Daily AI Briefing
The latest breakthroughs in AI — aggregated from top sources and paired with original analysis.
OpenAI will cut frontier models off from the internet weeks after one of its engineers said that solution wouldn't work.
BBC series deliberately uses ‘more organic’ shots to assure viewers animals are not AI-generated, producers say The David Attenborough-narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to counter AI fakery and assure viewers it is “authentic”, its producers have said. Nearly a decade after Blue Planet II shone a light on plastic pollution, and 25 years since the first Blue Planet aired, the hit BBC series is returning with more animal behaviour and cutting-edg
The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2-D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a "nap," and summersaulted on voice command.
Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies a
Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called "Time4Popcorn" still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the w
Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named "Ronald
Hosted by TechCrunch in partnership with Fidelity Private Shares, the full-day event goes beyond fundraising and AI to explore the realities of finding customers, building teams, sharpening a pitch, developing founder leadership, and scaling companies both inside and outside traditional startup hubs.
After discovery of severe bug in the PHP programming language, executives warn of ‘vulnerability tsunami’ Leaders in cybersecurity are sounding the alarm after the discovery of a major vulnerability this week. They are predicting that artificial intelligence tools will expose more fundamental weaknesses in global internet infrastructure in the months to come. “I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said Sam Altman on Thursday evening, joining the chorus of executives. In th
The Space 2 comes in multiple colors, including an attractive seafoam green. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore’s Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 — and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit with a $30 price increase. Thankfully, the Soundcore Space 2 are currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart in all three colors for an all-time
If your dog or cat is prone to getting lost, or you frequently go on adventures together, you can save 30 percent on Fi pet trackers through October 25th when you enter coupon code SCARY at checkout. The sale includes several satellite-connected trackers, including the Fi Ultra GPS we previously tested, which is down to $209.30 after the discount. That effectively brings it down to its original launch price. The IP68-rated Fi Ultra is fully waterproof, even in saltwater, and lasts up to five day
Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure and leading to a reported two deaths and at least 17 injuries. The Ukrainian military reported receiving no advance warning
We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it
Learn how OpenAI scaled Habitat with reliable multi-tenancy, global caching, and Azure Cosmos DB to deliver 12× faster reads for ChatGPT.
Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google
The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display. Here's how one user in Australia described what happened to their phone: Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer t
Video shows AI likenesses of people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party appearing to admit to wrongdoing A political ad from Spain’s main opposition party that used a deepfake video of the prime minister’s wife has sparked outrage and set off a wider debate on AI, as the deeply polarised country gears up for general elections next month. Launched this week across the social media channels of the conservative People’s party (PP), the video used artificial intelligence to manipulate the like
Everything has become so frictionless and optimised, that concerted efforts must be made to turn back towards beauty and individuality – even if it has no explicit market value By the time it’s 5pm on a Friday, the headache and dry eyes have well and truly settled in. Maybe it’s a long day in front of your four screens while funnelling white noise through a large pair of headphones to cancel out the calls of your co-workers. Or maybe it’s the almost chemical wash of white fluorescent lights that
Anthropic claims AI will shift how work gets done and labor demand – but some experts are skeptical of the vision Last year, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and that in six months it would be writing 90% of code. Neither of those predictions came to pass. Now, in a report Anthropic published on Thursday, the company said it was hiring fewer junior technical workers and that human attention has become the n
An old idea springs anew as a chorus of influential voices predicts that AI may trigger crises of vast magnitude In a preface to his book Capitalism and Freedom, the American economist Milton Friedman famously observed that a crisis can propel once-fringe ideas into the political mainstream. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around,” he wrote. The job of intellectuals, thinktanks and
OpenAI explains how we strengthened containment for frontier model training and evaluation, including offline environments and high-compute red-teaming.
Take a selfie to see how healthy you are: the idea is enticing and this new research is promising. But so many factors have been ignored The idea that a single selfie could predict how long someone with cancer may live sounds like an incredible breakthrough. AI is getting better at spotting patterns in medical data, but can it be used to reliably predict what will happen to an individual patient? I asked a clinical colleague what she thought about the recent headlines. She found it an interestin
The company plans to begin testing Pony.ai's robotaxis in Kazakhstan's capital in the first half of 2027.
