‘There are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company’, says OpenAI.
OpenAI has confidentially filed to go public, but said it could be a “while” before it ceases to be a private company.
“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said in a short statement yesterday (8 June). “But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
Estimates from last year suggest an initial public offering (IPO) could value the ChatGPT-maker at up to $1trn, in one of the largest listings in history. The company, at the time, was expected to raise at least $60bn in the IPO.
Advertisement
While newer reports suggest that the company is also in talks with the US government in the hope that it purchases some of its shares once it goes public.
Meanwhile, the tug of war for the biggest IPO raise is currently led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is expected to raise a targeted $75bn in its listing. The X and xAI parent company filed for an IPO late last month.
Anthropic – currently more valuable than OpenAI at $965bn – has been encroaching on its enterprise customer base, with reports from earlier this year finding that the Claude-parent was capturing a significant portion of first-time enterprise AI customers over OpenAI.
Advertisement
As a countermeasure, OpenAI is reportedly working on the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since its launch in 2022 to better compete with Anthropic, which has held a narrower focus on its enterprise business.
According to reports, the new desktop ‘superapp’ will focus strongly on OpenAI’s coding tool Codex, a move that reflects shifting interests from AI chatbots to agents that perform tasks for users. The app will also feature the AI chatbot, as well as the AI-powered browser Atlas.
OpenAI executives view ChatGPT as an introductory tool to encourage pick-up of higher-value products. The changes are expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks.
A majority of OpenAI’s 1bn monthly active ChatGPT customers use the free version of the tool. The company has between 5m and 9m business users, according to different blogs on its website, while the Financial Times reports that it has 2m businesses under its wing and 5m weekly active Codex users.
The company expects revenue from its business customers, which represents 40pc of its total revenue, to grow to 50pc by the end of the year.
Still, OpenAI is far from being profitable, making around $13bn in revenue last year with a planned spending of about $600bn by 2030.
Sources told CNBC earlier this year that the company projects its total revenue for 2030 to be more than $280bn – nearly 20-times its 2025 earnings – with near equal contributions from its consumer and enterprise businesses.
Advertisement
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.
We’ve been testing (aka eating) Blue Apron for our guide to the best meal kit subscriptions for nearly half a decade.The Gear team likes this service so much, it has its own story. If you’ve been struggling with figuring out what to make for dinner, you can save some money on our top service right now using a Blue Apron coupon or deal featured right here on WIRED.
Unlock $25 Off With Our Exclusive Blue Apron Promo Code
Blue Apron makes it easy—new customers can enjoy $100 off for the first five weeks of a new subscription—plus the first week ships free). Blue Apron is offering discounts of up to $4 per serving, depending on whether you opt for 4, 6, 8, or 10 meals per week. WIRED readers get rewarded—in discounts on delicious food—with $25 off your first 2 orders with promo code CONDE25, until August 11 2026. There’s also other sitewide deals for 20% off your first 2 orders with code WELCOME20 and25% off with code WELCOME25 at checkout Check out Blue Apron and see if it’s the right meal kit service for you, and from there you’ll be able to claim the deal with either promo code, and both codes are valid site wide.
Get a 5% Off Blue Apron Coupon With Autoship and Save
Apron now offers an Autoship & Save program, which includes a 5% discount on every autoship order. Be sure to download the Blue Apron app, which allows you to easily manage subscriptions, get notifications, and live delivery updates through your phone. With Autoship & Save, you’ll set up recurring deliveries on a schedule that works for you, and you can save 5% on every order. This includes setting your own schedule, including how often you want deliveries and what day of the week you want them. Plus, you can always skip a delivery if you don’t need it that week. To get started, you just need to choose your menu items from a wide range of options, and every order is pre-filled with meals Blue Apron recommends, but you can always add, swap, or remove anything before it ships out.
