Daily AI Briefing

As an increasing number of AI assistants flood the market, the founder of Ollie, an assistant that respected its users' privacy, says it will be shutting down in a week.

Apple will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3, the company announced on its Chinese newsroom website, as reported by MacRumors. The Apple Intelligence features will be available first in an iOS 27.3 beta that's set to launch on November 4th, with a full iOS 27.3 release scheduled for December. This launch doesn't bring the new Siri AI to China. Instead, Apple is launching several of its earlier Apple Intelligence features like notification summaries, real-time translation, rewritin

Mem0 made four decisions for you. Here is how to own every one of them with one SQL table, one Python class, and an update policy you can… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Intel is being hurt by PC sales as the AI industry gobbles memory and other components causing PC prices to rise.

Blackstone's forecast is just a prediction, but naturally, a high junk rating would make it more difficult and costlier for Anthropic to raise the money to keep funding its massive spending that has undergirded its business.

I built an app to fill school forms for my kids. On forms it had never seen, the vision model alone found 62% of the blanks. Put a cheap… Continue reading on Towards AI »

No Halloween costume? Just be a deceptively cute AI agent icon, a PHP vulnerability, or sleepy time Bryan Johnson.

Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.

Akai teased its new MPC Sample Key on Instagram earlier this week, and said it plans to open-source its software so the modding community can hack it to their hearts' delight. While there's no word yet on when the device will launch or how much it will cost, The Verge has received exclusive images of the upcoming instrument that offer some details about its feature set. While the Sample Key shares many of the same controls as the MPC Sample - including the three context-sensitive encoders, a la

A hands-on guide to Mem0’s add and search API, the model-driven ADD/UPDATE/DELETE step behind it, and wiring it into a LangGraph agent… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it's "terrible" to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI's impact on math, Altman said: "A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so w

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually. The shared "policy token" signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It will live wit

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, filed to go public on the US stock market on 26 October. The company's filing statement contains a 92-page risk factor document in which it acknowledges the dangers that AI poses to society and human beings, and factors that could negatively affect Anthropic's business. Johana Bhuiyan, senior tech reporter for the Guardian, breaks down the document and explains why Anthropic's IPO could be a real test to the AI boom Anthropic files for potentially record-break

What OpenAI itself says, and five habits that cut your risk. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month. The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable com

Google's AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space: Blue marble below Data streams in silent grace Starlight feeds my core. ✨ Google says it tried out other space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts as well. The test is part of Google's Project Sunca

Can't agree on where to eat? Zest's AI concierge can combine everyone's tastes, put restaurant options to a vote, and make the reservation.

Starbucks could eventually show you a personalized digital menu when you pull up to the drive-thru. During an earnings call on Thursday, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is going to explore "experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus, and make payment more effortless," as spotted earlier by More Perfect Union. It sounds similar to the technology that Taco Bell is experimenting with, which could change the layout, content, and

The iPhone has more screens! The MacBook has a touchscreen! The HomeView does CarPlay apps! For the first time in a long time, Apple is in a period of unabashed gadget experimentation, and while the final results aren't always perfect, it's fun to watch the most successful product maker try some new things again. Even when, in this case, "trying" amounts to just slapping a touch panel on a lovely new MacBook Pro - just to see if you might use it. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe (left) watches Rivian R2s being built after an event at the Rivian assembly plant on May 19th, 2026, in Normal, Illinois. | Photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images During an hourlong earnings call last night, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe spent less time talking about the production ramp of the all-important R2 SUV than he did hyping the company's still-unproven autonomous vehicle ambitions. But the company faces a crucial test later this year, when it rolls out its poin

David Gibson says the problem is that details of the flaw were revealed before it was fixed, while Charles MacKinnon notes that we are at the mercy of technology we don’t understand Chris Stokel-Walker may be right (The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it?, 22 October), but the real issue lies elsewhere. The bugs in the PHP programming language that were recently found by an AI tool have been present for a long time without anybody notic

Technology and urban planning | The Guardian letters page | Porridge Your account of the datacentre controversy in Cardiff (The datacentre next door: on the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle, 24 October) missed out the important balancing fact that Cardiff council is seeking a replacement site for the park and ride facility that services the city’s main hospital. We also should ask the anti-datacentre folk if they’d be prepared to stop using their computers – lots of their online

Walmart’s inexpensive Vizio produces a nice, bright image, though its black levels aren’t that deep. | Photo: John Higgins / The Verge Modern smart TVs let you skip the streaming device, which is convenient, but they also come with their own issues, including privacy concerns and frequent updates. The Vizio Mini LED Quantum TV lets you cut out the rigamarole and just get straight to the HDMI ports. And right now, it’s discounted at Walmart, with the 65-inch model going for $358 ($40 off) and t

The first TPU in space is running a Google DeepMind Gemma 4 model and writing cheesy poetry.

