🚀 Gemini 2.5 Expands, OpenAI Exposed, Apple Wins Transcription

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🚀 Gemini 2.5 Expands, OpenAI Exposed, Apple Wins Transcription

Plus: Waymo Widens Reach; Samsung’s Chip Crisis Deepens.

Jose Montes de Oca

Jun 18, 2025

Transcript

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, June 18. Today we are covering:

We're expanding our Gemini 2.5 family of models
The 'OpenAI Files' will help you understand how Sam Altman's company works
Hands-On: How Apple's New Speech APIs Outpace Whisper for Lightning-Fast Transcription
Waymo expands service area in Los Angeles and San Francisco
Samsung is desperate to compete on chips. Workers say it comes at a cost.

Let’s dive in

We're expanding our Gemini 2.5 family of models

By Tulsee Doshi via Google Blog

Google has made Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash models generally available, enabling developers and organizations like Snap and SmartBear to build reliable production applications.
A preview of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite—the fastest and most cost-efficient model in the 2.5 series—is now live, optimized for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks such as translation and classification.
2.5 Flash-Lite surpasses 2.0 Flash-Lite across coding, math, science, reasoning, and multimodal benchmarks, with features like 1 million-token context, tool integration, and dynamic reasoning budgets.

𝕏: Gemini 2.5 Pro + 2.5 Flash are now stable and generally available. Plus, get a preview of Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, our fastest + most cost-efficient 2.5 model yet. 🔦 Exciting steps as we expand our 2.5 series of hybrid reasoning models that deliver amazing performance at the Pareto frontier of cost and speed. - Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai)

The 'OpenAI Files' will help you understand how Sam Altman's company works

By Hayden Field via The Verge

"The OpenAI Files", launched by watchdog groups The Midas Project and Tech Oversight Project, compiles over 50 pages of public records, corporate disclosures, legal complaints, and media reports to map OpenAI’s evolution and corporate structure.
The report highlights potential conflicts of interest and safety concerns, including CEO Sam Altman’s investments in companies with overlapping interests—such as Retro Biosciences, Stripe, and Rain AI—with OpenAI.
The creators stress the project’s editorial independence, stating no support from competitors like Anthropic or Microsoft, and aim to present a transparent timeline from OpenAI’s nonprofit origins to its current form.

𝕏: NEW: The "OpenAI Files" are out today from @TheMidasProj & @Tech_Oversight, an interactive site -- which amounts to more than 50 pages and over 10,000 words -- that chronicles OpenAI’s evolution from nonprofit research lab to moneymaking household name. - Hayden Field (@haydenfield)

The best way to reach new readers is through word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends.

Hands-On: How Apple's New Speech APIs Outpace Whisper for Lightning-Fast Transcription

By John Voorhees via MacStories

Apple’s new SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber APIs, introduced in the macOS Tahoe beta, dramatically outperform OpenAI’s Whisper model by offering lightning-fast on-device transcription with comparable accuracy.
Developer Finn Voorhees built Yap, a CLI tool leveraging Apple’s APIs, which transcribed a 7GB, 34-minute video in just 45 seconds—over 55% faster than Whisper-based apps like MacWhisper and VidCap.
Despite some shared transcription quirks (e.g., misformatting proper nouns), Apple’s tools provide a seamless, scalable advantage for podcasters, YouTubers, and developers, and are poised to become the default transcription choice on Apple platforms.

Waymo expands service area in Los Angeles and San Francisco

By Caroline Petrow-Cohen via Los Angeles Times

Waymo is expanding its autonomous taxi service in Los Angeles to over 120 square miles, covering neighborhoods from Santa Monica to Inglewood and including Sunset Boulevard, Echo Park, and Silver Lake.
In the Bay Area, Waymo is extending operations to parts of the San Francisco Peninsula, including Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and newly adding South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, and Burlingame.
Despite incidents like vandalism during anti-ICE protests and community resistance in Santa Monica, Waymo’s fleet—launched from the Google Self-Driving Car Project—continues to grow, delivering 250,000+ paid rides per week across cities using sensor- and lidar-based navigation.

𝕏: Waymo expanding, but no SFO yet has this looking like a gerrymandered district. They have a permit to map SFO now, but the Teamsters union controls SFO and is fighting against Waymo - Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi)

Samsung is desperate to compete on chips. Workers say it comes at a cost.

By Michelle Kim via Rest of World

Samsung’s chip division is facing an exodus of talent as engineers flee grueling workloads, shrinking bonuses, and a toxic, hierarchical work culture, with many defecting to SK Hynix, Micron, and Intel.
Once dominant in memory chips, Samsung has been overtaken by SK Hynix and is losing ground to TSMC in foundry services, amid internal dysfunction, overwork, and a lack of strategic investment during the AI boom.
Engineers report being pressured to falsify performance data, log unpaid overtime, and work under unsafe conditions, reflecting what insiders call the “Samsung way”—a culture of fear, blame-shifting, and short-termism that many believe is eroding its global competitiveness.

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