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AI NewsPersistent Taps Databricks, MSOE to Train Students in Production-Grade AI Systems
7:21 PM IST · June 4, 2026
The initiative aims to prepare students for the growing demand in enterprise AI as organisations move from experimentation to large-scale AI deployment.
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Apple on Thursday offered its annual update on the state of the App Store ecosystem ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that begins next week. The technology giant said that its App Store facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025, a figure up from the$1.3 trillion it announcedlast year around this time. The figure, which includes all business taking place through apps on its platform, is meant to represent how the App Store creates financial opportunities for mobile developers that extend beyond sales from in-app purchases. It also helps to frame Apple’s portion of this business — a commission on in-app purchases of digital goods — as a much smaller portion of the overall pie. As Apple noted in its announcement, 90% of the $1.4 trillion involved transactions where developers didn’t pay any commissions. Broken down further, the 2025 total included $1.1 trillion in sales of physical goods and services and $149 billion in billings and sales for digital goods. The latter is largely commissioned at a rate of 15% to 30%, depending on transaction type and the size of the business, and is higher than the $131 billion Apple reported last year. Regardless of how it’s presented, it’s still a multibillion-dollar market that Apple takes a piece of. Additionally, Apple said that in-app revenue from ads was $151 billion in 2025, up from $150 billion the year prior. Apple also highlighted that the App Store saw over 850 million average weekly users from across 175 countries and regions in 2025. Notably, Apple called out AI apps in particular, remarking that 40 of the top 100 apps in 2025 had consumer-facing AI capabilities, and these saw stronger billing growth than the others in the top 100. This could be setting the stage for a WWDC announcement about Apple’s plans to allow AI agents on its App Store, as has beenrumored. The company is also poised to make announcements of its own around AI at WWDC, with an anticipated Siri revamp and deeper AI integrations into its operating systems. Apple’s announcement pointed to the App Store’s growth in China, as well, adding that, in the last six years, billings and sales facilitated by the App Store have more than doubled in the country. Meanwhile, billings and sales in the App Store more than tripled in the U.S. and Europe. Again, most of this is attributable to physical goods and services, like retail, grocery delivery, ride-hailing, travel, and more.
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Martinez, California, is about as far as you can get from Silicon Valley and still be in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perched on the northeast edge of the bay, the small city is home to Hello Robot, a startup that itself is about as far as one can get from the maximalist promises of its robotics rivals 45 miles south. Hello Robot released the fourth iteration of its home assistance robot, Stretch, last month. And you might stretch to call it a humanoid robot. While Stretch boasts a vaguely human torso and sensor-studded head, its telescoping arm has a pair of pinchers, and it rides around on a heavy, omnidirectional wheeled base. When Stretch’s batteries run down, lights around its “eyes” glow — “it looks angry,” Blaine Matulevich, an engineer at the company, jokes. Hello Robot, founded in 2017 by CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google, and CTO Charlie Kemp, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is not building a foundation model or promising to take over every job a human can do. Hello Robot developed Stretch to do something many other robots aren’t doing: Working in real homes, with real people, at a time when most are behind glass in laboratories. This is vital. While the latest advances in artificial intelligence promise more capabilities for robots, there is a dearth of useful training data. And while simulation is improving, investors are increasingly focused on deployment. “Companies that deploy first accumulate site-specific recovery loops and workflow tolerances that no competitor can buy or synthesize,” Bullhound Capital wrote ina reporton the sector published last week. “In robotics, the moat isn’t just IP, but accumulated operating hours under real-world liability.” Keith Platt, an investor in Georgia who now sits on Hello Robot’s board, invested in the company after taking on Stretch as a housemate. Platt became quadriplegic in 2021, only able to control parts of his shoulders, his neck and his head. He began exploring adaptive technology, and in 2024 started working with Hello Robot, which has an occupational therapist on the team to support its work with Platt and other people with similar conditions. Platt controls his Stretch using a voice-operated iPhone app; he can