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Even without any additional discounts, many of Harbor Freight’s best products are still no-brainers at their price. Add in some seasonal markdowns and the result is an even more affordable set of tools that should appeal to newcomers and seasoned DIYers alike. Every few weeks, Harbor Freight launches a new batch of limited-time promotions, and some of July’s latest deals are looking especially generous.
There are deep discounts available on tools from top DIY brands like Bauer and Warrior, as well as on specialist equipment from brands like Vulcan. Supplies of all promotional products are limited, and so anyone who wants to take advantage of these latest offers shouldn’t hang around.
We’ve picked out a small selection of tools with particularly hefty discounts, with many of our picks still being available both online and in-store at the time of writing. Stock levels can vary between stores, so be sure to check availability in your local store before you go.
Alongside its range of cordless tools, Bauer also offers plenty of corded tools, including its variable-speed drywall sander. It usually retails for $159.99, which is already cheaper than equivalent tools from brands like DeWalt. Right now, the sander is even cheaper thanks to a limited time coupon deal which slashes $60 off its retail price, dropping it to $99.99.
Harbor Freight’s current coupon deals are available until July 19th and can be used both in-store and online. If you use our link above, the coupon should be automatically applied to the tool when you add it to your cart online. Otherwise, you’ll need to head to the retailer’s coupon page to get the deal.
While it’s fair to say that the Bauer drywall sander is one of the brand’s more niche tools, it’ll come in handy if you have any bigger home improvement jobs planned. It features a telescoping shaft that extends up to five feet and a ring light to help improve visibility in dimmer workspaces. If you have a shop vacuum, you’ll be able to hook the tool’s built-in dust collection system up using the included 15-foot hose.
Harbor Freight offers a range of welders, with some them being more beginner-friendly than others. Vulcan welders are aimed squarely at the most demanding users rather than at beginners, and that’s reflected in their retail prices. The Vulcan PROTIG 205 industrial welder usually costs $1,199.99, but anyone who’s a member of Harbor Freight’s Inside Track Club can pick it up for $999.99 until July 30th.
The Vulcan 150A TIG welding torch comes with a slew of accessories including three sizes of gas nozzles, two 10-foot cables with DINSE-style connections, a foot pedal and AR/CO2 flow gauge regulator, and it work with 120V and 240V power. It weighs a hefty 53 pounds, and it works with a variety of metals including steel, stainless steel and aluminum.
If you’re a frequent Harbor Freight shopper, an Inside Track Club membership is a great way to take advantage of the best deals that the retailer has to offer. As of July 2026, an annual Inside Track Club membership costs $29.99. That means that, if you pick up the Vulcan welder using the latest deal, your membership will have paid for itself more than six times over in a single purchase. The only catch is that at the time of writing, the welder is an in-store exclusive and cannot be purchased online.
If the power tool setup in your home garage is currently missing a sander, Harbor Freight’s latest deals are a great chance to fix that. The brand’s corded 5-inch random orbit palm sander normally costs $37.99, but a coupon deal that runs until July 19th cuts its price to $19.99. That’s a savings of 47% off a tool that was already competitively priced in the first place.
Users are able to choose which of the sander’s six speeds best fits the task at hand, with the fastest setting hitting 13,000 OPM, or oscillations per minute. A dust bag is included with the tool to keep mess to a minimum and the 6-foot power cord should be long enough to comfortably stretch across most workbenches.
Like virtually every other Bauer power tool, the sander is only covered by a 90-day warranty as standard. That’s a far shorter coverage period than the similarly affordable Wen sander that’s available at Lowe’s. For context, the latter tool comes with two years of standard warranty coverage. Thankfully, the vast majority of Harbor Freight reviewers express no concerns about the longevity of Bauer’s tool.
The Bauer sander isn’t the only tool of its ilk to be discounted in the July coupon deals. The orbital sander from professional-oriented brand Hercules also receives a major discount, dropping from $44.99 to $29.99.
The Warrior tool brand is already one of the cheapest DIY brands that Harbor Freight sells, but a July deal makes one of its most popular tools even cheaper. The 18V ⅜-inch drill kit is down to just $19.99, a 33% reduction from its original price of $29.99. If you’ve been relying on a corded drill and want to dip a toe into the world of cordless tools, there are very few cheaper ways to do it.