Explore Blue Apron’s New Meal Kit Options From $7
If you’re a commitment-phobe like me and don’t want to sign up for pricey recurring orders in the subscription model before trying, we have good news. Unlike almost all other meal kits and delivery services, Blue Apron just updated their model to include a la carte meal kits and ready-to-eat meals that don’t require a recurring plan. You can get delivery in as little as three days, and it requires no commitment or mandatory subscription.
Advertisement
Meal Kits include step-by-step recipes and pre-portioned food, from $7 to $13 per serving. Easy ‘Assemble & Bake’ meals require minimal prep and are $11 to $13 per serving, and ‘Dish by Blue Apron’ are ready to eat, heat-and-serve meals from $9 to $12 per serving. They’ve also expanded their menu with new recipes, now with over 100 meals to choose from.
Score 20% Off Blue Apron+ or Start a 30-Day Free Trial
Blue Apron now also has a membership program, where for $10 per month, you’ll get free shipping on all orders, unlimited Tastemade+ streaming (this includes food, home and travel shows, a $50 value), and exclusive deals promotions throughout the year. If the bonus promos seem like something you’d use, the membership program is a good deal, because delivery is already $10 per month, so you’re getting free shipping plus all of these extra goodies. If you’re unsure, you can try it out with a 30 day free trial, just follow the link here. The good news is that you can get 20% off an annual Blue Apron+ membership, now at $80 per year instead of $100.
Save up to 50% With Blue Apron Heroes Discounts
Blue Apron wants to reward our everyday heroes, and has discounts for Military members, Students, Graduates, Teachers, Seniors, Medical Staff, and First responders. Members of these groups can get $150 off the first five weeks of a new subscription, plus free shipping for the first week of subscriptions. To get this discount, you’ll need to verify through ID.me or GovXID.
OpenAI announced on Monday that it confidentially filed for an IPO, marking what could become one of the defining public offerings of the decade. And then there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other company, Tools for Humanity, which is reportedly conducting layoffs, according to Business Insider. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for confirmation.
You might know Tools for Humanity better through its verification project known as World — and its related device, a creepy silver orb that wants to scan your eyeballs. The idea is that the company will be able to verify people’s identities using unique iris scans, helping to distinguish human activity from bot activity in the increasingly automated world that Tools for Humanity co-founder and chairman Altman is constructing. The company would also use these scans to validate people’s identities to support the trade of its own cryptocurrency, Worldcoin.
Image Credits:JUAN MABROMATA/AFP / Getty Images under a license.
These vague, suspicious ambitions were enough to raise money at a $2.5 billion valuation from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and other funds backing blockchain companies. But now the company is reportedly downsizing as it struggles to create revenue.
In the U.S., companies like Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign have partnered on Altman’s side project. Internationally, Tools for Humanity has faced regulatory and ethical concerns. In Kenya, India, and Hong Kong, for example, people were offered the equivalent of $50 in Worldcoin in exchange for their biometric data. Kenya later banned World from operating in the country, citing privacy and financial concerns; meanwhile, South Korea fined the company $830,000 for allegedly violating local privacy law.
Who would’ve thought? People don’t feel great about giving their biometric data to a startup in exchange for $50 worth of crypto.
Sneaky: Initially released in 1998, Thief is considered a landmark video game, particularly for the PC gaming industry. The Windows-exclusive title was groundbreaking in many ways and is now set to introduce a whole new generation of players to its pioneering first-person stealth gameplay.
Remake specialists at Nightdive Studios are working on yet another classic PC title. Thief: The Dark Project Remastered is a modern take on the groundbreaking 1998 stealth classic developed by Looking Glass Studios. The remaster is designed to preserve the original experience while updating the visuals for modern players.
Nightdive unveiled the project during the recent PC Gaming Show digital showcase. The studio highlighted the innovative gameplay that made Thief stand out in the late 90s, when most first-person games focused on shooting and direct combat. Instead, Thief challenged players to navigate carefully crafted environments, relying on stealth, timing, and observation rather than brute force to complete missions.
