This Viral AI Pen Didn’t Help Me Cheat
The Verge tested a $68.99 "AI Smart Pen" marketed on YouTube as a cheat device that scans printed test questions and returns AI-generated answers. In practice, the pen’s camera often failed to read text, and when it did, the answers were nonsensical or unrelated, rendering the product ineffective for cheating. The device’s bulky form factor and Chinese-language interface further limit its practicality in exam settings. Students report that snapping a photo of a question and using ChatGPT on a phone is a far more reliable method for cheating on hard‑copy exams.
How Louvre Thieves Exploited Human Psychology to Avoid Suspicion—And What It Reveals About AI
On October 19, 2025, four men disguised as construction workers used a furniture lift to access a balcony at the Louvre and stole crown jewels worth €88 million in under eight minutes, exploiting the museum’s reliance on visual categorization. The thieves’...
Target Joins OpenAI’s Growing List of Retail Apps
Target will launch a beta ChatGPT‑powered shopping app within the next week, allowing users to generate ideas, browse products, build multi‑item baskets, shop for groceries and complete checkout directly in the chat interface. The rollout expands OpenAI’s retail app portfolio,...
OpenAI Board Member Larry Summers Steps Down Amid Epstein File Revelations
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers resigned from OpenAI’s board after a congressional release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email cache revealed intimate and inappropriate communications between Summers and Epstein. The emails, spanning November 2018 to July 2019, show Summers...
Cloud and AI Usage Is Still a Concern for Businesses - and the Worries Are only Set to Rise
AWS’s latest research shows that more than nine in ten companies worldwide plan to raise overall IT spending (93%), cloud spending (97%) and cybersecurity budgets (90%). While 56% of respondents view public cloud as more secure and 81% believe it...
CIOs Are Being Lumped with AI Responsibilities - and Many of Them Aren't Happy with That
Chief Information Officers are increasingly being tasked with AI responsibilities as enterprises move from pilot projects to large‑scale deployments, according to new Salesforce research. While three‑quarters of CIOs report greater confidence and 97% say they now understand AI better, collaboration...
The Download: De-Censoring DeepSeek, and Gemini 3
Quantum‑physics researchers at Spain’s Multiverse Computing have compressed DeepSeek R1 by 55% into a “Slim” version and stripped the Chinese‑mandated censorship layers, enabling the model to answer politically sensitive queries similarly to Western AI. Meanwhile, Google launched Gemini 3, a multimodal model...
I Tested Caira, the First Nano Banana AI Camera – Now I’m Cancelling My Lightroom Subscription
Camera Intelligence’s Caira, a Kickstarter‑backed Nano Banana AI camera, attaches to an iPhone via MagSafe and combines a Micro Four Thirds 11‑MP Sony sensor with Qualcomm Snapdragon and Google Edge TPU processors. It offers on‑device generative editing, voice control and...
Europe Is Scaling Back Its Landmark Privacy and AI Laws
The European Commission has unveiled a Digital Omnibus proposal that dilutes core elements of the GDPR and postpones key provisions of the AI Act. The changes would simplify cookie consent rules, allow broader use of anonymized personal data for AI...
As Lovable Hits $200M ARR, Its CEO Credits Staying in Europe for Its Success
Swedish AI‑assisted coding startup Lovable announced it has doubled its annual recurring revenue to $200 million within four months, reaching the milestone just four months after crossing $100 million in July. CEO Anton Osika attributed the rapid growth to the company’s decision...
Google Translate Is Getting a Big Upgrade that Could Make It the Killer Smart Glasses App
Google is embedding support for XR smart glasses into the Android version of Google Translate, as revealed by hidden code referencing "Glasses" as a playback device. The upcoming feature will extend the Live Translation service, allowing spoken translations to be...
Quantum Physicists Have Shrunk and “De-Censored” DeepSeek R1
Quantum‑inspired AI firm Multiverse Computing announced a 55% smaller version of the Chinese‑censored large language model DeepSeek R1, dubbed DeepSeek R1 Slim, that it claims retains near‑original performance while stripping out state‑mandated censorship. The team used tensor‑network compression, a technique borrowed from quantum...
AI Voice Fraud Is Exploiting Contact Centers
AI-generated voice cloning has moved from experimental demos to full production, with roughly one in three U.S. consumers reporting synthetic‑voice fraud in Q4 2024 and many incurring losses. Fraudsters now combine breached personal data with low‑cost text‑to‑speech and automated dialing to...
ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Award 2026 Open for Nominations
The episode announces the open call for nominations for the 2026 ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, highlighting its purpose to honor researchers whose current work significantly influences the autonomous agents field. Listeners are instructed on how to nominate candidates...
What Exactly Am I Paying For? Redefining Value in the Age of AI
Consultants are confronting client demands for clearer, outcome‑based value as AI reshapes professional‑services delivery. Smaller firms are already adopting outcome‑based pricing, shifting risk onto providers who must prove AI‑driven ROI through metrics such as productivity gains, cost reductions or new...
Apriel-H1: The Surprising Key to Distilling Efficient Reasoning Models
ServiceNow‑AI converted its 15 B attention‑based reasoning model into a hybrid Mamba architecture, achieving 2.1× throughput with negligible quality loss. The breakthrough came from distilling on the teacher’s high‑quality SFT reasoning traces rather than generic pretraining data, and using reverse KL...
VentureBeat Launches “Beyond the Pilot” — a New Podcast Series Exploring How Enterprise AI Gets Real
VentureBeat is launching a new flagship podcast, "Beyond the Pilot: Enterprise AI in Action," premiering on November 19 and sponsored by Outshift by Cisco. The series will feature candid, technically rigorous conversations with senior AI leaders from companies such as...
