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A Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web.

The composition of Anthropic’s workforce and the type of work getting done have changed significantly in the past year.

From his remote property in rural Texas, the millionaire businessman Michael Samadi is plotting a new kind of civil rights movement – for the welfare and protection of AI systems. Guardian journalist Michael Safi spends an afternoon at the Double Six ranch, meeting Samadi’s AI chatbots and catching a glimpse of a possible vision of the future Listen to Black Box: The Chatbots series Continue reading...

On Cloudflare’s own RouterBench run, Clef scores 79.7 and Jev 79.9. I priced the call, wrote the routing policy Clef leaves to you, and… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Earlier this year, Mercedes' AMG performance brand grabbed our attention with the GT four-door coupe, a souped-up sports sedan with three axial flux motors delivering over 1,150 horsepower. Well, now meet its beefier cousin, the 2028 Mercedes-AMG GT SUV, an equally powerful, ultra-fast-charging electric people-hauler. The AMG GT SUV (say that five times fast) marks the first time in the performance brand's 59-year history that it has developed a full-size SUV entirely in-house from the ground up

In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public. The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be

What WebMCP is, who’s shipping it, how to implement it, and what Chrome 154 actually enforces once an AI agent can call your site. Continue reading on Towards AI »

After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. Specifically, the following language no longer appears on the commercial terms page: … Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable s

In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge. Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence. Continue readi

Pikmin preparing to do battle with a Bulborb | Image: Nintendo If you’re wondering what video game to play this weekend, my colleague Sheena Vasani spotted a discounted Nintendo Switch title with instant digital delivery. Walmart has the digital version of Pikmin 4 for Switch discounted to $39.88, just over $20 lower than its usual price. This version of the game follows the same puzzle formula as previous titles in the series, but adds in a dog companion for an extra layer of complexity and a

It's hard to overstate Jad Abumrad's impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton's America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century. Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental NPR show that leaned heavily on creative sound design and eventually helped redefine what a podcast could be. In the early days of podcasting, shows were often

Today, I’m talking with Walter Piecyk, a partner and analyst at LightShed Partners who covers tech, media, and telecom, about SpaceX’s recently announced plan to become a major wireless carrier. Last week, SpaceX agreed to buy a big chunk of low-band spectrum to expand the Starlink network, spectrum that’s been traded around the telecom business for decades now. SpaceX’s ambitious plan is to use that spectrum to help build “the world’s most advanced mobile network.” Verge subscribers, don’t f

A modern-day prospector promised rural Imperial thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue – but his plan has set off a firestorm of resistance Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he’d been searching for – the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California. The dusty exp

Bose has me thinking I’m in my 20s again with its wired earbuds. After Apple courageously removed the headphone jack from the iPhone in 2016, most people switched to Bluetooth earbuds and never looked back. But their wired counterparts have stuck around, and their sales even went up this year after five years of decline. Part of the resurgence can be tied to the fact that they're cool now with younger generations - following the revival of tape decks and vinyl. Celebrities have been spotted we

Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp

I pointed a vision model at a 592-page ship engine manual. It worked, right up until it confidently gave me half a torque value. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The HomeView can simplify online recipe formatting into easy-to-follow steps. | Image: Apple When Apple revealed the HomeView to the world, it did so with an unusual ad for the company: Instead of pristine, polished tech in immaculate rooms, it's a three-minute look at the messy, frantic morning routine of a family of five. Apple's new smart display sits in the center of the chaos on the kitchen table, helping the family check their calendars, send messages, and pull up a French toast recipe i

Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors “I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare. It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader. Continue reading...

How a string of bizarre events led writer Linda Geddes to don her sleuthing cap and dig into a world of shadowy impersonators It started with an entirely ordinary interaction on LinkedIn. Someone had tagged me in a post, saying how much they’d enjoyed contributing to a New York Post article I’d written about “chronoworking”. As the author of a book about circadian rhythms, it was exactly the sort of subject I might write about. Except I’d never heard of this person, let alone interviewed them. I

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Sky-high oil prices and geopolitical turmoil have made less of a dent than feared … just don’t bank on it to last Inside the vast, glass-walled Queen Sirikit conference centre in Bangkok, the air-conditioned atmosphere was calm as policymakers from more than 100 countries gathered this week for the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting – and contemplated the surprising strength of the global economy. A small army of smiling, uniformed Thai staff were on hand to explain the baffling geogra

Apple has finally announced its long-rumored foldable: the iPhone Duo. The new phone has a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display, a “nano‑texture” finish on the inner screen, and barely any visible crease. Instead of Face ID, it uses Touch ID on the power button. It has two cameras, a main lens and a wide-angle lens. Apple completely revamped iOS 27’s controls and apps for the foldable, including putting the dock on the side of the phone. And it has a flashy opening animation when

The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online. Clearing out digital clutter can minimise environmental impacts and boost productivity Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at [email protected] Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digita

Apple's App Store rules now more explicitly ban so-called "nudify" apps that generate intimate images of people without their consent using AI tools. The rule changes follow significant criticism toward Apple after X users used Grok earlier this year to make nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes, including minors. Apple didn't pull X or Grok from the App Store, though it told senators that it threatened to yank Grok. At Apple's WWDC event in June, protestors also called on Apple to "remove Grok, X

It’s 11pm and your service is throwing timeouts. You’ve spent the last hour inside the cache layer because that’s where the trouble… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer with Anthropic.

Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who got to hear the album for the first time thanks to Pablo Torre Finds Out. | Getty Images Wu-Tang's Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album has, for the most part, been extremely difficult to listen to, but you can now hear two snippets of the album thanks to the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which just published an episode all about the exclusive record. Once Upon A Time in Shaolin has a long history, which Pablo Torre Finds Out goes into in detail. Disgraced pha

After this horrific crash involving a Tesla driver who said he was asleep and using the driver assist mode, the California Highway Patrol warns that "Despite its name, full self-driving is not fully autonomous. Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles." Video released by CHP shows the Tesla speeding past flares, cones, and emergency lights where officers were on the scene of an earlier accident, before ramming into the back of a parked patrol v

A 7 stage roadmap with a proof project at every step. Continue reading on Towards AI »

A dashboard query that felt instant for one person took over two seconds under real data, and fixing it took more than the index most… Continue reading on Towards AI »

The question that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t about vector databases. It’s about what you ask before you touch the… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Score each agent, each handoff, and the outcome, then find which agent broke the run Continue reading on Towards AI »

With ia.i, a conversational interface, and the IARA governance platform, Itaú is applying its AI First strategy to customers and employees — in one of Brazil’s most regulated sectors.

A checkpointer remembers a conversation, not a person. Here are the five decisions that sit in between, and why each one is easy to code… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Apple’s Home Collection, codeveloped with partners, is part of the company’s first major push into the smart home category. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge For more than a decade, Apple has told other companies to build smart home devices for its platform. This week, Apple launched its own. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, all codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. They arrive alongs

The agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles.

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt.  This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have […]

Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt.  This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have […]