with many organisations expanding their job and upskilling opportunities. In early June, consultancy Primecore announced plans to create 50 new jobs across their offices in Ireland and the US over the next three years, on top of 100 new roles previously announced. 

In late April, the Advancing Innovation in Manufacturing Centre in Sligo announced an expansion with a new Galway base of operations amid plans to strengthen its links within the medtech and life sciences sectors.

Also in April, OpenAI announced plans to roll out an early version of GPT-Rosalind, an AI reasoning model designed to support research across biology, drug discovery and translational medicine. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine was recently confirmed to launch this summer, despite uncertainties surrounding its pricing. The console was originally announced back in November 2025, but the ongoing RAM and SSD shortages threw a spanner in its launch timeline.

While the company has not revealed the specific launch date of the console yet, eager fans have been digging through FCC filings and connecting the dots to predict when the console could land. As per their findings, it could happen on or before June 29.

FCC filings may have revealed Valve’s launch window

First spotted by Notebookcheck, Reddit user u/wayTooManyBugs examined the FCC documentation of past Valve hardware and pointed out a pattern in how the Steam Controller’s launch was handled. According to the findings, the Steam Controller was submitted to the FCC on November 24, 2025, but its user manual and product images were kept confidential until May 20, 2026. The interesting part is that these documents only became publicly available after the device had already gone on sale.

The same pattern now appears to apply to the Steam Machine. Valve reportedly submitted the Steam Machine’s FCC documents around the end of 2025, and its user manual and product images are scheduled to become public on June 29, 2026. Going by the Steam Controller timeline, fans believe Valve may launch the Steam Machine before those documents are released publicly.

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In other words, June 29 may not be the exact launch date, but it could act as the latest possible date by which the Steam Machine arrives. All that said, this is just a theory at this point, but since Valve has confirmed that the Steam Machine will debut sometime this summer, it could very well happen around this window.

Pricing could still make or break the Steam Machine

The biggest question is still pricing. Earlier reports have suggested that the Steam Machine could cost upwards of $1,000, which would make it a hard sell given that its GPU performance is already known to trail the standard PS5. Valve could still soften the blow by absorbing some of the hardware cost upfront, especially if the goal is to get more users into SteamOS and the wider Steam ecosystem. For now, though, the price may be the one thing that decides whether the Steam Machine feels exciting or excessive.

One of the most interesting new features is Custom Extensions, which lets you create an extension for Safari in natural language. Lastly, the new version of Safari will work the Passwords app to automatically fix website login passwords that are deemed no longer safe to use.

The other exciting implementation of Apple Intelligence is within the Shortcuts app. The app received some artificial intelligence upgrades last year, but this new update takes things much further. You can now use natural language to design an automated shortcut, no longer requiring the manual work of connecting functions within apps together. Apple’s example was that you could type, “Whenever I’m leaving work, calculate the ETA, and send it to Pedro,” which would use a combination of Maps and Messages.

Other updates include using natural language when creating an event in Calendar, which will then fill in the details with contacts or locations. Image Playground also received a major update, which is now based on Google’s Gemini image-generation tech. It can now cook up photorealistic imagery and looks far less limited in what it can do. Like other image-generation apps, Image Playground will be subject to daily limits, but paid iCloud+ subscriptions can buy you more image generation.

Tweaks to Liquid Glass

While AI is the focus of the update, Golden Gate is also a follow-up to last year’s macOS Tahoe. Liquid Glass represented a major change to the way all the user interface elements of the appear, and in macOS Golden Gate, those UI elements are being refined. Answering complaints about indecipherability and messy menus, macOS now has a refraction effect in its transparency, which more strongly obscures background content and makes the text in the foreground easier to read. This can be customized in System Settings, letting you change the transparency level using a slider.

Apple has also made some smaller refinements to the visual identity of macOS. The Tool bar now has a uniform menu, the sidebars expand to the very edge of the window and the icons within the sidebars have color once again. And perhaps my most requested feature, every window has the same corner radius to the window control buttons.

Beyond the visual elements, Apple says it has made improvements to responsiveness, such as memory usage, CPU usage, display rendering, and app switching. One example on the Mac was that moving between Spaces was more fluid now, as is opening Mission Control.

A group of third grade students gather around a board game on a Wednesday afternoon in a Charleston classroom, grabbing game pieces, discussing potential moves and reading out playing cards. The games are not Monopoly, Sorry, or any others of yore – they’re focused on identifying, and boosting, students’ strengths and weaknesses.