While buyers who need a drill for more demanding tasks will want to look towards Harbor Freight’s Bauer or Hercules brands, the Warrior drill should be more than capable for tackling smaller DIY jobs. Much like the cordless drills from those other brands, the battery that powers Warrior’s drill is interchangeable, and so it can also be used with any other 18V cordless Warrior tool.
An LED light located above the grip helps illuminate the area around the work surface, while the drill’s twenty different torque settings make it easier to optimize the tool for a range of jobs. Adjusted to its most powerful setting, Warrior claims that it delivers 199 in-lbs of torque. When the battery is flat, it can recharge in three to five hours with the included charger.
Inside Track Club members get $100 off the retail price of the Hercules 1-⅞ inch SDS-MAX rotary hammer until July 30th, bringing it down to a promotional price of $349.99. The tool is designed for jobsite use and offers as much as 2,800 BPM from its 14-amp motor. When its full power isn’t needed, the variable speed dial lets users easily adjust its output. Switching between the tool’s demo and rotary hammer modes is also easy, requiring only a push of the selector.
Some of Hercules’ cordless power tools come with five years of warranty coverage as standard, but the corded rotary hammer receives the same standard 90 days of coverage as Harbor Freight’s cheaper tool brands. To increase that coverage period, buyers can purchase the retailer’s extended service protection plan, which gives eligible tools up to two years of coverage. It costs extra, but the deep discount that’s currently available on the tool should offset the inconvenience of paying for additional warranty coverage.
OpenAI on Wednesday launched GPT-Live, a pair of new voice models that fundamentally redesign how people talk to ChatGPT — replacing the company’s existing Advanced Voice Mode with an architecture that can listen and speak simultaneously, much like an actual human conversation.
The two models, GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, are rolling out globally starting today across iOS, Android, and ChatGPT.com. GPT-Live-1 becomes the default voice model for paid ChatGPT users on the Go, Plus, and Pro tiers, while GPT-Live-1 mini serves free-tier users. OpenAI also plans to bring the models to the API, and developers can sign up to be notified.
The release marks the third generation of ChatGPT’s voice technology in roughly two years — and OpenAI’s clearest bid yet to turn its chatbot into something that feels less like querying a search engine and more like talking to a colleague.
The defining technical advance in GPT-Live is what OpenAI calls a “full-duplex architecture.” In telecommunications, full-duplex means both parties on a phone call can talk and listen at the same time. Applied to AI, it means the model continuously processes your incoming audio even while it generates its own spoken response — no more waiting for a clean silence gap to figure out when you’ve finished a thought.
“Instead of processing a sequence of separate messages, GPT-Live continuously processes input while generating output,” OpenAI wrote in its research blog. “The model can therefore make interaction decisions many times per second: whether to speak, continue listening, pause, interrupt, or invoke a tool.”
In practice, that translates to a voice assistant that can insert conversational acknowledgments — “mhmm,” “yeah,” “got it” — while you’re still talking, pick up on a natural pause without jumping in prematurely, and handle rapid interruptions without derailing the entire exchange.
OpenAI’s previous Advanced Voice Mode, launched to paid users in September 2024, processed and generated audio within a single model but still operated on rigid turn-by-turn exchanges. As OpenAI acknowledged in the announcement, “because turn detection is based on silence, even a brief pause or background noise could be mistaken for the end of turn — causing the model to interrupt at unnatural times.”
That brittleness created a product that, while impressive in demos, could be deeply frustrating in extended real-world use. Background chatter in a coffee shop could trigger a response. A thinking pause might get swallowed. The experience felt, as one researcher put it on X shortly after the announcement, like “walkie-talkie turn taking.” GPT-Live is designed to end that era.
GPT-Live introduces a second structural change that may prove just as consequential for enterprise adoption: it decouples the voice interaction layer from the reasoning layer.
When a user asks a straightforward question, GPT-Live handles it directly. But when the query demands web search, deeper reasoning, or more complex agentic work, GPT-Live delegates the task to a frontier model running in the background — at launch, GPT-5.5, the large language model OpenAI released in April — and continues talking with the user while the computation happens asynchronously.
“While it works, GPT-Live can keep talking with you and maintain the flow of conversation,” OpenAI explains. “As we release new frontier models, we’ll continuously update the model used by GPT-Live.”
