Daily AI Briefing

In August, Nscale and Anthropic announced a $45 billion compute deal. The two companies are reportedly discussing yet another deal of the same magnitude.

EmbeddingGemma 2 packs text, code, image, video and audio search into 270M to 740M parameters. See what it does well and where it falls… Continue reading on Towards AI »

AI labs have staked their reputations on model benchmarking — the supposedly neutral and accurate system of evaluations that are designed to measure whether one AI product is better than another. However, the methods behind these evaluations are complicated and still maturing, said Irene Solaiman, Hugging Face’s chief policy officer, during a discussion at TechCrunch […]

As of 18 September 2026, Microsoft’s public Copilot-in-Fabric documentation lists 100 CU seconds per 1,000 input tokens, 10 CU seconds per… Continue reading on Towards AI »

President Donald Trump announced this afternoon that Elon Musk's SpaceX shares for children will be given through Trump Accounts. Musk said earlier today that he would give one of his SpaceX shares to "every kid in America" sometime next year. Musk had thanked Trump Account booster Brad Gerstner for "helping enable this," and Trump appeared to confirm the plan in a post on Truth Social. Given the value of SpaceX's stock on Friday, 72 million shares would be worth approximately $10.5 billion, ac

System can estimate a person’s biological age and predict chances of cancer survival from a single photograph Doctors have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can predict a cancer patient’s chances of survival from a single photograph of their face. The AI system was custom-built by experts at Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit, integrated academic healthcare system in Massachusetts, to estimate biological age and directly predict survival outcomes in patients diagnosed with cancer. C

Microsoft wants enterprises to closely watch the agents employees use with systems not controlled by AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Semantic code search that runs locally. Chunk, embed, and search your repo by meaning with EmbeddingGemma 2. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The US is building more fossil fuel infrastructure than it has in a decade while renewable energy growth slows down, a new report shows. Electricity demand is also climbing faster than it has in more than a decade with more data centers, factories, and electric vehicles plugging into the grid. Despite those growing demands, the Trump administration has sought to hobble the wind and solar industries in favor of fossil fuels. America's energy landscape is already shifting as a result, according to

CoreWeave had a bad week last week. Its bonds slipped into distressed territory by a common definition - when investors demand 1,000 basis points more in yield than they'd get from government bonds. Last Tuesady Chamath "SPAC King" Palihapitiya noticed the distressed debt, and also asked whether the AI buildout was a private credit bubble. Its shares are down more than 20 percent since Tuesday's close, which is kind of a lot! There even seemed to be some collateral damage in the market on other

The Miles is a smart plug for your car. My 15-year-old daughter just got her learner's permit, so when I was pitched a new gadget tailored to teen drivers, I was intrigued. The Miles Plug is a small device that plugs into your car's OBD-II port and monitors location, driving habits, and vehicle health, along with emergency accident response and roadside assistance. The idea is that knowing all these things should help me feel more comfortable when my daughter starts driving alone. I tested th

Your users already learned how to use AI from a chat box, so here is how to design for that habit without trapping them in it. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Amazon wants to break Nvidia’s hold on PyTorch, the free toolkit used to build most AI apps, so that more developers run their apps on alternative chips like its own.

OpenCode is an open source AI coding agent that's become a popular alternative to Claude Code and Cursor. But hackers got into part of its online platform and stole some users’ API keys, and the AI tools it turned to for help kept refusing to look at the malicious code.

AI companion app Tolan has raised another $30 million after attracting more than 250,000 active users.

Sony’s WF-1000XM6 are on sale in black today only. | Image: Sony For a very limited time, Sony’s latest high-end noise-canceling earbuds are actually cheaper than their last-gen counterpart, the WF-1000XM5. B&H Photo is selling Sony’s latest WF-1000XM6 in black for an all-time low of $238 ($92 off) at checkout. Other retailers aren’t currently offering a discount on the XM6. Sony WF-1000XM6 earbuds Where to Buy: $329.99 $238 at B&H Photo The XM6 are a solid upgrade over their predecessor a

Eugenia Kuyda's newest startup Wabi is positioned to take advantage of an idea she had more than a decade ago. Wabi offers a personal AI assistant with a twist, free and downloadable to anyone today.

After drawing acquisition interest earlier this year, the Nvidia challenger raised $1.5 billion to remain independent.

Alex Tait on a proposed amendment to the representation of the people bill, and Dr Joseph Mullen on Russian interference in the Brexit referendum Andy Burnham’s comments about Russian interference in Brexit (Report, 11 October) and the warning by the MI5 chief, Ken McCallum, against exaggerating its impact (Report, 13 October) risk overlooking another serious threat to electoral integrity: disinformation from our own political parties and campaigners. Foreign interference deserves scrutiny, but

Fed up with ads, tracking, and sluggish interfaces, some smart TV owners are turning to AI agents to strip away bloatware and take back control of their TVs.