Thief played a pivotal role in popularizing the stealth genre and cast a long shadow over immersive sims and later stealth franchises such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Hitman. It was also the first game to successfully make environmental lighting and sound central gameplay mechanics, using sophisticated AI systems to create dynamic, emergent gameplay.
Advertisement
Like previous Nightdive remasters, Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will use the company’s KEX Engine to faithfully recreate the game’s stealth gameplay. The remaster will include the original missions, along with the additional content released in the 1999 Thief Gold edition.
According to the game’s Steam page, Thief Remastered should not require particularly modern hardware to run. As with System Shock 2 and other restored classics, Nightdive appears to be taking a conservative approach to updating the Looking Glass Studios original.
At the same time, the remaster is expected to include features modern players now take for granted. These include support for 4K resolution and high frame rates (up to 120 FPS), controller support, and improved textures, 3D models, and animations.
Advertisement
While the original Thief was released exclusively on PC, added controller support should also make it more accessible on modern consoles. The series continued with two sequels – Thief II: The Metal Age in 2000 and Thief: Deadly Shadows in 2004 – while Eidos-Montréal attempted a reboot in 2014 with Thief, which received mixed reviews.
Most people don’t think about their online security until something goes wrong, and by then the damage to their identity, finances, or personal data has already been done.
Fifteen months of coverage across five devices for under a tenner is the kind of deal that reframes how you think about what security software actually costs per day to run.
Advertisement
The antivirus layer is the foundation, using AI-powered threat detection to catch both familiar and emerging malware across phones, tablets, and computers before anything takes hold.
What makes McAfee Total Protection more than just antivirus is the way it handles the threats that traditional virus scanners were never designed to catch, particularly the kind aimed at your identity rather than your machine.
Advertisement
The Scam Detector analyses incoming texts, emails, and video content in real time, flagging deepfakes and phishing attempts that would pass a casual glance from even a careful reader.
Identity Monitoring runs in the background around the clock, scanning the dark web for your personal information and alerting you immediately if anything surfaces that shouldn’t be out there.
The Secure VPN completes the picture by activating automatically on public Wi-Fi networks, encrypting your browsing, banking, and shopping activity without requiring you to remember to switch it on yourself.
Do note that a payment method is required to complete activation and the subscription renews automatically after the 15-month period, so it’s worth setting a reminder to review before the annual billing date arrives.
For anyone running multiple devices across a household and currently relying on nothing but instinct to stay safe online, the savings here are substantial enough that the question isn’t really whether McAfee Total Protection is worth it, but whether £8.99 has ever bought more peace of mind.
Today’s WWDC 2026 conference has given Apple fans something they’ve craved for years: a powerful, agentic version of Siri, with its own dedicated app. The new Siri AI is designed to work across the entire suite of Apple tools, from powerful Macs to the smallest watch. But the AI health features we did see were lacking compared to Google’s.
One of last year’s headline Apple Watch features, Workout Buddy, has been improved: users can now get guidance and encouragement in their ears during exercise while just wearing a watch, and they don’t need to bring their phone, as they did in watchOS 26. Plus, new insights, such as heart rate zones, will be built in.
Other expanded health and fitness features include the inclusion of menopausal and perimenopausal conditions in cycle tracking (a significant and helpful addition for many women) and improved accuracy of treadmill metrics. Siri AI’s health capabilities were also shown off on the watch, using its ability to look for healthy recipes and describe stretching routines based on its broad intelligence.
Advertisement
Latest Videos From
However, despite rumors saying an AI model specifically dedicated to health and fitness was in the works, nothing materialized this year. Which is a shame, as I’ve already been using the Google Fitbit Air and its accompanying AI health coach, and I’ve seen how powerful such a feature can be.
Watch: Marques Brownlee gives his verdict on Siri AI
Despite existing Fitbit fans bemoaning their loss of community features, I ended up liking Google’s Health Coach. Unlike the Apple Watch, the Google Fitbit Air is screenless, with all chatbot interaction taking place on the phone in the Google Health app.