This delegation model is a meaningful architectural bet. Rather than building a single monolithic voice model that tries to be both conversationally fluid and deeply intelligent, OpenAI has split the problem in two: a voice-native model optimized for real-time interaction, and a separate reasoning engine that can be swapped out as the state of the art improves.
It is, in effect, a modular design — one that allows OpenAI to upgrade the intelligence of its voice assistant without retraining the voice model itself. The implications for enterprise and developer workflows are significant. A voice agent built on this architecture could maintain a natural conversation with a customer while simultaneously querying databases, searching the web, or performing multi-step reasoning — tasks that would have introduced several seconds of dead air under the old pipeline.
To understand how far voice AI has come, it helps to trace the three generations that led to GPT-Live.
The original ChatGPT Voice, launched in 2023, used a cascaded pipeline — a speech-to-text model (Whisper) transcribed what you said, a large language model (GPT-4) generated a text response, and a text-to-speech model converted that response back into audio. Each handoff introduced latency and lost information.
As OpenAI noted, “the complexity came at a cost: information could be lost across models, and responses were slow and stilted.” That cascaded approach was the industry standard, and its limitations were well-documented. As the blog OpenHelm noted in an October 2024 analysis of OpenAI’s Realtime API, the old pipeline stacked up to roughly 1,700 milliseconds of latency — nearly two full seconds of dead air before the first word of a response. Managing the state between the three separate APIs consumed an enormous amount of engineering effort.
OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, which began its limited rollout to paid ChatGPT Plus users in July 2024 before expanding more broadly in September 2024, collapsed that three-model pipeline into a single model that processed audio natively. As TechCrunch reported at the time, the rollout came with five new voices — Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce, and Vale — alongside improved accent handling and smoother conversations.
The feature also launched on the web in November 2024, extending it beyond mobile. But Advanced Voice Mode still operated through discrete, alternating turns — and it launched into the shadow of a PR debacle that OpenAI is still working to leave behind.
Advanced Voice Mode arrived in the wake of one of OpenAI’s most damaging self-inflicted crises. During the GPT-4o launch in May 2024, the company showcased a voice called “Sky” that many listeners immediately noted sounded strikingly similar to Scarlett Johansson, who famously voiced an AI companion in the 2013 film Her.
Johansson said she had declined OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s offer to voice the system, then was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” when the product launched with a voice her own friends couldn’t distinguish from hers, as NBC News reported. Altman had tweeted just the word “her” the day the product launched.
OpenAI pulled the voice and apologized, but the incident drew public scrutiny from SAG-AFTRA and members of Congress, and crystallized broader concerns about AI companies moving fast with creative IP.
The Hollywood labor union said the issue underscored “why we’re strongly championing federal legislation that would protect their voices and likenesses … from unauthorized digital replication,” as NBC News reported. Forbes contributor Paul Tassi wrote at the time that Altman, “by holding up Her on a pedestal of something to strive for, has missed the point of that film” — in which the protagonist’s relationship with his AI companion ultimately does him more harm than good.
GPT-Live appears designed, in part, to move past those controversies. OpenAI says it has “remastered the nine distinct voices in ChatGPT for GPT-Live” and notes the system “is designed for conversation, not voice impersonation,” with “safeguards to prevent it from imitating a real person’s voice.”
OpenAI disclosed that more than 150 million people talk to ChatGPT using voice and dictation features each week — a notable slice of the platform’s 900 million total weekly active users. The voice experience has grown into a substantial product in its own right, used for language practice, bedtime stories, commute-time chat, and hands-free everyday help.
The new product features reflect that usage. GPT-Live introduces rich visual cards that surface during voice conversations — weather forecasts, stock data, sports scores, and maps — giving users something to glance at without breaking the flow of speech.
Users can now choose between three reasoning levels for answers: Instant for quick responses, Medium for moderate thinking, and High for more complex work. And if you take a moment to think, “ChatGPT Voice now waits instead of jumping in and interrupting,” OpenAI wrote. “If you ask it to stay quiet and listen, it will. And when there’s background noise, like passing traffic or nearby conversations, ChatGPT is better at focusing on your voice instead of getting distracted.”
