
Intel stock popped after Trump said Apple agreed to build chips with it in America. Waymo yanked its robotaxis off highways over construction-zone blunders. Rockstar dated GTA VI pre-orders to June 25, and GLM-5.2 grabbed the open-weights crown.
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Welcome to the Tech we write home for Juneteenth 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today intel stock popped after Trump said Apple agreed to build chips with it in America. Waymo yanked his robo taxis off highways
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over construction zone blunders.
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GTA 6 pre orders are finally happening
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June 25 and of course, the weekend Long Read suggestions here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
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More signs that Apple might be returning to the intel fold, at least in some capacity.
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Quoting CNBC Intel's stock rose 10% on
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Thursday after President Donald Trump said the semiconductor company had agreed to a deal
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with Apple to design and build chips in the US intel stock has seen
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significant gains recently after struggling for years. Having relinquished its dominant market position, the Stock has surged 464% in the past
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12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion.
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For years, intel largely sat out the
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AI race as it grappled with manufacturing delays and awaited a major customer for its chip fabrication. But CEO Lipp Bhutan, who took the
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helm early last year, has revived Wall street interest in the struggling chip maker by drawing investments from Nvidia and the Trump administration.
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I decided to help intel because we need to design and build our chips right here in America, trump said Thursday on Truth Social.
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First, we helped bring in Nvidia, and
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they agreed to build their first level chips with intel, he added.
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Next, Elon agreed to build his Terafab,
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the largest chip factory in the world, designed together with Intel's technology team.
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The terrafab project is the first major outside commitment for Intel's capital intensive foundry
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business, which had only manufactured chips for its own products.
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While conflict in the Middle east has
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disrupted supply chains and seen oil prices
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skyrocket, the AI boom has so far
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insulated stocks, especially those tied to infrastructure around the technology.
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Nasdaq's Philadelphia Semiconductor Sector Index, comprising the
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30 largest U.S. traded chip companies, is up 90% so far this year. End Quote.
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Filings reveal that Waymo has pulled its
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Robotaxis from highways after finding more than
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13 instances of Waymo cars driving into highway sections under construction.
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Quoting TechCrunch Six of these happened in
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Phoenix, Arizona in April, and seven occurred
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in San Francisco, California in May.
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Waymo pulled its Robotaxis from all highways
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on May 19 and a fix for
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the problem is currently under development, according
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to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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The company is not pulling vehicles off the road and is still operating on surface streets, though it has periodically paused
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service during severe weather that could lead to flooding.
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We identified an area of improvement regarding performance around freeway construction zones, waymo said in a statement to TechCrunch. We voluntarily restricted freeway operations last month
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while making improvements, proactively notified state and federal regulators and decided to file a voluntary software recall with nhtsa.
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This is the sixth recall Waymo has issued for its Robotaxis.
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In May, the company recalled its Robotaxis after they drove into flooded roads, and in December it issued one to address its vehicle's illegal behavior around school buses.
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Waymo has previously issued recalls to fix
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low speed collisions with chains and gates and telephone poles, and one to solve a problem regarding towed trucks.
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The company's driving software is currently under
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investigation by the NHTSA and National Transportation Safety Board regarding its behavior around school buses after one of its robo taxis struck a child near a school in January.
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Alphabet owned Waymo says its vehicles have driven more than 170 million miles autonomously and claims they have demonstrated a 13x reduction in serious injury or worse crashes
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when compared to human drivers. The Robotaxi company is in the middle of a massive expansion, planning to launch in more than 20 cities this year
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alone, including in London and Tokyo.
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The expansion has helped highlight a number
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of edge cases that Waymo's Robotaxi software
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has struggled with, which now includes highway construction zones.
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Waymo which started offering highway rides in November 2025, told the NHTSA that its Robotaxis did not recognize and drove past
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ramp closure signs into pre planned freeway construction zones in mid April in Phoenix.
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After a review, the company's Field Safety Committee restricted freeway operations in the city
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while Waymo worked on a fix, the NHTSA documents show.