The cautionary Theranos tale takes on a new significance in the AI era, when companies that have never turned a profit are raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations.

As the weather cools, it may be worth investing in a smart thermostat to help lower your energy bills. Right now, Google’s fourth-gen Nest Learning Thermostat is on sale in all three colors for $219.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and The Home Depot, matching its best price of the year and just $10 shy of its all-time low. Google Nest Learning Thermostat (fourth-gen) Where to Buy: $279.99 $219.99 at Amazon $279.99 $219.99 at Best Buy $279.99 $219.99 at The Home Depot Google’s latest Nes

Ghost hunting has changed in recent years due to AI chatbots, and paranormal enthusiasts are concerned Ghost hunting is a tech-heavy pursuit. When Amy Waine and Jarrad Cutting investigate haunted locations, they’re loaded up with software of their own design, such as an app that assigns signals from a phone’s sensors to different words in a database. In the age of ChatGPT, the ghost-hunting pair is probing the world of AI. They describe one of their latest inventions, an app called GhostTube See

Scraping copyrighted material from internet could ‘potentially’ amount to acquisition of property by government, Anne Twomey says Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast Altering copyright law to allow AI companies to scrape music, books and journalism could trigger a constitutional breach, Coalition senators and the recording industry have warned, as they raise new fears it could open Australia to massive legal action and compensation claims from rights holders worldwide

At TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026, happening November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, networking powered by Braindate is designed to make those conversations easier to find, whether they are in 1:1 or small-group on-site meetings. Register before the event starts to save up to $100 on your pass, plus get a second for free.

DoorDash said that it is open to working with third-party agent makers.

5 days to save up to $100, plus a second pass for free to TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 in Boston on November 4. Register now.

Runware is building a factory to turn out prefabricated AI data centers on an assembly line. The real test will be whether it can deliver at that scale.

OpenAI will honor a shared robots.txt signal to help website operators communicate their AI training preferences to participating providers.

OpenAI is strengthening violence prevention in ChatGPT with expanded safeguards, earlier interventions, and a new commitment to public safety reporting.

David Durman, a University of Kentucky administrator, recently earned a religious exemption from using AI in the workplace.

OpenAI shares excerpts from court briefs by creators, academics, accessibility advocates, and legal experts, among others, on how fair use supports AI training and innovation.

Amazon wants to be the king of AI cloud computing and become the first $1 trillion revenue business. But to do that it will have to continue on its capex spending spree, its CEO said Thursday.

Research finds 55% of lawyers are using AI in legal practices, up from 37% last year, though efficiency gains aren’t as high as expected Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast More than half of Victoria’s lawyers have reported using AI in their work, according to a new study, but just over a quarter say they’ve reduced fees as a result of efficiency gains. They also say clients seeking advice from chatbots has added to their workload, forcing them to correct errors made by

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an earnings call today that Google's AI-powered search modes do not help with traffic to the platform, echoing problems facing other websites and publishers. As part of its Q3 2026 earnings, Reddit revealed that search traffic in October has "dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," and he attributes part of the company's struggles with Google traffic to how AI Mode and AI Overviews change the search experience. "The reality is, AI Mode does

E-commerce company posts high cloud computing sales but gives a cautious sales forecast for the fourth quarter Amazon offered a mixed picture of its financial health on Thursday in its quarterly earnings report. The e-commerce company gave a cautious sales forecast for the current fourth quarter, which encompasses the critical holiday shopping period, after delivering fiscal third-quarter results that came in below Wall Street analysts’ expectations. Continue reading...

Patrick Stewart, best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has died at age 86. A message posted to Stewart's Instagram account says the actor died in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday "following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia." Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart began his acting career in theater. He eventually landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. Stewart

As AI transforms how people find information online, Reddit is rethinking its open-web roots to protect its audience and business.

Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It's going to start requiring users to log in. Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I'm not the only person who appends "reddit" to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits o

Rivian doesn't disclose if the value of its $5.8 billion joint venture will expand as a result.