Codes of Culture | Issue 111
Everything Announced on Apple's Developers Conference.
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
June has been a wild ride so far, and I’m sending this newsletter out en route to Founders Forum Global at Soho Farmhouse. Over the next few weeks, we will only share one newsletter a week and will be back to regular programming from July.
This week's news recap was Apple's developers conference, and also for all the fashion tech enthusiasts in our network. Remember to reply to this if you will be at Cannes Lions in a couple of weeks.
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📖In this issue:
OpenAI’s biggest redesign of ChatGPT since launch.
Waymo acquires Apple’s former autonomous vehicle testing site for $220 million.
WWDC 2026: Apple rebuilds Siri with Gemini, rolls out iOS 27, and sharpens its AI strategy.
Fashion Tech’s largest-ever industry conference.
eBay backs AI textile-sorting startup Trosort.
1. AI PLATFORMS AND CAPITAL STRATEGY
OpenAI’s biggest redesign of ChatGPT since launch.
What’s happening: OpenAI is preparing the largest redesign of ChatGPT since the product launched, recasting it as a super app built around AI agents, coding tools, image generation, and third-party integrations. The overhaul begins rolling out across web and mobile in the coming weeks. A senior employee put the internal conviction plainly: "Chat is dead." Business customers already account for 40% of revenue, a figure OpenAI aims to raise to 50% by year's end. Codex, its coding product, has grown sixfold to more than 5 million weekly active users since February and forms the spine of the new experience. Launch partners include Canva and Booking.com. The redesign is timed to an IPO that could value the company at $850 billion.
TLDR:
The redesign moves ChatGPT from question-and-answer to task execution. The frame is no longer assistant, it is an agent.
Codex is the proof of concept: sixfold user growth in four months, now being embedded into the main product for a general audience.
Business customers at 40% of revenue, target 50% by year end. The IPO pitch is built on this number moving.
ChatGPT, Codex, and product teams have been consolidated under new CPO Thibault Sottiaux. Several senior executives, including former CPO Kevin Weil, have departed.
OpenAI shut down Sora, its video-generation product, less than a year after launch. Consumer-facing initiatives are being shelved in favour of enterprise tools with better margins.
Why it matters: OpenAI is steering 900 million weekly users toward higher-margin tools, ahead of a public listing, and directly competing with Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce for the same corporate budgets. The product convergence between OpenAI and Anthropic, both now pitching enterprises ahead of IPOs, is compressing the competitive window. The tooling landscape being evaluated today will look different before the next procurement cycle opens.
2. PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND CAPITAL REALLOCATION
Waymo acquires Apple’s former autonomous vehicle testing site for $220 million.
What’s happening: Waymo acquired a 5,500-acre autonomous vehicle testing facility in Wittman, Arizona, for $220 million from a shell company associated with Apple. The sale was recorded in early June. Apple had purchased the property in 2021 for $125 million, having rented access to it for years while running Project Titan, its self-driving car programme, which was eventually cancelled in 2024 after billions in expenditure. The facility includes a 115-acre city course, a vehicle dynamics area, a four-mile oval track, and a freeway course purpose-built for autonomous testing. Waymo confirmed the acquisition and said it will use the site for rider-only testing, motion control, and operational training workflows. The company is currently expanding toward tens of thousands of robotaxis annually from a fleet of close to 4,000 vehicles.
TLDR:
Apple spent years and billions on Project Titan before cancelling it. The physical infrastructure it has built is now directly operational inside the market leader in autonomous vehicles.
Waymo paid a $95 million premium over Apple’s 2021 acquisition price. Purpose-built AV test infrastructure at this scale rarely comes to market.
The facility adds a fourth major testing environment to Waymo’s existing network, in Waymo’s first and largest commercial market.
Waymo’s fleet expansion toward tens of thousands of vehicles makes controlled test infrastructure a hard operational requirement.
The transaction closes a loop: capital Apple allocated to a cancelled hardware bet is now compounding inside the infrastructure layer of a working one.
Why it matters: The more interesting frame here is what Apple's exit reveals. A decade of Project Titan spending has quietly resolved as physical assets absorbed by the companies that stayed. Autonomous vehicle investors and mobility infrastructure operators should note that the test and deployment layer is consolidating around Waymo's vertical model, from Arizona proving ground to Zeekr factory outfitting to commercial fleet, at a pace the public coverage hasn't fully registered.
3. AI, HARDWARE AND PLATFORM STRATEGY
WWDC 2026: Apple rebuilds Siri with Gemini, rolls out iOS 27, and sharpens its AI strategy.
What’s happening: Apple's WWDC keynote introduced a substantially rebuilt Siri, with Google Gemini now powering the underlying AI layer. The updated assistant launches as a standalone app in addition to its existing system-level presence, and Apple claims it will be more capable, more conversational, and compatible with visual intelligence. Craig Federighi opened the announcement with a privacy commitment: data is used only to execute requests, verifiable by outside experts at any time. iOS 27, compatible with devices back to the iPhone 11, brings performance improvements, including 70% faster photo loading and 80% faster AirDrop. WWDC was Tim Cook's last as CEO. He steps down in September, with hardware engineering head John Ternus succeeding him.