Early reactions from users with preview access were cautiously positive. “I had early access to sol. it is a phenomenal model,” wrote one user on X, adding it is “much better at frontend, long context knowledge work, and its vibes are much better.” Another observer cut to the heart of the matter: “The smarts are not new here, GPT-Live hands hard questions to GPT-5.5. What is new is the feel: full-duplex voice that listens while it talks.”
The GPT-Live system card, published alongside the announcement, reveals a safety strategy built around the particular risks of real-time voice interaction — a domain where the speed and intimacy of conversation create hazards that text-based chat does not.
OpenAI expanded its safety evaluations to include audio-native tests, using both real user voice samples (from those who opted in) and synthetically generated prompts targeting edge cases across categories like self-harm, sexual content, illicit behavior, emotional reliance, mental health, and hate speech.
On the synthetic evaluations — which OpenAI described as deliberately adversarial — GPT-Live-1 showed substantial improvements over Advanced Voice Mode. In illicit behavior, for instance, the safety score rose from 0.63 to 0.97. On self-harm, it climbed from 0.72 to 0.98. Hate speech achieved a perfect 1.00, up from 0.87.
On the production-prompt evaluations — which used real user audio and reflected more ambiguous, borderline scenarios — the picture was more mixed. GPT-Live-1 matched or improved on Advanced Voice Mode in most categories but showed a slight regression on emotional reliance (from 0.88 to 0.82), though OpenAI noted the change was not statistically significant.
The company built real-time safeguards that can intervene while the model is speaking — steering toward safer responses, surfacing crisis resources, or ending the voice conversation entirely in higher-risk situations. It also designed additional protections for teen users and adapted self-harm support flows for voice, including crisis helpline integration.
Perhaps most notably, OpenAI said it is “rolling out longer-term measurement and post-launch monitoring focused on emotional reliance” — an acknowledgment that the very naturalness GPT-Live strives for creates its own category of risk.
While OpenAI was refining its safety guardrails, its rivals were shipping full-duplex systems of their own. Google’s Gemini Live, which supports full-duplex conversation alongside camera and screen sharing — capabilities GPT-Live notably lacks at launch — is already available in the Gemini app. Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash Live in March as its highest-quality real-time audio model, targeting low-latency voice interactions for developers.
ByteDance launched Seeduplex in April, claiming to be the first production-scale full-duplex speech AI deployed at scale, inside its Doubao app. Seeduplex reported roughly a 50 percent reduction in false-response and false-interruption rates compared to ByteDance’s previous half-duplex system. And Nvidia’s PersonaPlex, released in January, brought customizable voice and role control to full-duplex models, breaking what had been a constraint where natural-sounding models were locked into a single fixed voice.
The competitive picture is clear: full-duplex voice interaction is quickly becoming table stakes for consumer AI products, not a differentiator. OpenAI’s advantage lies in the scale of its existing user base, its integration with GPT-5.5’s reasoning capabilities, and the breadth of the ChatGPT ecosystem.
But the window in which any one company has a monopoly on natural-sounding voice AI has already closed. OpenAI also acknowledged several gaps. GPT-Live does not support voice with video or screen sharing at launch. Language support is limited, with the company noting that “for certain languages, the model may have a non-native accent or gaps in fluency.” And API access is not available on day one, meaning enterprise developers cannot yet build on GPT-Live directly — a constraint that will slow the model’s penetration into commercial voice-agent workflows where competitors like Google, ElevenLabs, and Deepgram already have developer-facing products.
GPT-Live is essentially OpenAI’s most significant bet yet on voice as the primary interface for AI — not just a convenience feature bolted onto a text chatbot, but a purpose-built interaction layer that sits between the user and the company’s most powerful models.
“Over time, we believe this research will also unlock the ability to use voice for increasingly complex, longer-running, and more agentic work,” OpenAI wrote. That ambition — using natural voice as the front end for autonomous AI agents that can perform multi-step tasks — is the logical endpoint of the full-duplex plus delegation architecture.
Imagine telling your phone to book a flight, negotiate with your insurance company, or debug a production server, all through a conversation that feels as natural as talking to an assistant who also happens to have the intelligence of a frontier AI model.