It’s part of a shift in school districts’ gifted and talented programs. While many programs focused on a small group of high achieving students, instructors across the nation are now focusing more on inclusion, using data to help them zero in on students’ talents, a method that has the potential of capturing more students for advanced instruction.

For Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona, focusing on strengths and weaknesses helps to solve what she sees as a universal problem with gifted identification.

“Something I’ve been thinking deeply about that tends to be a universal problem is that gifted identification does not match the metrics of your district,” says Vanessa Hill, the gifted education coordinator for Amphitheater Public School District in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m constantly thinking of that, so our demographics can get closer. This new tactic is about exposure to critical thinking and reasoning – what does that look like, how to reason through a problem?”

Re-assessing the methods and ultimately changing the definition of “gifted” comes as some question the value of standardized tests and a push-and-pull to diversify programs.

The Shift In Gifted and Talented

The gifted and talented programs run the gamut of names and acronyms depending on the district, including advanced learning program, TAG (talented and gifted), LEAP (Learning Enrichment Alternative Program) or REACH (Realizing Excellence through Academic and Creative Help), among others.

Regardless of the name, the program has undergone several major shifts over the last few decades. Schools previously often only selectively tested students, often at the behest of involved parents or by a teacher recommendation. That brought a large amount of inequity in the programs, with many moving to a universal screening practice. Some states, including Washington and Missouri, made it a state mandate to test all students while in elementary school. The screening practice itself evolved from an IQ test to aptitude and ability tests, though how accurate those are is up for debate.

“Society is really unequal along socioeconomic and racial and ethnic lines, and these tests are just reflecting that,” says Scott Peters, director of research consulting at NWEA, a nonprofit education assessment organization. “You can change tests all day long, but at the end of the day, you can’t give some kids three years of $40,000-a-year preschool and also wonder why this kid that’s never been to school until first grade doesn’t do as well.”

Often, schools’ gifted and talented programs do not represent their overall school population and instead skew heavily toward white and Asian students. Zohran Mamdani, the widely-watched mayor of New York City, made it part of his platform to phase out gifted and talented programs because of the inequity.

“Ultimately, my administration would aim to make sure that every child receives a high-quality early education that nurtures their curiosity and learning,” he said in a 2025 statement to the New York Times.

There is no silver bullet test that accounts for inequality and a child’s upbringing, although Peters said when factors such as income, race and other equity gaps are controlled in tests, most inequities disappear.

“This isn’t a factor of, ‘Oh, there are students of color scoring high, but they’re still not getting in,’” he says. “It’s that there’s not enough students of color scoring high because of that larger societal inequality issue.”

Because of the often-skewed gifted and talented population, schools are shifting toward “talent development” with all students, versus focusing on strengthening some students’ already solid skills.

“Because of the baggage of the past, we’re moving toward a new perspective where we’re identifying the strengths of students — whether academic, social or emotional — versus people for a program,” says Kristen Seward, clinical professor in gifted, talented and creative studies at Purdue University. “And I think this twist in how we approach education as gifted researchers is going to benefit everybody.”

Using Data for ‘Talent Development’

Developing talent for gifted programs, much like the name itself, varies depending on the district. Seward says many teachers have enriched curriculums, which enhance things like vocabulary, science and social studies — topics that have been put on the back burner over the years in favor of standardized testing. Teachers are trained to spot students’ strengths and respond to those, which in turn, helps with students’ weaknesses.

For example, if a student has a strong vocabulary but struggles in math, the teacher might focus on math vocabulary during math class to put the lesson on a level the child understands.

“I don’t want it to turn into a thing where the teacher is the gate, and if they don’t open the gate, then the students don’t get identified – which has been a problem,” Seward says. “We have to train teachers to be talent scouts, presenting the enriched curriculum. Hopefully it’s not something additional, but something they’d naturally do in their role.”

Elizabeth McLaurin Uptegrove, now the assistant academic director in Charleston County School District, created a “stretch or support” system that involves the games the students played in the aforementioned classroom. When Uptegrove first arrived in Charleston’s school district, South Carolina used to require all second grade students be tested for the gifted and talented program. But after that year, selection changed to a nomination system.

“Which sounds elitist, and it is,” she says, adding white, affluent children were three times more likely to be in the programs.

She pushed for universal testing again for all fourth grade students, which yielded three times as many students identified as gifted, jumping from 40 fourth graders to 150 across the district. Several schools across the country have adopted similar stretch-or-support systems.