task it to autonomously move to somewhere in his house, then take over direct control to manipulate objects and perform tasks. One deceptively simple project has been figuring out how to get Stretch to serve him a protein shake for breakfast, which normally requires the assistance of another person. “When we first started out with that activity, it took me independently — no one there — took almost two hours,” Platt told TechCrunch. “But I was gonna stick with it. It got down to where, within a few minutes, I could drink the whole shake and put it back on the counter.” Being dependent on people is a real challenge, both physically and emotionally, Platt says. Anything he can do to regain independence — like putting on or taking off his reading glasses, or brushing his teeth himself — “is huge.” Not just for him, but for the people who care about him. He predicts it would be “life-changing” for families if robotic assistants could enable people with mobility challenges to be able to safely spend a day at home, allowing their family members to work independently or leave the house without hiring a professional caregiver. Stretch comes from the factory with limited autonomy; focusing on having a human in the loop is intentional. “Being in control is a feature — it’s desired to be embodied in the robot,” Matulevitch said. And, Platt points out, he doesn’t worry about Stretch falling over if it suffers an error. For all the money flowing into startups designing brains for robots, their bodies still leave a lot to be desired. While components are getting cheaper, the state of the art still delivers heavy limbs that require high-energy, active balancing. A robotic hand and arm weighs much more than a human’s, and physics is unforgiving. When robots make mistakes, they damage things around them. One startup, the Bot Company,is being suedby a San Francisco Airbnb owner who says the company rented his apartment to work on its robot, which scratched furniture, broke appliances, and chipped bathroom tiles. “The state of hardware today is actually abysmal from the perspective of, ‘I want to have robots in my parents’ place,’” Mahi Shafiullah, a postdoc working on robotic hands at the University of California, Berkeley, told TechCrunch. He recalled industrial robots in his lab accidentally punching through a plastic kitchen play set they were supposed to carefully manipulate. Shafiullah ultimately came to use the third generation of Hello Robot’s Stretch as part of his PhD research at New York University. Models he helpeddevelop with Stretchwon the best demonstration prize at least year’s Computer Vision And Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference. Hello Robot doesn’t promise that Stretch will have the complexity or capability of the humanoid robots that enamor the Valley, but its simpler design could make it more powerful. Edsinger compares his company to Waymo, which became the leading purveyor of self-driving cars by focusing on safety first (although the money helped). One leader in this field, 1X, was the subject of significant attention last year when it unveiled a humanoid robot, Neo, that people could buy to perform chores in their homes. The company says that it sold out of the 10,000 Neos it plans to build this year, but as of yet, none have actually been delivered. “Hello Robot has been really cautious and really caring about this problem, because I think they’re designing it to be around people first,” Shafiullah said. “And then they’re thinking about, where are the capabilities that they can fit in within those limitations?” Stretch 4 costs an affordable-for-a-robot $30,000, which is a bit more than robots from Chinese manufacturers, although Edsinger notes that those often don’t come with sensors or software included, add-ons that ultimately drive up the price. He expects to manufacture between 200 and 300 at the company’s Martinez headquarters, with the first run already sold out. Edsinger wants to keep the robot accessible to hackers and researchers on low budgets. One design criteria for Stretch is that it has to be shippable in a cardboard box via UPS or DHL— once wooden crates and installation teams are required, costs go up and accessibility declines. Hello Robot’s customers include researchers who use Stretch to test out increasingly sophisticated AI brains, enterprise customers who are testing Stretch’s utility in settings like data centers, and people working to develop in-home aides for people with disabilities. The combination of the robot’s comprehensive sensor suite, physical capabilities, and safe operations could make it a candidate to fill out the hopes of physical AI believers. “The algorithms may be there, but the data is not, and data is actually like 80% of the ingredient that matters,” Shafiullah said. Having a robot that can safely collect that data is another step forward. And Hello Robot intends to keep iterating. The lessons from the roll-out of Stretch 4 promise to feed into the company’s next bot, which could drive down the price and increase the capabilities enough to realize a vision of robot-human collaboration at home.