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On May 18, seven Waymo robotaxis drove into highway lanes under active construction in
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the San Francisco Bay area. Because the company software was prioritizing the avoidance of other free hazards and or failing to recognize the construction zone, the company suspended all freeway driving. The following day, Waymo's safety board decided to issue the recall on June 8.
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Footage of some of these incidents was shared on social media.
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On May 19, X user Slade posted a video where they claimed a Waymo blasted through cones and said it was chased by police. There were construction signs, slade told CBS News last month. There were lights going on, police in the distance and it sped up. That's when I looked at my fiance.
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We're done.
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This is it.
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We're dead.
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We're going to die right here in the Waymo. Waymo offered Slade three free rides up to $40 each in the future, according to CBS. End quote.
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At long last, it appears to finally be happening.
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Quoting Kotaku Grand Theft Auto VI is
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launching on November 19th. Some of you might roll your eyes
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at the seeming certainty of that statement, and understandably so. Rockstar and Take 2 have delayed the
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game a few times now, but this time I'm feeling very confident that GTA 6 is actually for real.
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Seriously launching as planned.
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Why?
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Because Rockstar has made all their social media accounts pink.
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On Thursday, Rockstar Games announced that pre
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orders for GTA VI would go live on June 25th. Alongside that news came the reveal of the game's official cover art. It looks rad and has some serious GTA Vice City on PS2 vibes.
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And as all of this was happening, Rockstar Games went around and changed all
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of the profiles, pics and banners found on the company's various social media accounts. Before, they featured the old classic yellow Rockstar logo.
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Now, however, they all feature purple and
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pink palm trees with a neon white Rockstar logo plastered on top. Why does this matter? Well, it signals to me that the company has officially entered GTA VI marketing mode historically, and there's not that much to go on because Rockstar's slow release schedule means they haven't put out all that many new games in the social media era.
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Once the company switches its icons and
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enters this phase of marketing for a game it doesn't announce a new delay. You can look back at Rockstar's Facebook page to see that once the company swapped its icon for a red Dead Redemption 2 themed logo on May of
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2018, a few months after announcing a delay, the game stuck to its October 2018 launch date. Essentially, once Rockstar and Take Two start showing off the COVID taking people's money
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and swapping social media icons and banners, you can be pretty damn sure that everyone involved is confident that the game is coming out as planned, barring some catastrophic event.
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So as long as the world doesn't end between now and November, GTA 6 will launch as planned on November 19
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on PS5 and Xbox. End quote.
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Again, if the current state of the art in AI proves to be sufficient
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to run our agentic future, then what
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happens six months from now when open weight open source AI models are equivalent
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to today's state of the art Win is good enough for a lot of people not to need to pay the major model players.
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Apparently a model called GLM 5.2 is
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getting a lot of attention in AI circles because it is now the leading open weights model on artificial Analyses Intelligence Index scoring 51.
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By comparison, Fable 5 scored 60, Opus
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4.8 scored 56 and GPT 5.5 scored 55. Quoting implicator AI Artificial Analysis this week
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named Zai's GLM 5.2 the leading open
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source open weight model on its intelligence index. The independent benchmarking firm said in A post on June 16 the model scored
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51 on the v4.1 index, up 11 points from GLM 5.1 and ships under
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an MIT license with a 1 million token context window. Independent reviewers who ran it over the past week reported that it matched or
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beat Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on several build
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tasks at a fraction of of the cost.
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Nate Herc, who runs the AI automation channel on YouTube, switched Claude code over
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to GLM 5.2 and ran it for a day. He clocked a one shot website build at 3 minutes 59 seconds against 14
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minutes 59 seconds for Opus 4.8 on
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the same prompt and said the GLM run used fewer tokens. Herc routed Claude code to the model
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by setting Anthropic base URL to Zai
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in his Settings local JSON, a swap he described to viewers as switching out the engine of a car. He ran it on a $60 a month Zai plan.
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The model did not match opus everywhere
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on one head to head. Herc had OpenAI's codecs generate a homework task and then grade both outputs and
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codecs judged Opus the more precise of the two.
