Daily AI Briefing
The latest breakthroughs in AI — aggregated from top sources and paired with original analysis.
On Tuesday, I published a story about how YouTube appeared to be testing hiding the dislike button on videos, with at least two users on X sharing screenshots of the dislike button moved into the three-dot menu. But a YouTube spokesperson, in a Wednesday statement to The Verge, confirmed that YouTube is "not testing hiding the dislike button on YouTube for users." However, YouTube is introducing a new UI for creators on their uploaded videos where the dislike button will be moved. Here's the ful
For years, Elon Musk has been making big promises to Tesla owners about unsupervised autonomous driving and the ability to add their own vehicles to the company's robotaxi fleet. During today's third-quarter earnings call, the company finally gave itself a deadline. According to Tesla VP for Autonomous Driving Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla owners will be able to add their own vehicles to the company's robotaxi fleet in the second quarter of 2027. Here's his exact quote (emphasis ours): Like I mentione
Your coding agent’s token bill is about to become rounding error. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017, released on 17 October 2026, resolves a… Continue reading on Towards AI »
A rush of new data centers could bring air pollution roaring back to levels not seen since the 2000s in Texas, which has become ground zero for the physical infrastructure behind generative AI. New and proposed data centers are demanding a tremendous amount of electricity. How developers and utilities meet that demand - with gas turbines or renewable energy - will determine just how dirty things will get. So far, though, things are looking grim. Tech companies and data center developers are devi
What the main tools charge, what burns tokens, and a daily budget that works. Continue reading on Towards AI »
Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027. "The scale of investment required to compete, sustain growth, expand infrastructure, and pursue new strategic initiatives amidst the AI transformation taking place in the industry is significant," Meta says in the press
Meta Muse users are adopting the app for shopping and personal productivity, the company said during Q3 earnings. The AI app now has over 10M users.
How OpenAI works with distribution partners to uphold consistent safeguards, support responsible access, and clarify expectations in our Usage Policies.
Actors Taye Diggs, Autumn Federici, Gary Entin, Troy Brookins, Edmund Entin and Eric Guilmette attend the world premiere of Microhouse Films and Lifetime's Reunion Island during the ALZA Festival. | Getty Images for Lifetime. It remains to be seen if people really want to watch vertical content on horizontal TV screens, but many filmmakers and creators were confident that their latest projects would play well at Alza - New York City's first microdrama film festival. Founded by former Tribeca F
Meta had to shell out $9.89 billion to pay for a chunk of the child safety settlement it reached with US attorneys general. That's according to the company's third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, which says Meta's income from operations would have been $22.89 billion without the settlement. In August, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion to settle a massive nationwide lawsuit that claimed the company harmed children by making its social media platforms "addictive" by design. It will a
Two bugs found with AI are behind major issues today for 4chan, DeviantArt, Wikipedia, and the blog where the bar around the corner posts pictures of people's dogs. The "critical vulnerabilities" were discovered in the PHP programming language, which underpins much of the internet, including any site built on WordPress. But it's far bigger than that. Some Dutch and Finnish government agencies took their sites down as a precaution. The NSA Cybersecurity account on X recommended that organizations
Startup Recursive has released Flint, a free, laptop-sized coding model built largely by its own AI research system, as an early test of AI that improves itself.
As the smoke clears from its outrageous Roadster demo, Tesla reported Q3 earnings on Wednesday - and the cold reality is that revenue has flatlined. Tesla said it earned $1.7 billion in net income on $28.0 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in September 2026. Revenues were flat, while profits dropped 4 percent compared to the third quarter of 2025, when the company earned $1.4 billion in net income on $28.1 billion in revenue. Tesla's revenue came in above Wall Street expectations of $
Bose announced today it has acquired Skullcandy. Although the two companies are competitors in the consumer audio space, Skullcandy recently partnered with its new owner to bring several of Bose's audio technologies - including its head-tracking spatial audio and excellent active noise cancellation (ANC) - to products like the Skullcandy Crusher 1080 ANC headphones and Method 360 ANC earbuds. Specific details about the deal weren't shared, but according to a news release, Bose plans to keep Skul
An extravagantly underpowered two-stage investigation into synthetic sainthood, institutional inheritance, and the remarkable elasticity… Continue reading on Towards AI »
Checking out of your next Airbnb might be less of a hassle now that the company is banning hosts from including time-consuming chores in their house rules. Airbnb's updated house rules policy, which starts with reservations booked on or after November 20th, says hosts can't ask guests to "complete tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner." According to Airbnb, that includes: Dishes: Guests shouldn't be asked to wash and put away dishes, but you
As Amazon blocks AI agents from shopping on its site, Walmart is taking the opposite approach, introducing new technology that lets AI agents make purchases on customers' behalf, with controls over spending and transaction approvals.