But Uptegrove’s efforts go beyond identifying candidates for gifted programs through teacher observation: her game-based system uses data. With the aptitude test, there are verbal, quantitative and nonverbal subsections. The tests indicate if a child is low or high achieving in those areas. Then the children are placed in groups with those of similar abilities to play games that can enhance those skills.

“Typically a teacher is not very well-equipped to come up with activities or lessons that can actually reach their level of thinking ability and games do that really quickly, in a way that’s not as boring for children as a typical worksheet,” Uptegrove says. “That’s where the magic of the games comes in. We’re making rigorous, hard thinking almost irresistible so students are willing to do the activity for longer.”

Hill, the Arizona-based education coordinator, initially implemented Uptegrove’s game strategy across third grade classrooms in five schools: three Title 1 schools and two non-Title 1. She says the schools that have the strength or stretch program in place have higher passing rates of “proficient” or “highly proficient” scores than those who do not.

“To me, it’s the difference between being a passive learner and active learner; by being able to engage in the games, it’s more active learning,” Hill says. “You raise the exposure to critical thinking and are taught to apply those skills to any situation, whether it’s on an achievement test or on the playground with a friend.”

The Future of the Program

Both researchers and teachers acknowledge the “talent development” approach to gifted and talented programs is far from perfect. It is often costly, whether it is buying the games, instilling teacher training or taking out time from testing. Hill pointed to four schools within her district that are closing this year because of financial constraints.

“Ordering the games is no small cost; I feel so blessed it’s that level of importance that we will find the funds,” she says. “As far as critical thinking games, yes that was missing. It is a hole we were filling. I think that while the core curriculum is doing its best, it can oftentimes be a bit surface level.”

Uptegrove agrees, saying she believes the talent development method is becoming more popular, but “there’s a long way to go in belief and funding for it.”

Peters, who has long studied the best educational methods and practices, believes the shift in gifted and talented is a good step. But he has concerns about the larger moves needed for lasting impact.

“It’s easy to have a 30-minute gifted program; it’s hard to have a second through eighth grade math development pipeline involving everyone in the school,” he says. “And advanced learning isn’t enough of a priority for most schools.”

Apple says its upgraded Siri AI can take the stress out of party planning for those of us (myself included) who find ourselves overwhelmed when hosting social events. 

As announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, an upgraded Apple Intelligence (improved with some help from Google’s Gemini AI models) is designed to help you brainstorm ideas, take action across multiple apps and ask questions that require personal context or current online information. 

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Launching in English later this year on Apple Intelligence-enabled devices, the conversational Siri AI will have its own dedicated app that works across devices, so you can ask a question on your iPhone and continue the conversation on your iPad. But it will also act across apps like Messages and Reminders to become your AI personal assistant. This could make it an exceptional party planner. 

During the WWDC keynote, Justin Titi, Apple’s senior director of intelligent system experience engineering, asked Siri AI on iOS for the schedule of the World Cup’s opening weekend. Then, Siri AI suggested dishes from Brazil and Morocco for a watch party centered on that match, located a dessert their daughter recently mentioned in the Messages app, pulled all those dishes together for a complete menu and sent that menu to a specific group chat to see if its members were up for a watch party. 

That’s just one example, but it shows that Siri AI can take the most tedious tasks out of party planning by telling you when certain events will occur, giving you menu suggestions, searching your device to answer personal questions and even sending the party invite. 

Speaking of invites, there’s a new version of Apple’s AI-generated image app, Image Playground, that uses Apple Intelligence to transform your images. Since the app runs on private cloud compute, images are never stored or shared. 

Leslie Ikemoto, Apple’s director of input experience, explains that you can use Image Playground to generate a birthday party invite by taking a photo of a friend from your image library and having it modified to include a birthday cake with a simple description. You can then refine the image further — adding candles to the cake and even changing your friend’s outfit to fit the party theme — by describing the changes you’d like or using touch. 

For those who struggle to create or edit images, Apple Intelligence also takes out that guesswork, so you can focus on the more fun aspects of preparing for a party. Personally, I’d rather save that time and effort for cooking. 

Every step of party planning can now be executed using Apple Intelligence, down to the most minute details: writing and perfecting the invite message in Messages or Mail, and adding and editing the calendar event based on that invite’s context.

If I could avoid all the frustrating parts of party planning, I would. Starting this fall, with Apple Intelligence’s improvements, I will.