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It cited a duplicate records edge case the GLM run missed, where values such as true versus one tripped it up. Herc put the share of his work that genuinely needs opus at maybe 10
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to 20% and said GLM 5.2 handled most of the rest. Julian Goldie, who tested the model on June 14 against Moonshot's Kimi K27 and Opus 4.8, said GLM 5.2 won four of his five build tests.
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He gave it the edge on a Temple Run style Voxel runner, a liquid metabol simulation, an Apple style landing page
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and a neon arcade game, and handed
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the fifth, an inner solar system orbit map to Kimik 2.7.
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I can't believe GLM 5.2 is beating
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Opus 4.8, Goldie told viewers. He noted the model was so new it had not yet appeared on openrouter.
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The same artificial analysis report recorded a higher token cost, though GLM 5.2 spends 43,000 output tokens per intelligence index task, of which 37,000 are reasoning tokens, up
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from 26,000 for GLM 5.1 and above the 35,000 Kimike 2.6 uses, that works out to about $0.46 per task against roughly $0.05 for DeepSeq v4 Pro at its maximum setting.
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Artificial analysis still placed the model on its intelligence versus Cost Pareto Frontier, citing
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the the lowest cost per task among models at its intelligence level. End quote.
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time for the weekend long Read suggestions First up in the Journal sources detail how Google is using Nvidia's Playbook to build out its
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AI chip business, including providing $3.2 billion
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to fund a New York data center
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renting TPUs to anthropic.
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Until recently, Nvidia all but had that market to itself, its graphics processing unit,
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or GPUs, coveted by tech companies for their power to train and run AI models. As the AI race has morphed over the past year into a contest for
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computing resources, though, challengers have begun to
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edge in, none of them more formidable than Google.
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You have all these very well capitalized companies who are big believers that this market around compute is going to have tremendous value, said Nazar Khan, co founder
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and chief executive Officer of the AI infrastructure company TerraWolf, which is developing Lake Mariner with Fluidstack, a Google backed cloud provider.
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They want to be in the game.
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They don't want to be left behind.
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In corralling customers for its chips, known as Tensor processing units or TPUs, Google has mimicked Nvidia's practice of using financial guarantees to help data centers raise cheaper debt and provide so called circular financing in which some of the money it
C
invests flows back in the form of chip purchases.
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A shakeup in the leadership of its cloud unit has increased the level of
C
urgency, people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia has a close partnership with and is a major investor in OpenAI.
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Google has a similar relationship with Anthropic
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as well as its own Frontier model Gemini in private and in public, Jensen
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Huang has played down Google's ability to compete with his company meaningfully. In April, appearing on the podcaster Dwarkesh
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Patel's show, Huang said Nvidia enjoys a wide lead over Google and other makers of custom chips known as ASICs, and argued that Anthropic is Google's only significant
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external customer for the tpu.
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Our market research is far greater than any TPU or ASIC can possibly, huang said. I would love to hear them demonstrate
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the cost advantages of TPUs.
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It makes no sense in my mind.
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In its most direct challenge to date, Google recently struck a $5 billion deal with Blackstone to establish a new cloud services company that would compete with coreweave
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and Nebius, two Nvidia backed cloud providers that exclusively use the chip giant's hardware stack.
B
They're clearly being more opportunistic and more aggressive about monetizing what they have relative
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to a few years ago, said Stacy Raskin, a tech analyst at Bernstein.
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But a few years ago the opportunity wasn't. Today, all we're hearing is that nobody
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has enough compute, end quote.
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Then a PwC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it to enhance human skills while leaving further behind those that use it to merely cut
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costs, quoting Bloomberg Artificial intelligence is pulling
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the global labor market in two opposite directions, rewarding companies that use AI to
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enhance human skills while leaving those who use it merely to cut costs further behind, a new study suggests.
B
Roles requiring specific AI skills increased almost eight times faster than the total job
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market in 2025, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP study. Such roles are also seeing higher wage growth. The PwC 2026 AI Jobs Barometer report showed.