Two weeks after launch, one community scan counts over 4,000 mods. Most “best mods” lists stop at the screenshots. This one adds what each… Continue reading on Towards AI »
This is the kind of security issue that was found and prevented by AI, but is also a high risk because of AI.
Blacksmith, a platform that lets companies build and test AI code more effectively, just announced a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia that values the company at $1 billion.
AT&T is working with OpenAI to make legal knowledge easier to access. Learn how its LegalEdge team is rethinking intake and scaling legal judgment.
Readers react to Simon Jenkins’ article that said it’s more important for children to learn how to speak fluently than study mathematics Simon Jenkins must have had a deeply unpleasant experience of learning maths at school because he seems to have a pathological antipathy towards it (We are teaching children maths they will never use. Isn’t it better to help them speak fluently?, 16 October). I have no qualms with his insistence on the importance of oracy. But his argument breaks down with the
From sensors and context engines to privacy and failure handling, here is what it takes to build it responsibly. Continue reading on Towards AI »
After months of controversy over the possible use of AI by winners of prestigious awards, the Prix Pascal de Littérature IA is rewarding fiction written with the help of LLMs A prize for AI-written books has launched this week. The Prix Pascal de Littérature IA invites submissions of manuscripts co-written with AI tools, with the winner promised publication. Continue reading...
More than 50% of managers say they're finding it harder to evaluate employees' work after adopting AI, according to a new survey.
Enthusiasts like Grimes and A$AP Rocky may embrace AI-generated content, but they won’t produce it themselves Streaming services, notable musicians and fans are confronting the growing presence of AI-generated music and drawing lines in the sand. On Tuesday, Spotify announced it had removed about 50m songs considered AI slop from its recommendations to users over the past year. Continue reading...
From local businesses to global brands, more advertisers can now reach people as they explore, compare and decide what to buy in ChatGPT.
OpenAI and Google Cloud are bringing frontier models and Codex workflows to Gemini’s Model Garden, available through Google Cloud Marketplace.
Patch the Planet connects security researchers, maintainers, and incident responders to help address critical vulnerabilities across open source.
Learn how OpenAI built ChatGPT’s LLM-powered ad stack to understand conversational intent, keep ads separate from answers, and deliver relevant ads at scale.
See how OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps Research used distributed AI agents to uncover promising research leads in data from millions of brain cells.
Widespread AI adoption is propelling Southeast Asia's digital economy to a projected $368 billion in 2026 and $1 trillion by 2035.
OpenAI outlines a blueprint for empowering cyber defenders with frontier AI, stronger safeguards, modernized cybersecurity, and more resilient public institutions.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Zachary Bluestone dismissed the lawsuit Ann Altman filed last year alleging that her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. As reported earlier by The Guardian, the judge wrote that over the past year, Ann had failed to appear for an independent medical examination or meet other deadlines despite warnings that it would result in the case being dismissed. When the case was filed last year, a statement shared by Sam Altman, h
The proposed policy seems to offer protections against AI run amok but actually forbids federal agencies from blocking a model's release without the permission of a judge.
Before you share the Netflix documentary "AI Gone Rogue" take note. Clem Delangue, Hugging Face's co-founder who is featured in the film, says it went "full doomer mode" and isn't accurate.
Influencer Nick Shirley listens as US President Donald Trump makes an announcement on fraud in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 20, 2026. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was giving right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 and launching a $25 million bounty program for members of the public to report fraud. In December 2025, Shirley published
Google is bringing Personal Intelligence to Gemini AI in your car. With this update, Gemini in Android Auto and cars with Google built-in can tap into your information across Google apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Photos, YouTube, and Search. As an example, Google says you can ask Gemini about your flight status if you're driving to the airport. The AI assistant can pull your flight details from a confirmation message in Gmail and then use that information to look up the status. You can a
Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to discuss a possible merger, Elon Musk said during the latter's third quarter earnings call Tuesday. Musk, who serves as CEO of both companies, said the special committees were formed at the request of shareholders and consist of independent directors (though he did not name them). He also noted that he is not a member of either committee, nor involved in any of the discussions. "Because I'm a conflicted party, I can't actually be in the discuss
Anthropic is reportedly struggling to secure enough compute from cloud providers that increasingly view it as a competitor, even as its infrastructure spending balloons ahead of a planned November IPO.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company would attempt to catch Starship and its booster next month, with the goal of recovering the entire orbital launch system for the first time. If successful, Musk said, the attempt would mark the first time in history an orbital launch vehicle has been fully recovered. "This is a profound technology milestone in the history of civilization consciousness," he said during the company's third quarter earnings report Tuesday. But he also allowed for the possibil