Two years ago, talking to ChatGPT meant dictating into a microphone and waiting nearly two seconds for a stilted reply. One year ago, it meant a smoother exchange that still felt like a polite, slightly awkward phone call with someone who insisted on waiting for you to finish every sentence. Today, it means something closer to a real conversation — imperfect, still constrained in some languages and missing video, but unmistakably closer. OpenAI once got into trouble for wanting to recreate the movie Her. With GPT-Live, the company may finally be reckoning with the harder question the film actually posed: not whether AI can sound human enough to talk to, but what happens to us when it does.
StatCounter’s June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft’s share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, “one of its strongest recent showings in the company’s desktop OS statistics,” reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple’s desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026, meaning Apple’s combined desktop presence remains comfortably ahead of Linux in the global chart. Chrome OS follows with 1.21%.
Of course, StatCounter’s numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems. The company calculates its Global Stats from page views across websites using its tracking code, analyzing details such as browser, operating system, and screen resolution. In other words, the figures reflect measured web activity rather than the number of machines actually installed worldwide.
SpaceXAI has released its latest model, Grok 4.5 — the first since the company went public several weeks ago.
In a blog post published Wednesday, SpaceXAI characterized its new release as a workhorse that can tackle all of the typical tasks that the AI industry has sought to automate: coding and app-building, office and clerical work, research, writing, and other forms of routine knowledge work.
Grok can supposedly do all this for less spend, too, as SpaceXAI says that its model has “twice greater token efficiency” than other leading models. If it carries through to real-world use cases, that efficiency would be a big advantage for SpaceXAI, since the cost of tokens has been a growing concern for AI consumers.
The company released benchmark metrics Wednesday that appeared to show Grok’s competitiveness with other top models from SpaceXAI competitors, although just short of best-in-class:

In a post on his social media platform X (which is a subsidiary of SpaceXAI), founder Elon Musk compared the model to Opus, Anthropic LLM designed for intensive and complex tasks.
“Based on strong positive feedback from customers in our beta test program, @SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public tomorrow. It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost,” wrote Musk in a post on X.
Musk later added: “Our internal assessment is that Grok 4.5 is roughly comparable to Opus 4.7, but much faster. The combination of capability, faster speed and lower cost is what makes it competitive.”
SpaceXAI says that its new model costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. That’s quite competitive, if Grok’s capabilities match SpaceXAI’s rhetoric.
Opus 4.7, by comparison, costs $5 per million input tokens, and $25 per million output tokens. OpenAI has tiered costs for different model versions: Sol, its most expensive, costs $5 for input tokens and $30 for output, while its least expensive, Luna, costs $1 for input and $6 for output.
It’s a big week for AI model releases. OpenAI is planning to release GPT 5.6, its latest, most powerful model, on Thursday. The release of that model had previously been limited by the Trump administration, due to concerns about its security implications. OpenAI has called it its “strongest model yet.”
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A China-linked threat cluster has been exploiting vulnerable Roundcube servers at U.S. and Canadian universities to steal credentials and deploy backdoor malware.
The campaign has been observed since May and focuses on physics and engineering departments, administrators and professors, as well as organizations involved in astrophysics, particle physics, or national security-related research.
Researchers at cybersecurity company Proofpoint are tracking the activity under the name ‘UNK_MassTraction’ and believe to be associated with a new threat cluster.
The attack begins with a malicious email sent from compromised accounts or spoofed domains, using a generic lure.

Opening the email in a vulnerable Roundcube webmail client triggers exploitation of a cross-site scripting flaw tracked as CVE-2024-42009, which executes JavaScript code inside the victim’s browser, loading a payload called IceCube.
According to the researchers, IceCube “is a fully-featured Roundcube stealer” that can harvest usernames, passwords, cookies, two-factor authentication (2FA) data, and browser information.
Proofpoint says that the malware uses “helpers” to exploit a Roundcube deserialization flaw tracked as CVE-2025-49113 and attempts to install SquareShell, a PHP webshell that includes remote code execution capabilities.
If successful, the attacker gains remote code execution on the mail server; otherwise, the malware downloads a shell script that loads another payload, VShell, directly in memory.
VShell is a commodity Go-based backdoor that supports interactive shell access and port forwarding, which is commonly used by Chinese threat actors.
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Based on several observations, Proofpoint assesses that UNK_MassTraction is likely a China-aligned espionage actor.
