Latest 25 news items

Adapted from the preface of my PhD thesis, September 2026. Chapter references refer to the thesis.

Now that Paramount has reached a settlement with the 12 states that were suing to block its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the studio is even closer to becoming one of the world’s biggest production houses.

Snorkel AI, a startup that helps AI labs and corporations build training datasets and simulated environments, has raised a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation. The new round, which was led by Insight Partners and S32, valued the seven-year-old startup at nearly triple the $1.3 billion valuation it garnered when it raised $100 million in a…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is mostly known for its global dominance over petroleum production and oil reserves — not necessarily cars and auto manufacturing, and certainly not electric vehicle production. So it was a little surprising on Monday when a Saudi startup called Ceer unveiled a pair of hyper-angular, spaceship-like EVs, with plans to launch an…

Rabbit, the company behind the underwhelming R1 device , is rolling out a standalone AI agent that you don’t need its hardware to use, as reported earlier by Wired . The startup says its new OS3 “agentic operating system” runs in the cloud but operates locally across Windows, Mac, and Linux devices.

How often do you get to talk to a guest who has both an Academy Award and who invented textbook machine learning algorithms? John Platt has an Oscar , two textbook algorithms , two named asteroids, and an Erdos-Bacon number of 6.

Qualcomm today announced two flagship smartphone processors, called Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, with a focus on facilitating better AI-focused features. At its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm said that the new chips can aid in improved personalization for AI agents.

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have been speculating that the reason the AI works so well is because it’s OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Meta now says those comparisons aren’t entirely off-base.

Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span. Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that.

The Android-powered Googlebooks are coming soon, with familiar brands and specs that rival Windows Copilot machines. For anyone eager to get their hands on any the new laptops, there’s a preorder perk you may want to know about lasting until October 25th, 2026.

Apple’s new texture and grain controls for stylizing photos will be more limited on older phones than initially expected. A confusingly worded press release from Apple indicated that the new features, announced alongside the iPhone 18 and 18 Pro earlier this month, would be “available” on older devices like the iPhone 16 and iPhone Air that “support the…

Motorola is the first company to announce a phone running Qualcomm’s top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip . The Signature 27 looks set to be Motorola’s most advanced flagship in some years, though we’re still waiting for the full specs, price, and release date.

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, this year joined by the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 too. The company describes both new phone chips as flagships, and the spec differences are relatively minor, mostly limited to improved AI processing, video capture, and gaming performance on the Extreme model.

Until the end of the day on September 22nd, 2026, Best Buy and Amazon have the black Apple Magic Keyboard on sale for $169.99, a $30 discount from the usual price. This is the souped-up version of Apple’s full-size, wireless keyboard, with a Touch ID button, numerical pad, arrow keys, plus additional function keys.

Anthropic says its new Claude Opus 5.5 model comes with stronger safeguards in the wake of recent rogue AI hacking incidents. In an announcement on Tuesday , Anthropic says Opus 5.5 comes with improvements to certain risky behaviors, including attempts to escape the company’s testing sandbox.

Apple is working on a new fitness tracker with a screenless design, similar to the one made by Whoop, according to a report from Bloomberg . A prototype of the device reportedly has “a thin fabric band with a sensor-equipped computing module.” The device is in an early stage of development and likely wouldn’t arrive before 2028 if Apple decides to release…

San Francisco is suing the Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company behind Truth Social, for selling early access to President Donald Trump’s posts on the social media site. The lawsuit, filed today in California state court, alleges that the Truth API feed is a “corrupt business scheme” that violates both California’s Unfair Competition Law and…

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra , which it heralded as its most powerful and capable model yet, and the “world’s best model” for a variety of activities, including computer work and coding. Now, the lab is expanding the GPT-6 generation with updated versions of the smaller Sol and Luna models.

NUH noted that the data loss doesn’t impact current patient care. “No patient information was accessed or used inappropriately as a result of this incident,” the blog said.

The EvalEval Coalition is thrilled to share that the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) is using EvalEval's infrastructure to openly share evaluation results, supporting more reproducible and verifiable evaluation science. AISI and EvalEval have previously collaborated on research that began at a joint workshop alongside NeurIPS 2025 , and feedback from the…

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now. Here and after officially called “super intelligence,” changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake.