🤖 Saudi’s $40 B “Humain” AI push | 🍏 Apple set to bump iPhone prices | 🕵️ Deepfake job scams surge

🔥 Warm-Up

Hey there, bandwidth-bandit—welcome to Monday’s link buffet.

• Riyadh just fired up a brand-new AI champion and handed it a royal budget.

• Apple’s next iPhones could cost more—because Tim needs a bigger piggy bank.

• Deepfake scammers are turning every Zoom call into CSI: Background Check.

• Google’s Veo 2 is secretly moon-lighting on Honor phones to turn photos into micro-movies.

• YouTube’s TV app now pushes Shorts above your subs feed—grab the remote before the cringe sets in.

💰 The Market

🚀 Today in Tech

Saudi crown prince launches ‘Humain,’ a new AI venture

• Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-launches-company-develop-artificial-intelligence-under-pif-2025-05-12/
  
  TL;DR: Mohammed bin Salman just unboxed “Humain,” a $40 billion Public Investment Fund play aimed at Arabic LLMs, hyperscale data centers, and cloud services. The kingdom wants to become the Sand-Hill-Road-in-the-desert and lure global devs with tax holidays and subsidized GPUs. Skeptics note that previous mega-projects still sit half-built in the dunes. But for now, Riyadh is writing the biggest AI check outside Silicon Valley.

Higher sticker shock looms for Apple’s next iPhones

• Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/12/apple-reportedly-plans-to-hike-prices-of-upcoming-iphones/
  
  TL;DR: Supply-chain whispers say Apple will nudge iPhone prices up this fall, citing pricier curved glass and beefier neural chips. Analysts expect a $50–$150 bump across Pro models, more in Europe after FX math. Cupertino may offset the sting with generous trade-ins and flashy new spatial-video modes. And yes—apparently inflation really is baked into Apple pie.

Deepfake job scams are making trust a full-time job

• Source: https://www.wired.com/story/paranoia-social-engineering-real-fake
  
  TL;DR: WIRED tracks a spike in AI-generated interview impostors, with scammers lip-syncing stolen résumés over Zoom. HR teams now quiz candidates on local trivia, demand rapid head-turns, and ping LinkedIn contacts to verify identities. Start-ups are rushing out voice-liveness APIs and on-device face-mapping SDKs. Until then, that “perfect” applicant might literally be too good to be true.

Honor phones get first dibs on Google’s Veo 2 photo-to-video trick

• Source: https://www.theverge.com/news/664812/google-honor-ai-image-to-video-gemini
  
  TL;DR: The upcoming Honor 400 series bakes in Google’s Veo 2, generating 5-second clips from a single still—think live Harry-Potter photos but IRL. Users get ten freebies a day before the cloud meter starts ticking. Early demos nailed a sunset timelapse but turned a cat portrait into an avant-garde nightmare. Full rollout to Pixels happens “later this year,” per Google PR.

YouTube’s TV app shoves Shorts above your subs feed

• Source: https://9to5google.com/2025/05/12/youtube-app-tv-shorts-subscriptions-feed/
  
  TL;DR: The latest YouTube TV-app update plants an un-dismissable Shorts carousel atop subscriptions, hogging half the screen. Google argues it “surfaces discovery across form factors” while creators groan about vertical-video creep. Users can hide individual Shorts but not the row itself. At least autoplay is mercifully muted by default—for now.

🎲 Link Grab-Bag

• TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/09/google-i-o-2025-what-to-expect-including-updates-to-gemini-and-android-16/ — cheat sheet for Google I/O hype hunters.
  

• Slashdot: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/12/1234204/us-copyright-office-to-ai-companies-fair-use-isnt-commercial-use-of-vast-troves-of-copyrighted-works — Copyright Office tells AI firms “fair use ≠ free buffet.”
  

• GitHub: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed — multiplayer code editor Zed hits 58 k stars and a fresh Rust-powered alpha.
  

• Show HN: https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp — fast, faster, fastmcp. Build mcp servers and clients.
  

• Boing Boing: https://boingboing.net/2025/05/08/some-guy-made-chess-interesting-by-turning-it-into-tiny-3d-printed-sushi-pieces.html — 3D-printed sushi chess turns checkmate into check-maki.

🏁 Sign-off

See you tomorrow—may your packets fly fast and your tariff charts stay boring. ✨