AMD to Acquire World Labs for $8.2 Billion; Apple Fixes iPhone 18 Pro Face ID Bug

World Labs develops spatial intelligence models that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, and it also studies robot learning and simulation. AMD said the acquisition will give its chip and system teams a more direct understanding of the compute requirements for models in inference, robotics and physical AI scenarios. The World Labs team will continue to work on model research.

Apple released iOS 27.0.1 for iPhone 18 Pro models, fixing a problem that caused Face ID verification to freeze and the phone to restart. First Financial said on Sept. 28 that Apple customer service had received user reports about the issue and had submitted it to its engineering department. Apple later pushed the update, whose changelog says it fixes unexpected restarts during Face ID verification. 9to5Mac reproduced the fault on an iPhone 18 Pro: when unlocking the Passwords app with Face ID, covering the face and then trying to authenticate again caused the phone to stop responding and restart. The issue appears in protected apps and may not occur during ordinary lock-screen unlocking; the affected range is unclear.

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in the Claude 5.5 series after Opus 5.5. Anthropic said the new model's output speed is more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and that in its tests the cost of completing similar tasks fell by up to 30%, while API input and output prices per million tokens remain the same as the previous generation. The model is positioned for everyday coding and office tasks such as fixing bugs and producing documents, slides and spreadsheets. In Anthropic's published Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding test, Sonnet 5.5 scored 70.6%, compared with 10.3% for the previous generation; these are the vendor's published results. The model is available on Claude platforms and major cloud services under the API ID claude-sonnet-5-5.

SpaceX's Starship launched from Texas on Sept. 28 and, on its 14th test flight, completed an orbital insertion burn for the first time and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. The satellites entered orbit, unlike earlier test payloads that were deployed and then returned to the atmosphere on suborbital trajectories. During the upper stage's ascent, one Raptor engine shut down early. After checking the status, the flight control team decided to complete the orbital insertion burn with a single engine. The Super Heavy booster made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned. After satellite deployment, SpaceX shortened the upper stage's originally planned nearly 10-hour flight and arranged for it to deorbit and splash down in the North Pacific.

Xiaomi's large-model team head Luo Fuli, 31, was promoted to level 22, according to a report by LatePost. People close to Xiaomi said level 22 is the highest level in Xiaomi's job-grade system and that further advancement mainly appears as changes in responsibilities; several other business heads were also promoted. On the same day, MiMo released two models, MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash. Pro targets complex projects and long-horizon tasks, while Flash focuses on high-frequency calls and large-scale workflows. In July, Xiaomi adjusted the organizational structure of Xiao Ai, splitting technical capabilities into foundation models, cloud and on-device parts, with Luo Fuli's MiMo team providing foundation-model capabilities.

Manus released version 2.0 on Sept. 28. The update includes the Cascade agent operating framework, purchasable cloud computers, event-triggered automation and a desktop workspace called Manus Studio. Manus said that in one test configuration Cascade used 23.2% fewer tokens than the previous system and reduced task time by 28.2%; the result came from Manus's own tests. Cue, a new standalone personal agent app for phones and desktops, lets users configure separate email addresses, phone numbers, wallets and computers for each agent so they can handle messages, answer calls and make payments within a user-set budget. Manus Studio provides creation environments for documents, spreadsheets, websites, code and video, and its video editor allows users to directly modify timelines and materials generated by agents.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other departments issued a plan for the new battery industry during the 15th Five-Year Plan period, Xinhua reported on Sept. 28. The plan proposes that by 2030 all-solid-state batteries will initially achieve scaled application, long-life lithium batteries will reach a cycle life of 15,000 cycles, and leading companies will achieve product defect rates at the PPB level. It lists advanced electrode materials, new electrolytes and high-end auxiliary materials as technology breakthrough directions and calls for faster integration of new batteries with clean energy and energy-consuming terminals. The phrase "initially achieve scaled application" is a 2030 planning target and does not mean all-solid-state batteries are already mass-produced on a large scale.

