Daily AI Briefing

Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and long-form video for Instagram, Mosseri said he thinks there's a trend of "more anxiety and more frustration and more anger about AI," particularly in creative industries: It's no

Understanding the architectural decisions behind ConvNeXt, advantages and disadvantages over Vision Transformers and older CNNs. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Calling everything AI is a little like giving every variable in a program the type any. It saves us the trouble of being specific. It also… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Microsoft has never disclosed Azure's quarterly revenue in dollars. But for the first time, we can see just how close it is getting to besting the biggest competitor in the market, AWS.

A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The data also linked the agencies to specific surveillance tools. As reported by TechCrunch, a hacker known as "Department of Peace" gaine

The announcement came alongside parent company Alphabet's third-quarter earnings report, which saw revenue grow 25% year over year to $127.6 billion.

Microsoft said it made $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, in the quarter ending September 30. It underscores the still-enormous financial dependency of the partnership.

The MPC Sample Key looks like the MPC Sample just with keys instead of pads. | Image: Akai The MPC Sample Key isn't even formally announced yet, but Akai is already showing off what the modding community is cooking up through vibe coding. Akai has decided to embrace the explosion of hackers and custom firmware developers by giving them early access to the device, which will have open-source firmware. It will likely run some version of the same software found on the MPC Sample, but with tweaks

Whatever the future of AI might be, the current situation is still very good for Microsoft. The tech giant reported yet another record for quarterly revenue on Wednesday: $92.3 billion, a 19% increase over the year-ago quarter.

For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There's the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you've read. There's Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you've saved for later. And now there's Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books. Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing Readw

Google parent company Alphabet says that its AI investments are leading to a big growth in searches year-over-year, as noted in its Q3 2026 earnings today. "Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In fact, our year-over-year query growth rate is the highest it's been in the last five years." Alphabet's consolidated revenues for the quarter were $127.6 billion, up 25 percent year-over-year, with its "Google

Microsoft just posted the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $92.3 billion in revenue and a net income of $33.6 billion during Q1. Revenue is up 19 percent, and net income has increased by 32 percent. It's a new financial year for Microsoft, so the company is changing up how it reports its finances by splitting its businesses into two segments for the first time. Gone are the previous segments: Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and M

With an OLED display and touchscreen capabilities, it's no surprise that the new MacBook Pro Apple announced today is more expensive than the MBP announced earlier this year. But upgrading the base models that start at $2,899 for the 14-inch, and $3,399 for the 16-inch, with every premium hardware option that Apple offers pushes those prices to an eye-watering $14,249 and $14,549, respectively. Both of those premium configurations include the M5 Max chip with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU, $150

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering "significant gains" in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon's top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind. The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over Argon, which Google released earlier this month. It's currently only available to a select group of cybersecurity defens

Five ways to wire memory into an AI agent, from vector RAG to temporal graphs to nightly “dreams”, drawn inside the whole harness, plus a… Continue reading on Towards AI »

A gavel prior to an open commission meeting at the FCC. | Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images What do drones, routers, and Roombas have in common? The US government wants to keep Chinese ones from entering the country. They’re the first consumer gadgets that are facing de facto import bans because of the US government’s xenophobic stance — and they might not be the last. Originally, the US government was just worried about US networks. It’s been distrustful of Chinese telecom equipment

The frontier lab is lifting the curtain on how users spend money on its models ahead of a planned IPO.

Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a larger OLED display this week, and we've just gotten to try it out at Apple's "Pro and tell" event. It's an iPad for sure, but the new OLED on the Mini looks exceptional, and the optional nano-texture matte finish is awesome. The "Pro and tell" event venue has soft lighting that's not the most conducive to blinding glare on displays, but the matte finish pretty much squashes it entirely. Moving the front-facing camera to the long edge is also a welcome chan

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the […]

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the […]

How vector search finds “I’m vegetarian” from “suggest dinner,” why it can’t tell a fact from its contradiction, and how to wire it into a… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Facts, past experiences, and self-written instructions each need their own storage, write trigger, and retrieval. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The autofill update lets Chrome pull flight confirmations, tracking info, order details, and other information from your inbox, with your permission.

A new developer platform will let businesses bring their services to Google's AI experiences, potentially changing how consumers discover and use apps.