To be honest, this works well: if you’re going to read reams of text about stretching or your metrics, you want to do it on a proper 6-inch screen oriented specifically for readability, not a 1.9-inch squircle as was demonstrated in Apple’s keynote speech.
Advertisement
What’s more, the Google Health Coach works with its own library of Fitbit workout and meditation content, allowing you to custom-build workouts just by asking the chatbot, and getting demonstrable, video instruction rather than just a block of text. It also takes your illness or injuries into account, as I found out when I got sick, and the Coach changed my workout plan to recommend rest days and shorter runs.
Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.
Apple already has a vast library of fitness content through its premium Apple Fitness+ service, and I expected a health coaching feature to be rolled into that subscription as part of the Siri AI revamp. Maybe that’s a feature we’re more likely to see at WWDC 2027. But its absence wasn’t quite as much of an own goal as Apple’s decision to only roll out watchOS 27 to a handful of modern watches.
Only 2% of new cars come with a manual transmission in 2026, so if someone says “riding the clutch” that may not mean much to modern car owners. While driving a manual, you want to press the clutch pedal fully down and then use the shift lever to select a gear before lifting the pedal fully up. However, “riding the clutch” is when you have the pedal partially pressed, creating unneeded pressure. This usually happens when your foot is resting on the clutch pedal, often while driving in traffic.
This is bound to happen sometimes; you don’t want to do this excessively since it’s a bad habit that harms your transmission. It can cause a lot of extra wear on your clutch disc, pressure plate, and release bearing. This leads to early replacements of these parts, which can cost thousands of dollars. Be on the lookout for shuddering or rattling, as well as slipping. You may even smell burnt metal as an indicator that the clutch is worn out.
Advertisement
How to avoid riding the clutch in a manual car
Desintegrator/Shutterstock
Driving uses a lot of muscle memory, so you may have some bad driving habits that are tough to shake. However, if you find yourself riding the clutch a lot more than you should be, there are some things you can do to prevent it.
First, take your foot off the pedal. It may seem simple, and you may not even realize you’re doing it. Always try to put your foot on the footrest on the left rather than keeping it on the pedal itself. You may need to shift your driving position since sitting too close makes it harder to take your foot off the pedal.
When shifting gears, try to be a bit quicker. Keeping your foot on the clutch pedal longer than necessary counts as riding the clutch, especially if you do it often. Putting the car in neutral while at a light can also help, since first gear requires you to keep your foot on the brake and clutch pedal.
Advertisement
Finally, when your car is parked and shut off, you may still be riding the clutch. Some people will tell you to leave your car in gear when parked, but it’s better for your transmission to keep your vehicle in neutral and lift up the handbrake instead.
Vivek Sharma, Rob Masson, Tore Hanssen and Calvin Grunewald of ArchAstro (ArchAstro photo)
ArchAstro just emerged from stealth with an artificial intelligence network designed to automate complex, cross-company software deployments and integrations.
Founded earlier this year by a team of veteran engineers from Microsoft, Stripe, Statsig and Meta, the Seattle-area startup is tackling a complex problem — the prolonged period it often takes for corporate clients to integrate newly purchased software into custom enterprise environments.
ArchAstro is led by co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer who most recently worked in technical leadership roles at Meta and Stripe.
GeekWire first got wind of the new startup back in January, when we noted Sharma’s departure from Stripe. At the time, he simply offered a cryptic message that they were using “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”
Now, more details are coming to light, including pre-seed funding of $6.2 million from a marquee list of investors.
Advertisement
In a blog post announcing the new company, Sharma said “even the simplest B2B software requires hand-to-hand combat to properly integrate.”
Hand-to-hand combat may be an apt description of the challenging business problem that ArchAstro is looking to tackle, an endeavor that Sharma admits is “a very difficult problem.”
