Daily reads: May 28, 2026

Federal prosecutors charged Google employee Michele Spagnuolo with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering over alleged Polymarket bets tied to 2025 Search trends. Prosecutors say he used confidential internal data to know wager outcomes before the public, earning about $1.2 million, and was released on a $2.25 million bond.

Rivian has set June 9 as the date for the first customer deliveries of its R2 SUV. CEO RJ Scaringe has described the vehicle as one of the company’s most important launches to date.

YouTube is reportedly preparing to automatically label videos that appear to be made with or altered by AI. The move would expand platform efforts to disclose synthetic media without relying only on creators to self-identify it.

MiniMax released a technical report on its M2 family, outlining engineering choices behind its open-source language models across text, coding, and agent use cases. The company also teased its upcoming M3 models, saying a new sparse attention approach can deliver up to 15.6x faster decoding at million-token context lengths.

The article argues that push notifications have shifted from simple delivery pipes into platform-controlled experiences managed by Apple and Google. Their systems now summarize, reorder, suppress, and sometimes rewrite notifications before users see them, much as major email providers have done with inboxes.

Simon Willison says Anthropic and OpenAI appear to have found product-market fit, driven by heavy enterprise use of coding agents and other LLM tools. He notes that while individual $100/month plans can provide thousands of dollars of API-equivalent usage, enterprise customers are increasingly paying per-seat fees plus API rates, leading to unexpectedly large bills.

Amazon is discounting Apple’s newest iPad Air for the first time, with the 11-inch 128GB Wi-Fi model starting at $519.99 and the 13-inch version dropping to $699. The tablets offer an M4 processor, 12GB of RAM, Apple Intelligence support, Apple Pencil Pro compatibility, and newer wireless features like Wi-Fi 7.

Triomics raised $22 million in Series B funding led by Battery Ventures to grow its AI platform for cancer centers. The company helps oncologists and staff automate data-heavy work such as clinical trial matching, appointment prep, patient summaries, and tumor registry reporting using oncology-specific AI.

Merck says its AI agents are already producing measurable results, including cutting one drug discovery cycle by 33% and speeding compliant marketing material delivery by 70% to 80%. VP Sean Finnerty says those gains depend on building the underlying infrastructure first, rather than deploying disconnected one-off agents that become technical debt.

Ferrari’s new Luce EV, a four-door electric sedan designed with help from Jony Ive’s LoveFrom, is drawing criticism for looking unlike the brand’s classic sports cars. The rollout was followed by a sharp stock drop, while related coverage highlights reactions from Ferrari figures, Lamborghini’s CEO, and details about the car’s sound and interior design.

Snowflake has signed a five-year, $6B agreement with Amazon Web Services to secure chips for AI-related computing needs. The deal gives AWS another major customer for its AI infrastructure as companies seek alternatives to Nvidia-dependent capacity.

Lux Optics has released Halide Mark III, the latest version of its camera app for iPhone and iPad, after announcing it in December 2024. The app adds a film simulation engine with five new Looks for landscapes, portraits, cityscapes, and black-and-white photography, and is available via a $59.99 purchase or $19.99 annual subscription.