Google Shrinks Its Free AI Assistant to a Single Model
Opening the Gemini app on October 9 meant something different for people who had never paid Google a cent. The heavier models were gone. Free users woke to a single…
A Five-Year-Old Intel Socket Readies Itself for New Chips
For PC builders, the most consequential Intel news of the week did not come from Intel. It came from Gigabyte, the Taiwanese motherboard maker, which posted a BIOS update on…
Micron Readies a $35 Billion Buyback as Its Taiwan Workers Prepare to Walk Out
The two numbers arrived within days of each other and told opposite stories. Micron’s board authorized a share repurchase program of up to $35.16 billion, effective December 9. In Taiwan,…
Apple Quietly Hires the Team Behind a Defunct Audio App
The app had a short, bright life and a quiet end. Huxe, a startup that turned a person’s email and calendar into a personalized audio briefing, shut down its service…
Oracle Hauls Gas to Its Data Centers by Truck
The data center outside Salt Lake City ran for more than a year on natural gas that arrived by truck. Oracle, waiting for a pipeline to be built and connected…
Anthropic Gives a Single Agent a Thousand Hands
The gap between two numbers tells the story. Asked to hunt for bugs hidden in a codebase, one Claude agent working alone found 27 of the 70 defects the test…
USA Today Sues OpenAI and Demands Its Models Be Destroyed
The publisher behind USA Today sued OpenAI on October 8 and asked a court to do what no major copyright plaintiff has yet achieved: order the models themselves destroyed. The…
Microsoft Sells a Model That Scores Choices Instead of Writing
Microsoft’s newest AI product does not write. Give it a list of options and it returns a probability for each one — a score, not a sentence. The company is…
Britain’s Data Watchdog Turns Its Scrutiny to AI Agents
The British regulator that polices how companies handle personal data spent this year pressing the builders of AI models to change the way they treat people’s information. This week it…
The White House Ends Voluntary AI Incident Reporting
For years, American AI companies decided for themselves when to tell the government that one of their models had misbehaved. That arrangement ended this week, in a statement the White…