Traditional artificial intelligence agents tend to operate entirely within a single organization’s firewall, while ArchAstro’s agents are designed to work across distinct corporate boundaries.
Securely connecting these disparate systems is no easy task. That’s why the company says its “privacy-aware” AI agents — what it calls Forward Deployed Agents— are designed to handle cross-company integrations, migrations and bug fixes quickly and securely.
Advertisement
“The key thing we’re enabling is a continuous connection enforced with code, built off the most current context across both companies,” Sharma tells GeekWire.
Of course, there is always the concern of possible data leakage between two entities — a potential showstopper for any corporate chief information security officer. But Sharma said they are addressing that concern.
Since customers control their own agents and how they operate, they choose how they interact.
“Instead of moving data between companies and managing leak risk, you’re just adhering to shared ‘acceptance tests’ that ArchAstro hosted agents create and maintain across both,” Sharma said. “Code is also easy to evaluate and check for correctness. This is how engineering systems have always worked, and we’re extending that discipline between companies rather than within one.”
Advertisement
Sharma said the ArchAstro system also could be used to help answer cross-company questions, like a custom agent assisting account managers with their customers.
“Either way, we work with the customer to share only what’s appropriate, and our runtime enforces that with additional safeguards layered on as needed,” he said.
In that regard, ArchAstro acts as a secure, automated translation layer, allowing two entirely different corporate systems to speak the same language and verify each other’s work instantly based on a shared set of rules. That seamless, secure flow of collaboration between companies translates directly to dollars saved.
“Product teams ship fast, but customers take months, sometimes years, to deploy what they buy,” Sharma noted. He added that delayed deployments result in revenue loss, customer churn and engineering burnout spent debugging individual setups rather than building what is next.
Advertisement
The system is designed to plug directly into existing developer workflows, including Cursor, Claude and Codex.
Given the complexities involved, Sharma’s founding engineering team includes veterans who previously worked on some thorny technical challenges: Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365, Stripe Billing and Connect, and engineering platforms at Meta, Atlassian and Statsig.
The team includes:
Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired last September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist in Meta’s Seattle office, who spent nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.
Rafael Brandao Lobo, a founding engineer who previously spent more than a decade building brand advertising and gaming products at Facebook/Meta.
Bruno Garcia, an open source startup founder who previously worked at PlayCo and Sega.
Rakesh Parida, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Stripe, said utilizing AI agents to create strong technical connections between companies is a major strategic advantage.
“ArchAstro is making that model repeatable at scale, enabling continuous integrations, deployments, and migrations across companies, with the security, (forward deployed engineering) oversight, and judgment that serious software partnerships require,” Parida said. “The future of software partnerships isn’t just about going live together. It’s about staying live together.”
Advertisement
Two Fortune 500 companies have already begun utilizing the platform as design partners, though Sharma declined to say who they are. There’s also the potential threat of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others entering the market, given their interests in making sure B2B customers are satisfied in deploying agentic AI systems. Sharma said they are fully expecting competition in the nascent sector, and in some cases they are already speaking to the big players. “But their demand is so high that they don’t have the time or the focused energy to build a solution like ours,” he said. “We think we can accelerate their revenue and help these larger companies scale even further.”
ArchAstro is backed by venture capital firms 20VC — the London-based firm led by Harry Stebbings — and Kyber Knight — whose investments include Cruise, SpaceX and Anduril. Its angel investors include a who’s who of technology leaders:
Will Gaybrick (President of Technology & Business at Stripe)
Based in Seattle, the company employs seven people. Sharma said they are deliberately “staying lean,” adding that a smaller team forces them to be “extremely nimble and invent a path to value.”
He’s also excited to build the startup in Seattle, which he says has “some of the best engineers anywhere.”
“If you want to be a serious B2B company, at some point you have to venture up to Seattle,” he said.
