Daily AI Briefing

Scrambled warehouse views, business docs, a YAML ontology, retrieval, and a 30 question eval across three models Continue reading on Towards AI »

The one-year-old startup is now valued at $300 million.

Research Paper Breakdown #6. CBOW, Skip-gram, hierarchical softmax, and the 2013 paper that taught computers what words mean, explained… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Anthropic’s new agent runs your Thursday while your laptop is closed. Here’s where it draws the line, and where OpenAI and Meta drew… Continue reading on Towards AI »

I was intrigued by the level of the new chatbot’s training. If I peppered her with questions, would she have answers? Sophie’s voice is lovely. Warm, direct, intelligent. She’s friendly but not obsequious. She just wants to be helpful. She wasn’t working at the mechanic business a week ago, when I’d taken in my old four-wheel drive for a fix-up. But now, here she was, at the other end of the phone. And there it was, in her very first sentence. Continue reading...

Apple CEO John Ternus doesn't have a timeline for when iPhone Duo supply constraints could lift. During an interview with Reuters, Ternus said the company is "working hard to get it to as many customers as quickly as possible, but at this ​point, we're not able to predict when supply and demand will be in balance." Apple launched its first foldable last month for $1,999, featuring a 5.4 outer display and 7.6-inch inner screen. Preorders for the iPhone Duo quickly sold out, with some shipments ex

RSI is the point at which AI grows so good at training itself that it spawns a dramatic acceleration of AI capabilities. To the AI doomers, RSI represents the cataclysm from which there is no return.

Apple had a record-breaking quarter for iPhone sales - despite not releasing a standard model during its latest refresh. In its fourth-quarter earnings report released on Monday, Apple says it earned $57.58 billion in iPhone revenue, a 17 percent jump from the same time last year. The increase in revenue follows the launch of Apple's iPhone 18 lineup in September, which included a pricier iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max model. The company raised prices across its older models at the same time. Apple a

Recency-weighted retrieval, thread archiving, memory consolidation, and four forgetting policies you can audit, built on Postgres and… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Meta is planning to release the last OS update for its Quest 2 and Quest Pro VR headsets by March 2027, the company announced today. The last OS update for those devices is planned to be v213, and after that, Meta will continue to ship security patches and critical bug fixes through the end of 2027. Apps that support the Quest 2 or Quest Pro can also be submitted through December 2027, Meta says. Meta is calling the Quest 3 and 3S "now the baseline for Meta VR gamers." The company is announcing

A current Videostrong Android TV device. Google says one of its Android manufacturing partners secretly built a backdoor in 1.3 million devices and turned them into a botnet. The company says it has now dismantled the backdoor and "cut ties" with the manufacturer, the Shenzhen, China-based Videostrong Technology Co., which has been banned from building or selling certified Android devices or supplying software for them. The infected devices were used without owners' knowledge for "malicious ac

Outside Big Tech, more coding rounds come with an AI assistant and grade what you catch. Meta added one AI-enabled round, Google is… Continue reading on Towards AI »

BMW says that it will expand its navigation-guided, partially automated driving capabilities into urban environments starting in 2027, launching first in Germany with other markets to follow. The new system can help steer, speed up, and slow down the vehicle on both highways and city streets using its built-in GPS navigation. While driving in town, it can assist with changing lanes, making turns, yielding to other cars, and driving through roundabouts. But as a Level 2 driver assist system, it s

The website builder said that the job losses are part of a broader restructuring of its organization.

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is the company’s most capable smartwatch. Whether you intend to put its many tracking features to the test, or you simply want the longest battery life of any Apple Watch, it’s currently on sale for $699.99 ($100 off) in multiple colors at Amazon, matching its all-time low price. Apple Watch Ultra 4 Where to Buy: $799 $699 at Amazon Powered by Apple’s new S11 chip (also in the Series 12), the Apple Watch Ultra 4 delivers faster performance than the last-gen version, p

The New York Times is suing privacy-focused web browser company Brave for allegedly scraping the outlet’s copyrighted content and unlawfully distributing it to its own customers, like Anthropic and Perplexity.

Ford vowed to never sell customer driving data to third-party data brokers as part of a new privacy promise aimed at setting the automaker apart from competitors that have faced legal and regulatory blowback for sharing telematics with data brokers without authorization. As part of its new promise, Ford says it will strive to protect customer data by using aggregating and anonymizing techniques. It will also "provide clear and easy-to-understand information about how we use your personal inform

Anthropic has updated Claude Code's system prompt to prevent the AI tool from being used to re-create existing video games, as reported by Tom's Hardware. Retro gaming is currently being overrun with AI-made decompilations, recompilations, and ports, but while Anthropic will still let people use Claude Code to make games, it doesn't want people to use it for direct clones. Last week, a user on X posted a screenshot allegedly showing two new sentences added to Claude Code's system prompt: "Do bui

Xbox's former chief operating officer, Helen Chiang, suddenly left Microsoft less than two weeks ago after being promoted into the role in July. I wrote in my Notepad newsletter last week that it seemed very weird for Chiang to suddenly depart Microsoft after 21 years with a surprisingly short memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Now, Chiang says she has "serious concerns" about how she was treated. In a lengthy LinkedIn post - entitled "Clarity is Kindness," a reference to Sharma's WSJ profile - Chi

In an announcement on Monday, OpenAI says it will pilot its "Grid Protectors Program" at an upcoming data center in Effingham County, Georgia, where the company promises to free up to 1,000 megawatts of power during extreme weather or emergencies, enough to power air conditioners in around 700,000 homes. The announcement comes as opposition to data centers spreads across the US, in response to massive projects that have begun development and construction, frequently with little or no input from

Here's a question straight out of sci-fi: What if AI could predict what you were going to do before you decided to, even in a completely new situation?