MIT researchers marooned 13 AIs on a virtual island, and they responded by inventing games, mourning a lost ring and, eventually, getting better at their jobs.
OpenAI and Poland’s NASK are partnering on AI safety, security, and technical research to strengthen safeguards and support a more resilient digital ecosystem.
Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a "routine improvement" instead: This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. Family Pl
An Xbox Elite controller. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication's Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA. My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that much. It couldn't possibly charge that much money if it wants next gen to be a success. "I would
Should OpenAI command an over $1 trillion valuation with this round, it would break records as the most highly valued private company ever.
Video generators predict every pixel. A new family of AI world models predicts only what matters, and it is learning physics… Continue reading on Towards AI »
Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday. Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social medi
Datacenter and chip costs fueled sharp decrease in AI sector although non-AI stocks still had a strong showing The latest shudder for stocks in the AI industry pulled markets lower worldwide on Thursday, while oil prices hit their highest levels since May on worries about the war with Iran. The S&P 500 fell 1.2% for its worst day since July, while the Nasdaq composite tumbled 2.6%. The weakness for tech stocks was so overwhelming that it masked strength for the rest of the US market, in which th
Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That's in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It's not just PCs, either - that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low. Counterpoint linked the decline in PC shipments to higher component prices. Up until Q2 2026, PC shipments had been growing for over two years straight. But over the last several months, RAM, S
Every company is suddenly an AI company. Compute is an asset. Cars are flying. We’ve been promised robots — again. It’s time again to dig through earnings reports, listen to investor calls, and call out the latest wins and losses from around the tech sector and what it means for where the companies go next. Sure, let’s smoosh SpaceX and Tesla together, who cares Just because Tesla’s Optimus is in production doesn’t mean it’s actually ready In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse
Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites," James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab. Initially, Meta's new terms for business accounts
Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Researchers at Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web addresses for shared conversations from Muse were named after a conversation's title and written into public DNS. Ars Technica said Tuesday that Meta
On October 13th, Brendan Carr's FCC gave itself a new power - it can block gadgets for containing any computer chip made by any company on its list of potential threats to national security. Today, it's exercising that power for the first time, blocking two gadgets because they contain "foreign surveillance chips," the FCC claims. The agency doesn't say which specific gadgets it blocked, and it didn't immediately respond to our request for comment, but it does name the "surveillance chip": it's
Mars not depicted. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or "spread the light of consciousness," as he put it in this week's Sp
It looks exactly like what you’d expect a Teenage Engineering guitar amp to look like. | Image: Teenage Engineering Teenage Engineering is branching out into instrument amps with the previously leaked EP-35, a multi-input, multi-instrument, battery-powered amp with built-in effects. The back of the unit has a line-in port, as well as a 1/4-inch guitar input and an XLR input for mics, including mics that require phantom power. You can also stream audio to it via Bluetooth and connect multiple E
The new feature allows agents to log into a customer's personal accounts while still protecting the private credentials that secure those accounts.
Point Claude Code at an app and it pulls out how a feature works and writes its own version. Continue reading on Towards AI »
OpenAI is launching its decision model to the world. Can it compete with the original Jev?
Canva is making its new image model available to all users, promising better, more customizable performance at lower costs.
Microsoft’s new AI diagnostic system beat generalist doctors on hard cases, according to a study in Science. But most of the improvement seems to come from the AI models underneath, not from Microsoft’s system itself.
Harness² edits the prompts, memory, tools and guardrails around a model instead of retraining it. Here is how the loop works, where the… Continue reading on Towards AI »
The current US administration is an obstacle, but public demand for protection will ultimately prevail Organisations around the world scrambled on Thursday to fix critical flaws in PHP, the software that powers much of the web. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take control of affected servers. Some websites were taken offline as a precaution while fixes were installed. The paradox is that while AI helped researchers uncover the flaw, it also threatens to accelerate the ability to exp
Websites around the world have been taken offline as governments and businesses scramble to fix a flaw in the computer language PHP. There are fears that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal data, take control of web servers and disrupt services. Millions of attempts have already been made to attack websites since the issue with the programming language was revealed, cybersecurity companies have said. Michael Safi speaks to global technology reporter Aisha Down Continue reading...