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
You may not think of early summer as the best time to upgrade your tech. Many big-box electronics stores and popular websites offer great sales in late summer for Back-to-School sales, during major holidays like Christmas and just after Thanksgiving, and around big sporting events like the Super Bowl. If you’ve been contemplating a new TV, headphones, or laptop, Best Buy is offering deep discounts this June.
Shoppers have endless options when it comes to electronics retailers, but Best Buy offers a few perks that other stores may not. Depending on the product, you may be able to view a demo in-store, rather than simply reading specs and user reviews online. Best Buy also offers a price match guarantee, matching prices from both local and online competitors. The Geek Squad can help you select, set up, or troubleshoot your new electronics, and even provide repair services down the line if necessary. You can also look for open box deals, though these may not be included in other sales, and trade in your old devices for a Best Buy gift card that you can use on a new purchase. Here are four of the best deals at Best Buy this June.
Advertisement
1. Beats Studio Pro Wireless Over-the-Ear Headphones
Earbuds are having a moment right now, but many people still prefer traditional over-the-ear headphones for comfort, superior sound quality, and better noise cancellation. Beats is a popular brand compatible with both Apple and Android devices. Currently, these Beats Studio Pro Wireless Noise Cancelling Over-the-Ear Headphones – Black are more than 50% off at Best Buy, on sale for $169.99. Buyers will save $180, making this a hard-to-beat deal!
Advertisement
The Beats Studio Pro headphones offer active noise cancellation, a built-in microphone, and Bluetooth wireless connectivity with a maximum range of 100 feet. You can also connect via USB-C or a 3.5mm audio input. They have a battery life of up to 40 hours and a charging time of two hours. The headband is adjustable for maximum comfort, and these headphones also come with a carrying case. Beats promises an “immersive listening experience” with personalized spatial audio and dynamic head tracking for 360-degree audio. These headphones come with a one-year limited warranty covering both parts and labor, and currently have a user rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Best Buy’s website.
Advertisement
2. LG 77-inch OLED TV
If you missed Project Hail Mary or another blockbuster on the big screen and want to upgrade for a similar experience at home, you should consider this 77-inch LG Class B5 Series smart TV. It may be a hit to your wallet at $1,499.99, but buyers who take advantage of this deal will save $1,500 off its normal price of $2,999.99.
If you buy this television, be prepared to welcome AI into your living room. This OLED LG TV has a special processor that uses AI to automatically improve the picture and sound quality of whatever you’re watching, from sports games to your favorite binge-worthy show. It also has Perfect Black and Perfect Color technology for deeper black tones, richer colors, and enhanced contrast. The TV runs on webOS and works with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home. Gamers will appreciate the 0.1ms response time and 120Hz refresh rate, with four HDMI ports and Bluetooth-enabled connectivity. It also supports Dolby Atmos surround sound. The TV is well-rated by customers for picture quality, setup, and size, though some experienced connectivity issues. This LG comes with a stand and has a one-year limited warranty.
Advertisement
3. Ring outdoor camera
Outdoor cameras at home may feel invasive, but they offer more perks than simple security. They may deter a package thief or a home intruder, but they may also give you a break on your insurance premium, help you keep an eye on your children or pets, monitor traffic on a busy street, or simply give you peace of mind when you’re away from home. If cheaper security cameras simply don’t do the job, this sale at Best Buy on the Ring outdoor stick-up camera may be the deal you’ve been waiting for.
Currently $40 off and on sale for $39.99, this Ring camera from Amazon is weather-resistant and wireless. It has 1080p HD video, and buyers can activate a live view anytime from the app on their phone or tablet. This camera also has a two-way talk function. Additionally, users can receive real-time notifications when the camera detects motion. Privacy features include customizable privacy zones and audio privacy. An optional Ring Home Plan subscription offers 180 days of video event history, a search feature, and more detailed alerts. The camera comes with everything required for installation. It uses a removable, rechargeable battery pack, and you must have high-speed internet.