Counterpoint Research said in a Sept. 24 forecast that global annual shipments of smartphones priced below $200 will fall by more than 230 million units by 2030 from 2025, a decline of about 40%. Total global smartphone shipments are expected to recover to about 1.2 billion units in the same period, close to the 2025 level, while shipments of models priced at $200 and above are expected to grow by about 26%. The research firm attributed the contraction in low-priced phones to rising memory and chipset costs, higher minimum device configuration requirements and reduced investment by vendors in non-priority markets. Counterpoint said not all lost low-end demand will shift to mid-range phones: some users will extend replacement cycles or buy second-hand and refurbished devices, and in low-income markets fewer low-priced new phones could slow first-time purchases.

Jin Yuzhi, CEO of Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solution BU and Yinwang, responded on Sept. 28 to the question of whether carmakers' money is being earned by Huawei. He said Huawei wants win-win cooperation with automakers and that carmakers and component suppliers need deeper coordination rather than treating every link as something that must be developed in-house. Using intelligent driving systems as an example, he said automakers targeting mid- and low-priced models especially need to calculate the cost of in-house development. Some automakers sell fewer than 1 million vehicles a year, making it difficult to spread R&D investment across enough cars; after software delivery, they still bear hardware, domain-controller and continuous-iteration costs. This is his reason for advocating division of labor between carmakers and suppliers.

Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, wrote on Sept. 28 that developing batteries in-house does not mean "de-CATL-ization." He said vehicle companies define product experience, system architecture and quality standards, while suppliers contribute manufacturing processes and large-scale delivery capabilities, and that describing Li Auto's battery strategy as "de-XX-ization" mischaracterizes the relationship as a zero-sum game. He cited chip-industry division of labor: Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm design chips while TSMC manufactures them, and Tesla develops battery technology while also working with companies such as CATL. Li thanked CATL for its early cooperation and listed three reasons for continuing deep battery research: some requirements for range, low-temperature performance, charging speed and safety have no ready-made solutions; cells, packs, battery management, thermal management and vehicle control should be designed together; and quality data across materials, cell production, pack manufacturing and vehicle use should be connected. He said Li Auto's Lianshan system has been connected to vehicle and supplier production lines to trace each cell and detect production anomalies before delivery. The conclusion, he said, is that no matter who manufactures the batteries, Li Auto remains responsible for user safety and after-sales service, so it welcomes deeper supplier involvement in product development.

Other companies also made announcements. Honor launched the Magic9, Magic9 Pro Max and Magic9 Ultra, along with the MagicPad 4 tablet and Watch 6 Pro; the Magic9 series starts at 4,499 yuan. The Zhijie RX was officially launched, with Yu Chengdong calling it the "best-driving car" in HarmonyOS Smart Mobility. Huawei open-sourced Pangu 2.0 training code, with repositories for pretraining, SFT and reinforcement learning. Nvidia introduced an AI agent security platform that uses independent hardware to monitor privilege escalation. MiniMax launched M3.1-Flash-Preview, first opened on a coding platform. Qwen was integrated with Quark Netdisk, allowing it to read and organize personal files with authorization. BOOX released the card-sized E Ink device Picco, which can magnetically attach to the back of a phone, and Honor released the magnetic E Ink reader S3 for 359 yuan. OpenRouter's anonymous model Space Bunny Alpha ranked first on its latest single-day token usage list, processing about 3.99 trillion tokens. The model was listed on Sept. 23 and supports text, image and video input, adjustable reasoning intensity and a 1 million-token context window, with free use during the preview period. Interface News reviewed developer speculation about the model's origin; some inferred from tokenization results that it is related to MiniMax models. OpenRouter still labels the developer and operator as an anonymous third party, and MiniMax has not confirmed the relationship. The ranking reflects usage on OpenRouter and does not represent total global usage.