First, the infrastructure used in the attacks overlaps with a covert VPS network previously associated with multiple China-linked actors. Another clue is the presence of Chinese-language artifacts in earlier phishing emails.
Finally, the tactic of targeting internet-facing mail servers as a foothold for accessing internal networks is a hallmark of Chinese attacks.
Taking everything into account, Proofpoint emphasizes that attribution in this case is just an assessment and definitely not a high-confidence one.
An interesting finding regarding the specific targeting of this campaign is that UNK_MassTraction appears to have selected servers previously deemed vulnerable to CVE-2024-42009 and CVE-2025-49113, so some reconnaissance was performed prior to the attacks.
Administrators of Roundcube systems are advised to apply the latest security updates that address the two flaws and treat mail servers with the same diligence they show for VPNs and other remote access nodes.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes, will be updated to send users direct messages alerting them whenever a post they have interacted with has received a correction. The change, which is not yet live, was announced by X owner Elon Musk. He did not share a time frame for its launch.
The update attempts to address one of the bigger criticisms about Community Notes — that corrections arrive too late to matter. A misleading post can accumulate views and reposts while its accuracy is disputed, and by the time it’s corrected, the damage has been done. By proactively notifying users when a post receives a correction, X is trying to extend the reach of the note beyond the original post. This could also allow users who spread false information to issue their own mea culpa, if they had been duped.
X’s Community Notes system was first established when the company was still known as Twitter, before Musk’s acquisition.
The idea was to introduce a different way to address misinformation on the platform, rather than require Twitter (now X) to be the centralized authority for moderation decisions. Instead, Community Notes contributors could suggest corrections and add critical details or missing information to posts. Consensus is achieved when people who rate the note as helpful are those who typically have different perspectives, and the note goes live.
A similar system has since been adopted by Meta as part of its broader moderation overhaul last year, which saw the company eliminate its partnerships with fact-checkers.
Though Community Notes makes sense for a company that wants to distance itself from the business of fact-checking, it’s also proven difficult to scale. A 2025 study of the feature by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of the proposed notes on X remain invisible to users, and only 8.3% get published and become visible. A separate study conducted by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which encompassed 1.76 million notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025, put the figure for unpublished notes even higher at 90%.
This weakens Community Notes as a system that surfaces information when it’s most needed, critics have pointed out. Plus, they’ve argued, people aren’t aware when a post they saw or boosted receives a correction later on, as there’s been no way to bring that information to their attention.
Musk’s proposal to send users alerts via X Chat (DMs) would address the latter issue, at least, assuming it goes live. X was asked for comment, but a response was not immediately available.
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A Paris startup wants to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI, not with a new chip, but with software. ZML has released a free tool that runs open-source models fast across Nvidia, AMD, Google, Apple and Intel silicon alike.
Nvidia still rules AI hardware, but its walls keep thinning. ZML, a Paris startup backed by AI pioneer Yann LeCun, has released free software that runs open-source language models across a mix of chips, TechCrunch reports. The list spans five targets: Nvidia, AMD, Google’s TPUs, Intel and Apple.
The tool, ZML/LLMD, is an inference server. Inference means running a trained model to answer prompts, the part of AI that now eats most of the compute. Founder Steeve Morin says the goal is to break the silos that lock users to one vendor, and to squeeze each chip to its top speed.
Cost is the driver. As AI bills climb, enterprises and clouds want the freedom to pick cheaper or less power-hungry silicon for a given job. “The idea is to give people back the power to create their own system,” Morin said. Do that well, and it reads less like a feature and more like a wedge under Nvidia’s moat.
It could also lift a wave of novel chipmakers, many of them European. Morin name-checked Axelera, Fractile, Kalray, SiPearl, VSORA and others. Software that treats their chips as first-class, not second-best, gives buyers a real reason to try them.
Morin does not write off Nvidia, and says ZML has a good relationship with the chip giant. But the field is crowded. The “inference gold rush” has minted rivals like Baseten, recently valued at $13bn, plus the teams behind the open-source projects vLLM and SGLang. All chase the same prize: making AI cheaper to run.
Morin thinks ZML reaches further. “We have reached the point where we are co-designing silicon,” he said. His lean team of 20 has shipped fast, with more releases to come.