Tech leaders are flaunting how out of touch they are when they brag about using AI to connect with their families.

South Korea’s financial institutions have been hit by another wave of cyberattacks, highlighting the growing risk of AI-driven hacking in Asia.

Several Mississippi homes have been purchased near datacenters and one resident said realtor outlined target to buy more than 400 People in a Mississippi neighborhood, many of whom dislike a nearby power plant central to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions, have received a stark offer – to sell their houses to his company and make way. Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agr

AI tools are making it easier to modify and recreate games, raising questions about piracy, copyright and how far the technology could disrupt the industry • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here If your social media algorithms have clocked that you’re into video games, something strange will have happened in the past few weeks. Your feed, like mine, will have been full of clips of streamers playing bizarre mashups of popular video games. Skyrim in Minecraft. Halo, exce

Nvidia just released a free speech-to-text model that can transcribe up to 40 languages, but it only works on recordings, not live audio, so it’s a big step for meeting and medical transcription tools while still leaving real-time use to rivals like ElevenLabs.

Billed as the first end-to-end AI-created series on a major streaming service, this Turkish show looks like the result of the prompt ‘make it cinematic’ Just as the world reels from Elon Musk’s AI-powered The Odyssey remake – though “remake” feels rather generous for a seven-minute splat of synthetic sludge – another bucket of AI gunk is dropped on to our faces. For Prime Video’s AI-generated TV series Castle Walls, produced by Turkish production studio Ay Yapım using a melange of generative vid

OpenAI and ServiceNow expand their partnership to bring OpenAI models and agents into ServiceNow and ServiceNow workflows into ChatGPT and Codex.

In just 7 days, TechCrunch Founder Summit takes over Boston’s SoWa Power Station on November 4. Your chance to save up to $100 on tickets is running out, and the opportunity to learn and connect directly with experienced founders, investors, and startup leaders is almost here.

Both of these threats have the same roots: private entities seeking to cash in. We have the power to stand against them A summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a super El Niño breaking records, Exxon publicly saying we may reach 3C by 2050 – could it possibly be any worse? How about throwing AI extinction in the mix? Continue reading...

The author believes we are at a turning point as a species – and even in the shadow of big tech it’s up to us how we want to proceed ‘I am a storyteller by trade,” writes Jeanette Winterson on the first page of her 2021 book 12 Bytes, an idiosyncratic and thought-provoking series of essays in which she considered just how artificial intelligence might change everything about our lives. “And I know everything we do is a fiction until it’s a fact: the dream of flying, the dream of space travel, t

How AI might enter the org chart—beneath, beside, and between us.

See how Legora uses OpenAI models, ChatGPT, and Codex to accelerate legal workflows, expand contract analysis, and free lawyers to focus on higher-value work.

Labor government under pressure to create social media watchdog as new online safety standards bill passes lower house Follow our Australia politics live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The federal government wants to ban AI chatbots which seek to create “emotional intimacy” after prime minister Anthony Albanese raised the alarm in a heartfelt speech about children treating these agents as their “best friend”. But Labor is coming under incre

Massive note conversions reveal the true extent of Amazon's ownership in Anthropic.

A family is suing OpenAI, saying ChatGPT coached their daughter to quietly taper off her seizure medication and keep it from her doctors before she died in February.

As the AI boom stresses the existing power grid, all sorts of new opportunities for grid modernization are also emerging as a result, industry insiders say.

Within hours of the iPhone Duo launch last Friday, people reported that the inner screen on some brand new foldable phones was already broken. The issue was similar across many photos shared on social media: some kind of issue or crack would appear in the middle of the screen above the hinge, with lines appearing on the right side of the display. On Monday, Apple acknowledged an "issue" and said it's replacing damaged units, without going into much detail about how many broken phones have been r

Three-quarters of all responses were machine-generated in failed attempt to stop bill from passing into law, research finds AI bots flooded a government consultation with tens of thousands of fake responses in a failed attempt to stop the UK’s ban on disposable vapes. Three-quarters of all the responses to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated, in what is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK. Continue

Python helped us build intelligent models. Rust might help us build intelligent systems that can actually survive the real world. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The banking giant reminds customers that "you're responsible for activity" resulting from your AI agents' access.

Here's a clear explanation of Anthropic's incredibly complex governance structure.