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As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC 2026, approaches, the excitement is building around what Apple has in store for us this year. From Siri’s overhaul to new Apple Intelligence updates, there’s a lot to look forward to. The annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off Monday at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. For those eager to tune in, the event will be streamed live via theApple Developer app,Apple’s website, and the Apple DeveloperYouTube channel. The most anticipated announcement is a major AI upgrade to Siri, transforming it into a more conversational assistant capable of understanding context, handling multi-step tasks, and interacting more naturally across apps and services. The revamped Siri will leverageGoogle’s Gemini technologyto enhance its capabilities. Additionally, recent leaks from Bloomberg have unveiled astandalone Siri appthat aims to compete with advanced AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Apple may also introduce a feature reminiscent of messaging apps, enabling users to set timers forautomatically deleting conversationsafter 30 days, a year, or keeping them indefinitely. According toThe Information, Apple plans to introduce an AI agent integration with the app store. While details are scarce, agents allow users to delegate tasks such as booking reservations, managing everyday tasks, editing documents, or controlling smart home devices. A new “Visual Intelligence” section isanticipatedto be introduced within the Camera app, taking the place of the previous Visual Intelligence feature found in the Camera Control button. This upgrade will introduce a dedicated Siri mode that exists next to options like Photo, Video, Portrait, and Panorama. The Visual Intelligence feature leverages Google Image Search to accurately identify objects captured by the user. In addition, the Photos app is set to receive exciting enhancements powered by Apple Intelligence. These may include intelligent scene recommendations for optimizing photos, automatic object removal for cleaner images, and an innovative AI photo editing feature that allows users to request edits simply by using natural language.ng new productivity functionalities in visionOS. Apple is set to upgrade the Image Playground app, introducing higher-quality image generation, more artistic styles, better character consistency, and richer editing controls. The interface for creating new images will be simplified, offering fewer controls and a “describe a change” option for editing. Additionally, we might see a suggested Genmoji feature that proposes custom emojis based on users’ media and text interactions. Users may also be able to generate AI wallpapers that reflect various themes and moods. Notable updates are rumored to be coming to the Wallet app, particularly a new bill-splitting feature that will simplify sharing expenses among friends or family. Users will be able to photograph a receipt and generate payment requests to different parties effortlessly. Alongside this, the Wallet app will also include a “Create a Pass” option that enables users to generate digital passes from physical items such as movie tickets, concert passes, or gym membership cards. Apple is expected to enhance its AI-powered Siri experience across its devices, as well as likely incorporate more AI features and stability updates.
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Metaannouncedon Thursday that it’s introducing a new AI creator assistant on Facebook that will give creators personalized recommendations based on their content style, performance, community, and goals. Creators often have to parse through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the new AI assistant, they can get quick answers to questions like “When should I post?” and “What are people saying in my comments?” Since the AI assistant is conversational, they can ask follow-up questions and dig deeper on a topic, like how their audience has shifted over time. The answers they receive will be based on their own presence and what they can do differently to improve performance. Beyond performance, the AI assistant can help brainstorm ideas for new content by drawing on what’s trending. For example, it may suggest using trending audio or creating content around cultural moments. The new assistant is rolling out to creators in the U.S., Canada, and India. Meta plans to add new capabilities and bring the assistant to more countries in the future. By giving creators access to an AI assistant, Meta is looking to keep creators active on Facebook as it competes for their attention against rivals like TikTok and YouTube. Additionally, by offering creators content ideas, Facebook is encouraging more frequent posting, which could in turn boost user engagement. In-app access to an AI assistant also gets rid of the need for creators to turn to third-party tools like ChatGPT when brainstorming and understanding performance, keeping them within Meta’s ecosystem. Meta also announced that it’s introducing new languages for AI translations on Facebook, including Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Thai, and Vietnamese. WithAI-translated Reels, a creator’s tone and sound are preserved and automatically translated into another language. Launched last year, the idea behind the feature is to allow creators to reach more audiences by breaking down language barriers. Creators also have the option to use a lip-sync feature to align the translation with their lip movements, which makes it seem more natural. Meta says over half a billion users on Facebook are now watching AI-translated videos weekly.
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