LLMD ships free for now to gather usage, not yet a paid product. Its unusual root is the bigger signal. A tool built to loosen Nvidia’s grip and to back Europe’s own AI stack landed from Paris, not Silicon Valley. Morin, who raised $20m from investors including Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures, put it plainly. “I couldn’t do ZML anywhere but in Paris,” he said.
Virtualization
CA and VMware both suing insurance giant
Broadcom has accused Allstate Insurance of dodging a software license audit that the insurer claims only happened after it decided to stop using VMware and CA software.
Those two Broadcom business units – CA and VMware – have brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Allstate.
The CA suit, filed in May 2025, alleges that the insurer breached contracts after the sale of its Employer Voluntary Benefits business to an outfit called StanCorp. The VMware suit, filed in December 2025, alleges that Allstate didn’t comply with contract terms that required it to participate in license audits.
Software license audits are not unusual. Vendors routinely include the right to conduct audits in their contracts, and those rights can extend beyond the term of a license so that software companies can be paid for all use of code under a time-limited contract. Some vendors, however, are known to audit more often and more vigorously than others, or to use audits to gain leverage during license renewal negotiations.
Allstate claims Broadcom’s decision to audit it was not entirely reasonable.
“This case is about VMware’s decision to initiate a haphazard ‘audit’ of Allstate, once it was aware that Allstate did not intend to renew its contracts with VMware or its sister company, CA,” the company stated in a June 12 filing.
That accusation came after months of conflict.
An Allstate filing in the CA matter claims that Broadcom launched four audits, covering “Tanzu,” “VMWare,” “Agile Operations” and “Mainframe.” Broadcom advised of its intent to audit around April 2025.
Broadcom alleges Allstate didn’t co-operate with the audits. “Throughout August and September 2025, VMware sent weekly follow‑ups. Allstate continued to stonewall and withheld the requested materials,” according to VMware’s claim.
Allstate says it simply didn’t have the resources to respond to four simultaneous probes.
One of the tools Broadcom uses during software audits is a set of scripts that detect software installations. Allstate acknowledges it received the scripts and other audit material.
Then on September 12, Broadcom alleges, Allstate dropped a bombshell: It had “removed VMware from all devices.” On October 1, the insurance giant apparently told the virtualization pioneer “all VMWare instances have been terminated and removed” – at least from an environment governed by an enterprise license agreement.
After terminating its VMware estate, Allstate said Broadcom’s audit scripts wouldn’t work. The insurer nevertheless completed an audit questionnaire, but Broadcom said the info in that document was “woefully incomplete.”
Both cases continue and, on June 12, Allstate filed a document that offered its view of the matter – and includes the allegation that Broadcom only ordered its audits once it realized Allstate was binning VMware and CA software.
Allstate also accuses Broadcom of making “vague, competing, and contradictory demands of Allstate, often in direct violation of its contractual agreements.”
Broadcom and Allstate tried alternative dispute resolution in both matters but have not found common ground. Courts have proposed the two matters adopt the same timeline, which will see Dispositive Motions – an attempt to resolve a case before a full trial – take place no later than May 17, 2027.
The Register has asked Allstate why it decided to stop using Broadcom software and if it has replaced it. We’ve not heard back at the time of writing.
However we understand that the relationship between Allstate and Broadcom has not been good for quite some time, and that the insurer decided to move away from both VMware and CA at around the time Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware closed.
VMware points to major clients such as the London Stock Exchange and Nationwide Bank as evidence big corporate entities trust it with their private clouds, and therefore the heart of the IT estate that powers their business and enables innovation. And this week, AWS also showed confidence in VMware by adding support for version 9.x of its Cloud Foundation suite.
However, The Reg has also learned of several big users quitting VMware – including T-Mobile, Tesco, and Western Union – sometimes under acrimonious circumstances. ®
Google Photos is getting a new “Video Remix” feature that can edit and transform videos in seconds, Google announced on Wednesday. The feature is powered by Gemini Omni, Google’s recently released model that promises to “create anything from any input.”
The launch is Google’s latest push to bring more generative AI tools into its consumer apps as it continues to compete with companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Adobe. By baking AI-powered video editing into Google Photos, the tech giant is making it easier for users to edit clips with a few taps instead of relying on dedicated software, giving users another reason to stay within Google’s ecosystem.
