Fudzilla

Major League Baseball (MLB) has decided that managers should continue striking out on their own, with no algorithm allowed to pinch-hit for questionable judgment. The US professional sports league has effectively banned teams from using generative AI on league-issued dugout iPads during games.

The first smartphone chipsets mass-produced on TSMC’s 2nm node are expected to launch next month. That is only a small taste of how popular the Taiwanese outfit’s next-generation process has become. At the 2026 Japan Technology Symposium, TSMC senior vice-president Kevin Zhang said 2nm had four times as many tape-outs as 3nm. This shows how fast chip designers are piling into the advanced node. The 2nm node’s popularity is good news for TSMC and AI firms.

The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple is poking US politicians by trying to buy cheap Chinese memory during a global shortage. According to the Financial Times US House China committee chair John Moolenaar has urged the Trump administration to ban US companies from buying memory chips from CXMT and YMTC. He said the move was needed to avoid dependence on China for critical parts of AI infrastructure.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping pitched open-source AI as Beijing’s answer to US chip controls and closed Silicon Valley model worship. According to the Wall Street Journal Xi cast China as the champion of openness, equality and the Global South. It was a fairly obvious poke at US efforts to protect its lead in AI chips and models. “We should oppose overstretching the concept of national security in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others,” Xi said.

The EU has spared smartwatches and smart glasses from its battery-swapping rules while Nintendo gets the screwdriver treatment. According to Thurrott the European Commission has announced new exemptions to its Batteries Regulation, which will require portable batteries in EU products to be removable and user-replaceable. The rule is supposed to make gadgets last longer rather than be binned when a sealed battery gives up.

The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple might finally give the iPad mini OLED, then hobble it with a 60Hz panel. While the Tame Apple Press are filling their pages with stories about why fanboys need to buy the new OLED iPad mini, a fresh leak claims Jobs’ Mob is preparing an OLED iPad mini for later this year. The bad news, for anyone hoping for silky scrolling, is that it might not get ProMotion.

The maker of expensive printer ink, HP’s Indian branch, has been bitten in the rump by India’s competition watchdog for allegedly rigging government PC bids and printer supply prices. According to Ars Technica the Competition Commission of India fined HP India and its partners about 1.4 billion rupees (€12.7 million, $14.4 million). The regulator said the outfit colluded with resellers on government PC contracts, ink cartridges, toner and other printer consumables.

Investors dumped US tech shares as the AI boom started to look less like a gold rush and more like margin-call bait. According to the Financial Times  the Nasdaq Composite fell 1.5 per cent on Thursday as another dose of volatility bounced through the markets. Memory and computer storage outfits took a thumping, with Sandisk, Western Digital and Seagate all down more than nine per cent. Chipmakers Intel and Micron slid about six per cent, with Chipzilla once again discovering that gravity works.

Google has decided that appearing in your own corporate videos is now far too much effort and has upgraded Google Vids so an AI-generated version of you can do the talking instead. The company is rolling out “personal avatars” that create a digital representation of a user from a selfie and a short voice recording.

SIGGRAPH returns to Los Angeles from July 19 to 23, bringing together researchers, artists, game developers, hardware makers and visual effects specialists for another look at where computer graphics is heading next. This year, the answer appears to be deeper into AI, neural rendering, simulation and interactive systems, as technologies once confined to research papers move closer to production use.