Daily AI Briefing

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.

Rivian reported its third quarter earnings of 2026, providing us a closer look at the company's financial health as it ramps up production of its all-important R2 electric vehicle - which is now, for the first time, outselling all of Rivian's other EVs. Rivian said it brought in $2.155 billion in revenue, a 38 percent increase compared to the $1.558 billion in Q3 2025. Of that amount, $1.55 billion came from automotive revenue, which is up 36 percent year over year. Comparatively, the company re

OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings is buying ADT in a $15.3 billion deal, with plans to bring AI to the home security business.

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million to settle claims that it illegally sold driver and location information to data brokers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The agreement, which resolves a complaint from a coalition of 36 US attorneys general, requires GM to limit the driving data it collects and obtain "express consent" from drivers before collecting their information. The allegations surround GM's now-discontinued Smart Driver program, which collected data about driving habits, inclu

The app connects to Instagram to build a virtual closet from photos you’ve already shared, or lets you add items manually by snapping a photo, recording a quick video, or uploading images from your camera roll.

Now you can generate, preview, and edit PDFs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, slide decks, Markdown files, TXT files, and code directly within Google Gemini. The new file editing capabilities are available starting today for all Gemini users, and while PDF previews/editing works on both the web and mobile, all other file formats are only in the web version for now. Google added support for generating and downloading files in Gemini earlier this year, but now you can tweak those files without leaving

With its playful design, versatility, and relatively affordable price, the Ikea Varmblixt quickly became one of my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy’s new favorite smart light products when she tested it in April. Now, the donut-shaped lamp is on sale for $79.99 ($20 off) through November 11th at Ikea. Ikea Varmblixt lamp Where to Buy: $99.99 $79.99 at Ikea window.HYPE_DESK_CONFIG = { productImageUrl: "https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/iphone_17e.png",

Uno reverse! After Wispr added meeting notes to its dictation app, Granola is adding dictation to its meeting notetaker. The voice AI wars are getting interesting.

The new MacBook Pro brings with it a bunch of firsts for Apple laptops, the two flashiest being an OLED display and touchscreen functionality. But as an image-accuracy enthusiast, trained calibrator, and resident display expert, what excites me most about the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the technology it uses to display an accurate picture. It's the first laptop, and only the second product overall, to support Apple CMF 2026 color modes. It could be the future for displays. CMFs, or c

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images Utah has filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its executives, accusing the prediction market of breaking anti-gambling laws, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Associated Press. The state has filed 14 charges against Kalshi, as well as CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara, including 12 counts of illegally promoting online gambling. The move marks an escalation in a nationwide battle against prediction mar

The US power sector could release 42 percent more planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution by 2030 than it did in 2025 as it builds out more fossil fuel infrastructure to meet data center electricity demand, according to a new analysis by the Sierra Club. That would essentially wipe out 15 years of greenhouse gas reductions. CO2 emissions from electricity generation would increase by 618 million tons by the end of the decade if planned AI projects are constructed. That's roughly equivalent to car

OpenAI’s updated Model Spec outlines five core values to guide more capable AI toward sound judgment, human agency, and faithfulness to human intent.

Mistral says its new model can afford organizations a kind of control over its cyber defenses that closed models can't.

A top executive of a Singapore AI cloud company that was accused of illegally selling Nvidia chips to China could also have been a Chinese spy, sources have told the New York Times.

Dream is grounded in real physics and construction standards. Just as LLMs learn from text, Dream's world model is trained on more than 100 million square feet of building data gathered from permit archives across the United States.

Guardian columnist, senior economics commentator and host of the new Radical Thinking podcast Aditya Chakrabortty will be online at 2pm GMT (9am EDT) on Friday to answer your questions on the big ideas around economics, society and democracy Send your questions to [email protected] or join the discussion on Friday from 8am Aditya Chakrabortty is the Guardian’s award-winning senior economics commentator. Through his regular opinion column, he shares his thoughts on the economy and its

Using AI for roles from executive assistants to chiefs of staff, companies are boasting about doing more with less, creating tension with their human workers On an average workday, Dhruv Amin chats with dozens of colleagues to get things done at his AI startup Anything. He might ask Gwen, his executive assistant, to schedule a meeting, then troubleshoot a technical problem with Cody, his coding partner. Then he might check in with Betsy for search engine optimization, or Juno for onboarding cust

On Thursday, AI app Wabi, now describing itself as a "personal agent," said it has raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation.

The Michigan Senate candidate is calling for public ownership and other reforms, offering a potential antidote to ideological gridlock The Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat, occupies a strange but increasingly common place in modern American politics. He’s praised by progressives, begrudgingly tolerated by moderate Democrats and largely demonized by Republicans. He’s also uniquely positioned to forge an all-too-elusive thread of political kinship between these perpetually-

The update allows you to use Alexa to create lists, register them, see what's on them, and add or edit items. You can also manage subscriptions.

With Pipecat, Deepgram will likely gain a deeper understanding of real-time voice and video infrastructure.

Human practitioners warn computer-generated offerings lack the empathy and connection central to divination “This journey isn’t just about algorithms or data,” an AI psychic named Urban Mystic recently told me. The chatbot, featuring an AI-generated profile photo of a smiling woman surrounded by palm trees, also said I will get married soon, that I have a pink aura and that I may have been an herbalist in a past life. “It’s about connecting on a soulful level,” the chatbot said. Continue readin

OpenAI uses layered monitoring to detect frontier model misalignment and unauthorized agent behavior so responders can intervene before incidents escalate.

Ropes & Gray is developing AI for transactional diligence with OpenAI. Lawyers review grouped documents, summaries, and reports before advising clients.

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.