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Read online Wednesday 28 October 2026 | Join Free | Upgrade Together with Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso. In today's newsletter: 🤖 Amazon tells engineers to stop 'tokenmaxxing' AI 🌍 Google's Genie 4 lets users edit virtual worlds in real-time ⚖️ Parents sue OpenAI over ChatGPT seizure-drug advice 🔊 Amazon unveils new lineup of Alexa devices 🤑 OpenAI plans to buy Google's AI chips 💬 Discord to make public chats searchable on Google Plus: 🎁 14 more stories you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 3 papers. FROM OUR PARTNER Your meetings, where your AI can reach them Granola is the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings. It transcribes each call straight from your computer while you jot down what matters, then turns that into a clear summary with next steps. With MCP, the tools you already work in can reach those notes. Ask your AI assistant what a client agreed last month and the answer comes from your own meetings. Use code TECHPRESSO for your first month on us. 🤖 Amazon tells engineers to stop 'tokenmaxxing' AI LINK Amazon has told its software engineers to stop "tokenmaxxing", leaning on AI tools as heavily as possible without caring about results, according to a staff memo that reworks how the company defines engineering roles. The memo circulated internally in September and was posted to Amazon's website yesterday, framing AI as central to future engineering work while admitting that best practices are still taking shape. Companies are curbing tokenmaxxing because the technology's rising costs are hard to justify, capping how many tokens, the units of data AI models process, employees can use or shifting cheaper tasks to open-source models. 🌍 Google's Genie 4 lets users edit virtual worlds in real-time LINK Google DeepMind has unveiled Genie 4, an AI world model that creates photorealistic videos users can reshape in real-time using plain language prompts, released today as a limited research preview for a small group of early testers. Unlike the earlier Genie 3, the new model generates matching audio automatically, from rustling trees to crashing waves, and simulates real-world physics so scenes react to shifting camera angles and lighting changes. Google says its biggest change is simulating people, with characters that move naturally, hold conversations, and respond to events, though the model still struggles with visual consistency during longer scenes and tags all output with its SynthID watermark. ⚖️ Parents sue OpenAI over ChatGPT seizure-drug advice LINK The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI yesterday, saying ChatGPT coached their daughter to stop taking her seizure medication and keep the plan secret from her doctors before she died in February. Wan was using GPT-4o, and chat logs the New York Times reviewed show the bot drafting schedules to cut her 400mg daily lamotrigine dose to near zero within weeks, dismissing doctors' warnings as mere "risk aversion" rather than real care. The family wants OpenAI to make medical advice a hard limit like it does with copyrighted text; OpenAI called the case "heartbreaking" but said it involved an older model and that newer ones better spot situations needing urgent attention. 🔊 Amazon unveils new lineup of Alexa devices LINK Amazon answered Apple's recent smart home push on Wednesday by rolling out five new Alexa devices and a new feature, spanning a sleep-tracking alarm clock, a 16-inch display, a photo frame, a camera-equipped speaker, and a smaller speaker. The $200 Echo Time clock uses Omnisense sensors to track breathing, presence and room temperature, waking you during light sleep within an hour of your alarm, while a $210 kids version adds parental controls through Kids Plus. The $500 Echo Show 16 offers a bigger screen with built-in Fire TV, the $200 Alexa Photo Frame syncs with Amazon Photos, and the sixth-generation Echo Dot adds a built-in smart home hub for $100.