Same hardware. Same model. Same quality output. Up to four times faster. And you don’t have to spend anything to get it.
That’s DSpark - a new text generation technique just published by DeepSeek. If you run AI models locally, this is going to matter to you.
Text to speech (TTS) is a brilliant service for those who would otherwise be literally speechless. Lost Voice Guy on Britain’s Got Talent rather humorously demonstrated the challenge.
But TTS has broad use. DIY personal podcasts. Read some text when on a walk or in the car. Share a personal update with someone who is more of a listener than a reader.
The good news is you don’t need to pay for a service like ElevenLabs to get quite good TTS. At least not on a Mac. (Don’t ask me about Windows — that’s for someone else to untangle).
Meta has a court order stopping Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her own book. She cannot talk about it, cannot criticise the company, cannot even sit near a bookshop that stocks it without risking a fine. So let me do the promoting for her.
The book is Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams spent six years as Facebook’s global director of public policy. Her memoir is a first-hand account of what the company is like from the inside, and it is not flattering: allegations of sexual harassment, of courting Beijing with censorship tools, of contempt for the very users whose teenagers it studied.
Alan Turing taught himself electronics from an RCA vacuum tube manual on a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1943. Within months he was in a Nissen hut in the English countryside, building a working voice encryption device that shrank a 50,000 kilogram Bell Labs room-filling machine down to three shoebox-sized units. Donald Bayley was a young electrical engineering graduate who arrived at Hanslope Park in 1944. He found Turing’s soldered circuits looking like a “spider’s nest” and promptly dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.
Tech companies are posting record profits while laying off tens of thousands of people and citing AI as the explanation. So far in 2026: 363 layoffs, nearly 150,000 people, 974 per day - 44% faster than last year, per TrueUp. May was the highest single month in two years. AI was the most cited layoff reason across every industry for the third month running.
Many are saying it. Google Gemini is inside Apple’s iPhone AI. Apple has been gobbled by Google. The companies' phones are barely distinguishable now. None of that is right. The confusion is understandable. Google uses the word “Gemini” to mean at least two different things: their consumer AI assistant app and their family of underlying AI models. When people hear that “Gemini is powering Siri AI,” they picture the Google Gemini app somehow inside an iPhone.
Anthropic launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 last week. By the weekend, the US government had ordered both suspended for every foreign national on earth.
No advance notice. No specific public explanation. Just a directive citing national security, and Anthropic - with no practical choice - complied. Access to other Claude models remained unaffected. The concern, widely reported, centres on Mythos 5’s ability to detect software vulnerabilities. In the right hands it’s a security tool. In the wrong hands it becomes a cyberweapon. The US government has apparently decided it cannot control whose hands are whose.
This is what AI geopolitics looks like up close.
At WWDC 2026 this week, someone asked Siri to go through a folder of contractor quotes as PDFs, compare them, pick the best option and draft a reply email. Siri did it. Live, on stage, in front of an audience.
That’s not a kitchen timer. That’s not “Hey Siri, what’s the weather.” That’s the kind of task you’d currently hand to Claude or ChatGPT with careful prompting and a bit of luck. Apple just demonstrated it happening through a voice assistant most of us had written off.
It is worth understanding how they got there - because the architecture behind it is genuinely interesting, and a lot of it comes down to a clever solution to a very unglamorous problem: memory.
Apple didn’t announce anything revolutionary at WWDC. For a company of this maturity, that’s not a criticism - it’s a read of the room.
The focus was platform optimisation and extension: making what already exists faster, smarter and less visually exhausting. Yes, they’ve walked back some of the Liquid Glass overload. Good.
Twelve months ago the most capable model you could rent was Claude Opus 4, at $15 in and $75 out per million tokens. Today the flagship Opus costs a third of that: $5 in, $25 out. So the price of frontier AI collapsed over the year, right?
Not even slightly. It went up. You just have to know where to look, and who is paying.