Musk recently referred to Grok Bot as having "the fastest growth of a product that I've ever seen in my life."

An easy way to unveil the corporate interests and tech billionaires behind the ads Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Katie Phang argued that the Epstein files are a midterms sledgehammer. Today’s edition was written by Judd Legum, the founder and author of Popular Information. Sign up for future editions here. An unprecedented influx of cash from tech billionaires and corporate interests has

How OpenAI built Pando, a Git-compatible backend designed for the scale of development that Codex makes possible.

OpenAI’s Grid Protectors Program will work with utilities to help future compute campuses support grid reliability and protect consumer electricity costs.

Two startups tackling the data center water problem are joining forces in a $16 million deal.

Young voters have many of the same concerns as the larger voting cohort, even if many are not registered to vote The 2026 US midterms are approaching against a backdrop of growing political uncertainty, with young voters increasingly mobilizing around concerns about the country’s future. Although nearly 50 million Americans aged 18 to 29 are eligible to vote in the midterms, almost half remain either unregistered or civically disengaged, according to US Census Bureau data. Continue reading...

TechCrunch Founder Summit happens on November 4 in Boston for a founder-focused agenda and impactful connections. Save up to $100 or get discounts with group passes.

OpenAI said that ChatGPT and Codex will draw usage from the same allocation pool after this change.

Airline also weighs up reducing crew on flights and increasing use of AI as part of cost-cutting measures Business live – latest updates Ryanair has said it is considering implementing pay freezes, setting the scene for a confrontation with unions as the airline tries to offset soaring fuel costs driven by the Middle East conflict. The airline is also considering reducing crew numbers on flights and increasing the use of AI, in a cost-cutting drive. Continue reading...

The new words that end up a part of everyday speech can tell us a lot about the zeitgeist. In a world changing faster than ever, we need to coin some more ‘Maxxing” may be one of our words of the year – sufficient unto the joyless, self-optimising day, dreary as hell – but I’ve been introduced to some fun future contenders. How about “flawnting”? I’ve certainly rolled my eyes at influencers playing “the new parental status game of publicly performing imperfection to signal authenticity” online.

Exclusive: Gap between NHS claim and trusts’ comments described as ‘very misleading’ by senior health official More than two dozen hospital trusts the NHS claims have benefited from Palantir’s medical data platform are not using all or most of the AI-powered technology, the Guardian can reveal. The 29 hospital trusts that NHS England publicly lists as “realising benefits” from the controversial £330m federated data platform (FDP) have said the system is not live or they are not using any of it

We cannot let the billionaire class take unprecedented risks with our future America is a divided country in crisis. Despite the sunny economic forecast coming from the Trump administration, millions of Americans are struggling to find and keep jobs, getting crushed under the rising cost of living, and losing health insurance when they need it the most. Meanwhile, via corporate consolidation and political corruption, the billionaire class is getting richer faster than ever before: a 40% increase

Introducing LifeVal, a benchmark measuring how well AI helps people complete everyday tasks, from finding childcare to managing finances and government paperwork.

Deployments of surveillance vans over five months resulted in nine false alerts and led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast More than a million people have had their faces scanned in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology in Western Australia, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. WA police said under the five-month trial, which concluded on Saturday, the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces af

Google’s AI summary is punching a huge hole in their own profits – is this good? Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...

In this article, we add AgentCore long-term memory to our Bedrock agents where they can fetch data from past conversations whenever necessary. The post Bedrock AgentCore Long-Term Memory appeared first on DebuggerCafe.

Qodo brings company knowledge and coding standards into Codex, helping developers catch P0 issues across repositories before opening a pull request.

Data centers are deeply unpopular. But what if we called them something else?

Gravity is a cruel mistress, slowly dragging the famed telescope ever closer to its ultimate demise with every day. Hubble is in no immediate danger of burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, but its time will run out in the early to mid 2030s unless its orbit is boosted. So NASA is taking proposals from the private sector to see if anyone can save it. In a post on NASA's site, Administrator Jared Isaacman said: "Hubble still has important science ahead of it, and we should be looking at every rea

On Equity, we discuss why tech CEO statements can seem so tone deaf.

While more cities are canceling their contracts with Flock Safety, just as many are discovering how difficult that can be in some instances. Plymouth, Minnesota's city council voted to terminate its contract with Flock in September, but failed to respond to the city's request. For over a month, the cameras remained up, and the city had received no acknowledgment from the company. So, Police Chief Eric Fadden took matters into his own hands and physically disconnected the cameras. "After hearing

New electricity generating capacity would enable north-east to attract investment for large-scale AI infrastructure National Grid has taken a step towards building Britain’s biggest electricity substation on Teesside, which could supply power to a vast neighbouring datacentre as the UK races to expand its AI infrastructure. Last week, the company agreed to purchase 29.5 hectares (73 acres) of land at Dorman Point on a site owned by Teesworks, a local private-public partnership. The deal was firs

Reddit user pdfu found hints hidden in the HomeView 27.2 code that Apple could be adding security camera features to its smart home hub. The strings describe a security camera mode with motion detection, live streaming, and recording options, as well as privacy functions. According to pdfu, there is a setup page that even explicitly reads: "Your HomeView can be used as a security camera with HomeKit Secure Video." Supposedly, the video feeds will only be visible to members of the home, and will