Advertisement
4. Dell 15.6-inch Touchscreen Laptop
If you’re in the market for a new laptop, this 15.6-inch Dell is on sale for $649.99, a savings of $450. With a near-perfect user rating on Best Buy’s website, this laptop has a 13th Generation Intel Core processor, express charge capabilities, a built-in camera, and an LED-backlit display with a touchscreen. Buyers should note that Dell describes the laptop as built for “everyday computing,” and it is not a gaming machine. It comes with 16 gigabytes of memory, an Intel UHD graphics card, and 512 gigabytes of storage capacity. It also has three USB ports, a headphone jack, and Bluetooth capability.
The keyboard has an ergonomic design for maximum comfort and includes a separate numeric keypad and a calculator hotkey. Additionally, the Dell ComfortView software is designed to reduce blue light emissions and ease eye strain during extended use. This laptop comes with Windows 11 Home installed and has a one-year warranty.
Apple’s Spatial Reframing tool in Photos for iOS 27 is an interesting use of Apple Intelligence, but don’t push it too far just yet.
WWDC 2025 included a neat feature for Spatial Photos that lets users convert flat images into 3D scenes. By moving the iPhone around, you could temporarily re-angle your shot and explore the scene.
It was a neat trick, but it wasn’t that much of a major feature for photographers. It did, at least, give you an idea of how a Spatial Photo would look on something like an Apple Vision Pro.
One year later, Apple has decided to try and get the feature to be more practical to iPhone users. That comes in the form of Spatial Reframing.
Advertisement
Fixing the imperfect shot
One of the problems with photography is regretting not lining up the shot perfectly. Frequently, you’ll look back at what you’ve just taken, and the background isn’t in quite the position you wanted it to be.
If you were to edit it traditionally, you would try to cut around the subject and move it over, then fill in the new empty pixels with a clone tool or something else. An expert image editor can do this, and most people won’t tell that an edit has taken place at all.
That requires time and skill, which the average photo-taker doesn’t really have or wish to invest.
Spatially reframing an image in iOS 27
Advertisement
Spatial Reframing is a blend of the previous Spatial Photos feature and generative AI smarts. The idea is that you can select an image, the iPhone will analyze it, and then you can alter the angle of the camera’s view to a new one.
In theory, that would be a quick and relatively painless process, and with no issues at all. Depending on the photo you throw at it, you may just get that, but with some massive caveats.
Background filling
You can find the Reframe feature under the editing section of an image, under Tools.
Once you tap it, the screen fills up with a multi-colored filter, as it scans the shot. Once scanned, you’re instructed to touch and drag to adjust the perspective.
Advertisement
You can also use a two-finger pinch to pan, zoom, and rotate the image.
Dragging the picture around gives you a similar effect to the Spatial Photos, but to a more extreme degree. You can move the angle far enough to one side or the other that you can uncover sections of the background that simply aren’t visible in the original shot.
Reframing a portrait of a kitten works well. Original on the left.
In the preview, this is filled in with a minimal generative graphic that won’t be used in the final picture. This is especially the case for the edges, which appear blurred because it’s a lot to generate on the fly, and that’s not necessary in a preview.
Advertisement
Once you have set your new angle, hitting the Reframe button sets the processing in motion. After a few seconds, you have your reframed image.
In the short time we have played with the feature, we tried it out with a pair of images, to see how it works with a close-up portrait and with a wider scene.
The portrait, which we used an old image of a kitten, was handled pretty well. It was a minor shift of the camera to the right, with a small amount of deformity to the cat’s image.
More apparent is the background, as the left-hand side of the image was completely generated by the tool. It did pretty well in its blurry state, and if I showed anyone who didn’t know the room’s layout, they wouldn’t tell.
Advertisement
Our second test was with a wide touristy photograph of the Colosseum in Rome. It’s a difficult structure with many archways, and the subjects are a distance away from the camera in the middle of the frame.