Apple has sent invites to a second product launch this month, and it's scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. At the event, Apple is set to announce new Macs and a refreshed iPad Mini, according to Bloomberg. The big announcement is expected to be a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen that's also lighter and has an iPhone-like Dynamic Island. But Apple is also planning on revealing a 14-inch MacBook Pro and a new iMac with the M6 chip, which was recently introduced with the Ma

It’ll be several years before the facility is complete, but this digital rendering gives us some idea of what it’ll look like. | Image: Amazon Amazon has signed an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power (AEP) to fund the building of a new nuclear energy facility in Indiana. The proposed plant, which would replace the now defunct coal-fueled Breed Generating Station in Fairbanks, Sullivan County, aims to provide up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free energy for both the regional power

Nvidia is leaning hard into the trend of enterprise companies wanting to run their own open models in their own data centers and also trying to make on-device, private AI agents a thing.

The front view of the Mac Mini. | Image: The Verge Best Buy has a great deal for the rest of the day on the M4 Mac Mini base model that has 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Normally, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to buy the M4 model for its usual $799 price given that the newer, faster M6 version has been available from Amazon for $779.99 (originally $899) for the past couple of weeks. However, at $649 it’s a much more tempting price. The M4 Mac Mini launched at $599 in 2024, and was an incredible v

Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming up next month, and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes are pretty high right now. So I asked Gov. Pritzker about all that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone signed a letter of intent saying they're considering a joint bid for spectrum that would support European direct-to-device satellite competition for SpaceX's Starlink. The four telecom companies say they would handle the ground infrastructure while a separate, unannounced satellite partner provides the satellite constellation: The joint initiative by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone has a clear ambition: to meet customer demand

Monitoring tools common in a range of workplaces, including factories, office jobs, delivery work and in retail – often without employees being informed Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Employers are increasingly using technology, from CCTV to keystroke monitoring, to track workers’ moves and it is being accelerated by the use of AI, the Human Technology Institute has warned. Examples provided to Guardian Australia by the institute include a fast-food restaurant usin

The $48bn giveaway comes amid concerns about the tech and as the company prepares for a stock market listing Anthropic has said it will commit 5% of its shares to a fund for the “public good”, as the AI developer behind the Claude chatbot seeks to bolster its appeal before its stock market listing. The company announced it would commit the shares, worth around $48bn (£36bn) at its latest valuation in May, subject to shareholder approval. It will add a further 2% of its stock to the fund for ever

Learn how OpenAI is improving ChatGPT across low-resource programming languages, with new evaluations for software engineering, SQLite, and COBOL migration.

Exclusive: Using test accounts acting as 13-year-olds, Tech Transparency Project downloaded 135 apps with features to generate nonconsensual nude imagery In December 2025, Morgan Dorfman received distressing news: a student at her daughter’s Pennsylvania high school was making AI-generated pornographic material using the daughter’s image. He was using an artificial intelligence image-editing app called Movely to create sexual videos from pictures of her daughter and five other girls. Continue r

Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian government has been warned against giving in to “strong-arming” from tech companies seeking to weaken copy

In this article, we explore adding custom tools and MCP servers to Bedrock AgentCore agents, deploying them to AWS account, and testing them via AgentCore Dev UI. The post Extending AgentCore Agents with Custom Tools and MCP Servers appeared first on DebuggerCafe.

Anthropic said that it will commit 5% of its shares to the fund.

Mister Organ doesn't reach the level of societal horror of The Act of Killing or the creepypasta-meets-true-crime gruesomeness of Beware the Slenderman, but there's something deeply unsettling about Michael Organ and his intimate campaign of terror against everyone who enters his life. Mister Organ is a documentary by David Farrier, an Auckland, New Zealand journalist. The movie starts with Farrier reporting on Bashford Antiques, a shop in Ponsonby that has begun aggressively clamping cars in i

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward." Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arreste

The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward with a higher offer.

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district in the Bronx introduced the Power To The Players Act this week. If passed, the bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to establish regulations that guarantee consumers ownership of a game when they pay for it, rather than a licensing agreement. It's increasingly common for games sold to require a connection to a server. Meaning that when a company decides to shut down those servers, the games often become unplayable. Rep. Torr

The Legion Go S with SteamOS is a pretty solid alternative to the $789 Steam Deck OLED. It runs identical software, but ships in a design with two-stage triggers, a bigger eight-inch IPS screen (1080p and up to 120Hz versus 800p and 90Hz in the Deck OLED), and it’s got double the RAM and storage (32GB and 1TB, respectively), not to mention a slightly faster processor in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. At $999.99, its current discounted price at Best Buy, it’s worth considering if you’re deciding on a hand

Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since

Exclusive: Rightwing lobby group, which says state poll is trial run for next federal election, accused of undermining Victorian Liberal messaging Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast Victorian Coalition MPs have criticised a prominent conservative lobby group’s pre-election campaign as “bizarre” and warned it may cost them a majority government at the November state election. But the criticism has been dismissed as “galactically stupid” by Advance, which has rebuked the

J Mascis on stage during Dinosaur Jr.’s Baby’s Alright show in NYC. | Photo: Terrence O’Brien Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis is known as something of a slacker guitar god. He stands stoically onstage, barely moving, as he seemingly effortlessly works through deft guitar solos and lopsided riffs. Unfortunately, Mascis has developed a similar reputation as an interview subject, quietly sitting and offering deft nonanswers. That's not to say that Mascis can't be funny or charming. As our intervie

The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about. Yet a report this week from Anthropic’s offensive research team grabbed attention by describing a new, practica