Four things that happened in tech worth knowing. Two lines each, link to the source.
OpenAI ships GPT-5.6, and the US government slows its release
The new model comes in three tiers (the top one is called Sol) and two reasoning modes, one of which sends several sub-agents to work in parallel. The unusual part: the US administration asked OpenAI to open initial access only to a few trusted partners, approved case by case, for security reasons. A very powerful model that launches with the handbrake on.
The first real US AI law takes effect
As of June 30, the Colorado AI Act is live, the first comprehensive US state law on artificial intelligence to actually come into force. It covers systems that make important decisions about people (jobs, credit, healthcare) and demands transparency and bias controls. It is the first concrete test for anyone building AI in the United States.
OpenAI builds its own chip: meet Jalapeño
On June 25 OpenAI unveiled, with Broadcom, its first custom chip for inference, the process of running already-trained models. It joins Google, Apple, and Amazon in building its own silicon to depend less on Nvidia. The race is no longer only about models, it is about who owns the hardware that runs them.
IBM shows off the first sub-nanometer chip
IBM unveiled a 0.7-nanometer chip with nearly 100 billion transistors on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail. It promises 50% more power, or 70% less energy use. Translation: more AI with less energy, which today is the real bottleneck.
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