TLDR:
Gemini under the hood: Apple is outsourcing the AI model layer to Google while retaining the interface, the data architecture, and the privacy narrative.
iOS 27 runs on every iPhone from the 11 onward. The addressable base for AI-capable Apple devices has expanded significantly.
“Privacy in AI is non-negotiable” is Apple’s declared positioning against the consumer AI field. The trust argument is the product.
Tim Cook’s final keynote marks a transition in platform and leadership at the same time. Ternus brings hardware instincts to an era defined by software intelligence.
The Liquid Glass design system is getting opt-in rollback options, a quiet acknowledgement of sustained user resistance.
Why it matters: The structural implication is clear: Apple has ceded the AI model layer to Google while hardening its grip on the interface and the privacy frame. That is a deliberate platform position. The 1 billion-plus active iPhone users now have Gemini's capabilities delivered under Apple's trust architecture. Luxury and retail brands building voice, visual, and ambient AI commerce experiences should note that iOS 27's expanded install base and Siri's rebuilt capability set are the consumer surface area on which those experiences land.
4. FASHION TECH AND INDUSTRY INFRASTRUCTURE
Fashion Tech's largest-ever industry conference.
What’s happening: The FASHIONOLOGY Summit, held at The Glasshouse in New York and co-produced by Manya Jain and Mary Korlin-Downs of All Things Fashion Tech, drew 1,400 attendees across nine panel tracks, an innovation expo, and a sensory gallery featuring live wearables demos, a content studio, and a scent salon. Topics spanned agentic commerce, virtual try-on, trend forecasting and data, wearables, manufacturing and design, the creator economy, brand discovery, and the future of commerce. Every subject on the agenda was actively deployed somewhere in the market. The event was the largest fashion tech gathering the industry has produced.
TLDR:
1,400 attendees: founders, brand leaders, investors, creators, and press in the same room. The scale signals institutional weight.
Nine panel tracks covering agentic commerce, virtual try-on, wearables, and manufacturing. The breadth reflects how many adjacent categories now overlap with fashion tech.
The sensory gallery ran live product demos alongside a content studio and scent activations, industry convening and experiential proof-of-concept in the same format.
The summit was co-produced by All Things Fashion Tech, a newsletter-to-conference arc that reflects how serious industry discourse is being built outside traditional media.
The founding question, what exactly is fashion tech?, has a working answer now. The category has operators, capital, and commercial products behind it.
Why it matters: Creative directors and retail executives with commercial technology decisions approaching should treat the FASHIONOLOGY topic list as a live map of where operational capability is maturing. Agentic commerce, AI-powered trend forecasting, and physics-based virtual try-on are entering procurement conversations. The useful question is which vendors are building genuine category depth and which are still at the pitch-deck stage.
5. CIRCULAR FASHION AND OPERATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
eBay backs AI textile-sorting startup Trosort.
What’s happening: Trosort, a Belgium-based startup founded in 2023, was named the global winner of eBay's 2026 Circular Fashion Fund at an awards event held at The Ned in New York, taking a $300,000 investment from eBay Ventures. Selected from eight international finalists, Trosort was recognised for building the infrastructure that circular fashion has consistently lacked: the ability to process secondhand garments at scale. Its hardware and AI system assign a digital identity to 1,200 garments per hour, gather full metadata, and sort clothing for reuse, repair, upcycling, or recycling. Founder Achille Mathot put the problem directly: the world discards six times more fashion items than it can sort; the rest is landfilled or incinerated. Trosort sells the system as a hardware service, automating resale listings and, as Mathot described it, becoming the brain and heart of sorting centres. He plans to use the investment to build a US team.
TLDR:
1,200 garments processed per hour, full metadata captured, sorted by end destination. The throughput gap between consumer intent and circular reality is an infrastructure problem; Trosort is addressing it at the processing layer.
The system automates resale listings from the sort. The value capture extends beyond the physical sort into the digital commerce pipeline.
Eight international finalists across the EU, UK, US, and Australia. Each received $50,000. The fund is in its fourth year and has backed more than 30 businesses globally.
Mathot’s statistic from the stage: the world discards six times more fashion items than it can sort. That gap is where Trosort operates.
The judging panel included the CEO of the Global Fashion Agenda, the Chief Strategy Officer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and a senior editor at Vogue. The evaluation frame is systemic, not only commercial.
Why it matters: Luxury and fashion brands with circular commitments on the record should note where their investments are going. The gap between consumer-facing resale programmes and operational reality behind them is a logistics problem the industry has largely treated as a communications one. Capital is now moving toward the actual bottleneck. Brands that treat circular as an infrastructure investment rather than a brand position will hold a structural advantage as EU regulation raises the operational floor.