When lining up the shot, we could tell that it was trying to make a vague-but-acceptable background for the preview, which is fine.
The final image has some plusses, but also some minuses.
Reframing a tourist scene initially looks OK. Original on the left.
Advertisement
On the plus side, it handed generating the background really well. Arches and road that were not visible in the original shot were created and put into place in the back quite well.
Less well done are the subject faces. You can tell that, as part of the reframing, the bodies and heads are taken into account, and are similarly adjusted to match the rest of the image.
This can sometimes work well, but the resulting warp to the faces is unflattering, to put it mildly.
Caveat Emptor
Spatial Reframing, as a concept, makes perfect sense. If you have a camera system and processing that can take apart a scene, move elements around, and smartly generate missing bits, there’s no reason not to do it.
Advertisement
This would be a massive task for a human to undertake, so what it’s coming up with is pretty phenomenal for a first try.
Close-ups of the original [left] and the warped faces of the reframe [right]
That said, we are talking about a feature that is in a developer beta, that is months from release, and the first real attempt too. It’s expected that there will be hiccups and foibles here.
Expect more improvements in the future.
Advertisement
As it stands, it’s a nice feature that could make for some fun shot changes. Content altered by the feature is not going to make the cover of Vogue anytime soon, so professional editors can breathe a sigh of relief.
If you don’t push it too far, it’s decent enough to make your Instagram cat photos a bit better.
Open Media: After years of development, an industry consortium has published the first major release of AV2. The next-generation video encoding standard has ambitious goals, including improved compression efficiency and broader industry adoption, while remaining royalty-free.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) recently released version 1.0.0 of the AV2 specification and reference code. The finalized AV2 specification provides a baseline framework for software and hardware developers, who can now begin integrating the new video codec into products across the media and technology industries.
AOMedia introduced AV2 as a next-generation video coding standard built on the same foundations as AV1. Both codecs are royalty-free, open-source solutions for streaming, transcoding, and other media-related workloads, offering an attractive alternative to royalty-bearing formats such as AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, and the newer Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard.
The final AV1 specification was released in 2018, while AV2 took longer than initially anticipated to reach completion. AV1 has since gained significant traction across the industry, with Netflix and other major players adopting the royalty-free codec at an accelerating pace. AV2 was originally expected to arrive in 2025 and promises substantial improvements over its predecessor in image quality, feature support, and compression efficiency.
Advertisement
Early testing suggests that AV2 can deliver roughly 30% better compression efficiency than AV1, while significantly outperforming older codecs such as VP9 and H.264. According to AOMedia, AV2 has been engineered to provide “superior” compression efficiency compared to AV1, enabling media companies to deliver high-quality video streams at substantially lower bitrates. Alternatively, they can maintain similar bitrates while offering higher video quality.
AV2 was designed to meet the evolving needs of the video industry, including streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. The new format also introduces improved support for mixed-reality applications, split-screen delivery of multiple video streams, and a broader range of visual quality options.
AOMedia was founded in 2015 by major technology companies to develop open video standards capable of succeeding Google’s VP9 codec. The non-profit consortium includes industry giants such as Amazon, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and Microsoft, alongside smaller technology organizations such as Mozilla.
AOMedia created AV1 to reduce the substantial licensing costs associated with patented video standards such as AVC and HEVC, and the strategy appears to be paying off. Modern graphics processors from Nvidia and AMD fully support hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding and decoding, alongside older formats, while support for VVC remains largely absent despite the codec having been available since 2020.
Advertisement
In contrast, VVC’s adoption has been hindered by a complex licensing landscape, leading some industry observers to question its long-term prospects. While it may take years for AV2 support to arrive in GPUs and other hardware devices, software adoption is already moving forward. The VideoLAN community has released dav2d, its portable AV2 decoder, featuring architecture-specific optimizations for x86 (AVX2), ARM (AArch64 NEON), and RISC-V processors.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login