Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
There’s a quiet crisis inside Google: several of its most important AI researchers have quit for rivals in the span of a week.
Elsewhere, Samsung locks in its next big launch, your ChatGPT can now peek at your finances, SpaceX lights up its next Starship, and more…
Let's dig in.
📱 Samsung's next Galaxy Unpacked event is now tipped for July 22 in London, where the company is expected to show off new folding phones, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, along with its first pair of smart glasses, the "Galaxy Glasses." If you've been waiting to upgrade, it may be worth holding off a few more weeks. But with folding phones and smart glasses on the same stage, Samsung is throwing everything at the wall in London. Some of it might stick.
🎮 A year into its life, Nintendo's Switch 2 has now sold more than 19 million units, and this week a new "Star Fox" shot straight to the top of its download charts. A reminder that even with all the AI noise, a great console and a beloved franchise still move the needle.
🤖 Anthropic says China's Alibaba used roughly 25,000 fake accounts to bombard Claude with nearly 29 million questions, allegedly to copy its abilities on the cheap. It's being described as the largest known attempt of its kind. The global AI cold war is getting warmer.
💳 OpenAI is rolling out a new personal finance feature that lets you securely link your financial accounts to ChatGPT, see a dashboard of your money, and ask questions about your own spending. Handy if you're comfortable sharing that data… but think carefully before you hand your money story to an AI.
🚀 SpaceX test-fired the engine on the Starship vehicle slated for its next flight, "Flight 13," posting video of the burn over the weekend. It doesn’t look like SpaceX or anyone involved is superstitious or has triskaidekaphobia. Company president Gwynne Shotwell says the giant rocket, central to plans for the Moon and Mars, is targeting a launch in July.
❤ In a break from nearly two decades of habit, YouTube is testing a heart "like" button on Shorts, quietly removing the dislike button, and adding double-speed playback. A clear nudge to look and feel more like TikTok and Instagram. YouTube Shorts is slowly becoming the thing it was supposed to compete with.
🚕 Self-driving taxis are no longer a science-fiction promise: Waymo now runs paid rides in about a dozen U.S. cities and is eyeing London and Tokyo, while Tesla's rival service is still confined to a few Texas markets. If you live in a big city, an empty driver's seat may be coming to a curb near you.
In the AI world, a company's biggest asset isn't a building or a product: it's a small number of brilliant, specialized employees.
So when several of Google's most celebrated researchers walked out the door in the span of a single week, it landed like an earthquake.
Among the departures:
Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the foundational research paper that made today's chatbots possible and a co-lead of Google's flagship Gemini AI, is heading to OpenAI
And John Jumper, a Nobel Prize winner whose AlphaFold system cracked one of biology's hardest problems, is leaving for Anthropic. Reports say at least two more senior Gemini researchers are following Jumper out the door.
To understand why this stings, it helps to know what these people represent.
Shazeer is so valued that Google paid a reported $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring him back into the fold.
Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, software that predicts the shapes of proteins and has accelerated drug discovery worldwide.
Losing one star is a setback; losing several at once, to your direct competitors, raises an uncomfortable question:
Is the most talented bench in AI starting to clear out?
Wall Street certainly took it that way. Shares of Google's parent company, Alphabet, slid roughly 5% to 6% as the departures piled up, wiping out a chunk of market value and feeding a growing worry: that even a giant with Google's resources, data, and head start can't guarantee it stays at the front of the AI race.
Talent in this field is fiercely mobile, and rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic are offering money, freedom, and the chance to build the future on their terms.
For the rest of us, this is about more than just office drama. It’s about who shapes the AI that's quickly working its way into our phones, search results, and jobs.
The tools that millions of people use every day are built by a surprisingly small circle of researchers, and right now that circle is reshuffling fast.
Whether Google can stem the bleeding (or whether this is the moment the balance of power in AI tips toward its younger rivals) is the story to watch through the rest of the year.
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