The Video Remix tool can be accessed in the “Create” tab in Google Photos, allowing you to do things like apply cinematic relighting to brighten up a dark clip, swap out a plain background for something else, or add artistic styles to videos, such as watercolor, raw sketchbook, and oil painting effects.
For example, you could edit a video to make it appear that you shot it in a greenhouse, relight a video with a morning glow, or paint a video in a watercolor effect.
“Creating beautiful video clips shouldn’t require professional skills or hours of editing,” Google wrote in a blog post. “Now, with Video Remix in Google Photos, you can transform ordinary videos into share-worthy moments in just a few taps.”
Video Remix starts rolling out today to eligible Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the U.S., Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey.
The feature is the latest in a series of AI-powered updates introduced to Google Photos. The app recently launched new touch-up tools to allow users to apply subtle edits and fixes, such as removing blemishes, refining skin texture, brightening eyes, and whitening teeth. Google also announced an AI-powered feature that turns photos of your clothes into a digital closet where you can create new outfit ideas and virtually try on outfits.
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alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items. In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by “SUNHZMCKP,” spoons made by “SACATR,” and a lamp made by “ROTTOGOON.”
In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote “Sorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX.” The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who don’t use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.

— Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer.
“As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our customers.”
Seattle-based Torres comes to Dropbox from Google, where he served as vice president of product for Chrome. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as VP of Kindle. At Microsoft, he led teams working on OneDrive, Windows Movie Maker and other products.

— T-Mobile appointed Chris Sambar as chief enterprise officer, effective no later than Oct. 14. Sambar will lead the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s small- and medium-sized business, enterprise and government units.
Sambar joins from Public Storage, where he serves as chief operating officer. He was previously at fellow communications giant AT&T for more than two decades, most recently as a president of the company’s global network organization overseeing architecture, engineering, construction, operations, tower strategy and program management.
“Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.
— T-Mobile also announced that André Almeida‘s C-suite role has expanded and his title has been updated to chief marketing, brand and broadband officer. He previously served as chief broadband, enterprise and emerging business officer. In the new position, Almeida will help oversee the company’s consumer wireless and broadband businesses.

— After 37 years with Microsoft, Xbox Vice President Kevin LaChapelle was among those laid off this week, with the cuts hitting the gaming division particularly hard as the company aims to overhaul the division.
LaChapelle was hired by the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 1989 as a software design engineer and joined the Xbox team in 2012.
“I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program,” LaChapelle said on LinkedIn. When Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, announced the program at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2015, LaChapelle added, “The audience’s reaction was unbelievable.”

— Adam Schoenfeld has resigned as chief marketing officer for Inflection.io. In April, the B2B marketing automation company acquired Keyplay, a Seattle startup co-founded and previously led by Schoenfeld. The deal reunited Schoenfeld and Inflection CEO Aaron Bird, who have known each other for many years and have collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.
Schoenfeld said on LinkedIn that he “had the best of intentions” when he committed to the acquisition, but then burnout hit him. “I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I dreaded telling the team. I didn’t want to bail and let people down… I’m sure others have been in this place,” he added. “After facing the hard conversations, I’m excited to look ahead.”
Schoenfeld remains a part-time CMO advisor for the business and also produces Adam’s GTM Report, which provides data-backed research, maps and tools for leaders and builders in the space.
— Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies named former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil to its board. Weil has held leadership roles at Planet, Meta, Instagram and Twitter and also serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy.
Stoke Space builds reusable rockets and raised $860 million from investors in its latest round. It’s No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
— Skippy Shaw has joined fusion startup Helion Energy as director of Washington government affairs. The Everett, Wash.-based company is working to build what could be the world’s first commercial fusion facility in Central Washington. Shaw joins Helion from The Nature Conservancy, where she led state governmental relations for TNC’s Washington chapter.
— David Langworthy announced that he has resigned from Microsoft after nearly 25 years, leaving the role of architect for Azure OpenAI. Langworthy, who worked as a founding member of Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, GenAI, MAC, and Azure AI Services, is the founder and CTO of a stealth startup based in Bellevue.
— Carissa Allen has also left Microsoft, departing as director of strategy for the company’s events, including Ignite and AI Tour. On LinkedIn, Allen called her resignation after nearly 30 years “my Valiant Reboot Project (no “retirement” here) because you know I’m not finished yet.”
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