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Jobs that can use AI to amplify human skills, such as creativity and judgment,
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are rising the fastest, with PwC naming
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radiologists and recruiters as examples.
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Jobs where AI makes the task easier for non experts to perform, such as IT service managers and medical secretaries, are seeing much slower growth.
B
The company seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation and create entirely new
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sources of value, said Joe Atkinson, PwC's global chief AI officer.
B
They're pulling further ahead on productivity and
C
growth than companies that focus primarily on automation. The report drew on Data including over 1 billion job postings across 27 countries and territories, combining labor market, financial and occupational information to track how AI is reshaping work skills, wages and productivity, end quote.
B
Finally today from the Verge, I didn't know this was a feature in iOS,
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but this sounds useful to me. So FYI quote introduced in 2024, Apple's
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vehicle motion cues promise to tap into your device's accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or in my case, even eliminate the
C
motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.
B
According to Big S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car
C
turning, braking and accelerating motion cues solve
B
this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car.
C
When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left. When the car brakes, the dots slide forward.
B
It sounds preposterous, but I'm here to
C
tell you that it actually works.
B
Once enabled, I've comfortably read books in
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the Kindle app on my phone for
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a few hours at a go and even written thousand word reviews while my
C
wife drove our camper van to the next destination. She uses Apple's vehicle motion cues now, too, because because they've been a game changer for how we balance work with life on the road.
B
Vehicle motion cues can be configured under accessibility settings in iOS, iPadOS, and macros.
C
They can be turned on offer set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected.
B
I made it easy to quickly toggle the motion cues on and off by
C
double tapping the back of my phone. To do the same, head over to
B
Accessibility touch back tap and set the
C
double tap gesture to vehicle motion cues ON devices supporting iOS 18 and above. End quote.
B
No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend.
C
Talk to you on Monday.
In this June 19, 2026 episode of Tech Brew Ride Home hosted by Brian McCullough, the show delivers a rapid news roundup focused on major developments in tech, gaming, and AI. Highlights include a long-awaited GTA VI launch date and pre-order news, major moves from Intel and Apple in semiconductor manufacturing, Waymo’s robotaxi troubles with construction zones, breakthrough open-source AI benchmarks, and a deep-dive on the evolving AI chip wars. The episode closes with insights on how AI impacts jobs and a surprising iOS feature that reduces motion sickness.
Notable Quote:
“I decided to help intel because we need to design and build our chips right here in America.” — President Trump, quoting Truth Social (02:37)
Memorable Moment:
Viral video of Waymo driving into a construction zone: “We’re dead. We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.” — Slade (passenger), CBS News (06:28–06:29)
Notable Quote:
“Once Rockstar and Take Two start showing off… and swapping social media icons and banners, you can be pretty damn sure that everyone involved is confident that the game is coming out as planned, barring some catastrophic event.” (08:20)
Quote:
“I can’t believe GLM 5.2 is beating Opus 4.8.” — Julian Goldie, AI reviewer (11:21–11:23)
A. The Google-Nvidia Chip Battle (14:26–16:50)
Quote:
“They want to be in the game. They don’t want to be left behind.” — Nazar Khan, TerraWolf CEO (15:17–15:18)
B. PwC Study: AI Fuels Divide in Job Market (16:53–18:19)
Notable Insight:
“Companies seeing the greatest returns on AI are using it to amplify human expertise, accelerate innovation, and create entirely new sources of value.” — Joe Atkinson, PwC global chief AI officer (17:54)
Practical Tip:
“Head over to Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and set the double tap gesture to Vehicle Motion Cues on devices supporting iOS 18 and above.” (19:40–19:43)
This episode offers a brisk, insightful look at the forces shaping tech, gaming, and AI in 2026—blending hot headlines, industry analysis, and practical takeaways. Whether you’re tracking hardware juggernauts, awaiting Rockstar’s next move, or pondering AI’s workforce impacts, you’ll find concise context and colorful commentary throughout.