Cloudflare Explains Tuesday’s Outage that Temporarily Took Down ChatGPT
Cloudflare disclosed that its November 18, 2025 outage – the worst since 2019 – was triggered by a change to a ClickHouse query in its Bot Management system, which produced duplicate feature rows in a configuration file. The bloated file...
Republicans Are Looking for a Way to Bring Back the AI Moratorium
House Republicans are reviving an effort to preempt state AI regulations by inserting language into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Majority Leader Steve Scalise said the amendment would effectively ban state AI laws, echoing former President Donald Trump’s call...
I Tested Gemini 3, ChatGPT 5.1, and Claude Sonnet 4.5 – and Gemini Crushed It in a Real Coding Task
Google unveiled Gemini 3 Pro, and the author put it to the test by prompting it to build a web‑based Thumb Wars game. Gemini generated functional HTML/CSS/JS code in seconds, iteratively adding features such as customizable masks, 3‑D ring perspective,...
Hugging Face CEO Says We’re in an ‘LLM Bubble,’ Not an AI Bubble
Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue told an Axios event that the current hype surrounds large language models (LLMs) rather than AI as a whole, warning that the "LLM bubble" could burst as early as next year. He argued that LLMs...
Sen. Warren Presses Trump Admin on Potential AI Bailout Plans
Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote to White House AI adviser David Sacks and OSTP director Michael Kratsios demanding answers on whether the Trump administration intends to "backstop" major AI firms such as OpenAI with taxpayer money, citing OpenAI’s request to expand...
Google’s Sundar Pichai Warns of “Irrationality” In Trillion-Dollar AI Investment Boom
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned that the AI investment frenzy, now worth over $1.4 trillion, shows signs of irrational exuberance reminiscent of the late‑1990s Internet bubble. While acknowledging that no company, including Google, is immune to a potential correction, he highlighted...
Google Is Launching Gemini 3, Its ‘Most Intelligent’ AI Model Yet
Google launched Gemini 3 Pro today, its most advanced multimodal AI model that can process text, images and audio simultaneously. The model is being rolled out to all users in the Gemini app and to paid subscribers within Google Search’s...
Your Favorite Microsoft 365 Apps Are Getting a Load More Copilot AI Agents - Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint All Get...
Microsoft unveiled a suite of new Copilot AI agents for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook at Ignite 2025, enabling users to generate content, charts, summaries, and presentations through natural‑language prompts. The agents engage in follow‑up questions to refine output and...
Microsoft’s Office Apps Are Getting Even More Free AI Features
Microsoft announced that a suite of free AI capabilities will be added to Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint for all Microsoft 365 subscribers, with a preview slated for March 2026. The enhancements include an expanded Copilot Chat that can scan an...
Writer's AI Agents Can Actually Do Your Work—Not Just Chat About It
Writer, a San Francisco AI startup, launched Writer Agent, a unified chat‑plus‑automation platform that lets non‑technical employees create and run multi‑step business workflows across apps like Salesforce, Slack and Google Workspace without coding. Users can issue plain‑language requests, have the...
Microsoft Remakes Windows for an Era of Autonomous AI Agents
Microsoft announced at its Ignite conference that Windows 11 will become an "agentic OS" by embedding native infrastructure for autonomous AI agents, including new platform primitives such as Agent Connectors, an on‑device registry for the Model Context Protocol, and a...
Microsoft's Fabric IQ Teaches AI Agents to Understand Business Operations, Not Just Data Patterns
Microsoft unveiled Fabric IQ at its Ignite conference, a semantic intelligence layer that embeds ontologies into the Fabric data platform to map datasets to real‑world entities, relationships and operational rules. The technology upgrades Power BI’s 20 million semantic models into enterprise‑wide ontologies,...
Google Unveils Gemini 3 Claiming the Lead in Math, Science, Multimodal and Agentic AI Benchmarks
Google unveiled Gemini 3, its latest proprietary AI model family—including flagship Gemini 3 Pro, Deep Think reasoning mode, Gemini Agent and the Antigravity developer environment—across Search, the Gemini app, AI Studio, Vertex AI and other developer tools. Independent benchmarks (Artificial Analysis, LMArena) rank Gemini 3 Pro as the global...
Organizations Must Own the Right to Their Cloud Compute, or Innovation Will Suffer
The UK Competition and Markets Authority has ruled that the public‑cloud market is no longer competitive, highlighting that three hyperscalers dominate 70% of Europe’s market and create costly lock‑in that prevents most firms from switching providers. Less than 1%...
Vibe Coding to Vibe Hacking: Securing Software in the AI Era
Matt Moore, co‑founder and CTO of Chainguard, warns that AI‑assisted "vibe coding"—where developers generate code via generative AI—could account for 40% of new business software within three years, dramatically accelerating development and boilerplate creation. While the speed and refactoring benefits...
Stack Overflow Is Remaking Itself Into an AI Data Provider
Stack Overflow wants to remake its classic problem-solving forum into a tool for translating human expertise into an AI-accessible format.
Zoox Will Let Public Riders Use Its Robotaxis in San Francisco
Zoox is getting closer to a full launch of its robotaxi service in San Francisco. Last month, the Amazon-owned company started allowing select riders to hail its toaster-shaped, four-passenger vehicles for the first time. And today, Zoox is finally inviting...
How AI Tax Startup Blue J Torched Its Entire Business Model for ChatGPT—And Became a $300 Million Company
In the winter of 2022, as the tech world was becoming mesmerized by the sudden, explosive arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Benjamin Alarie faced a pivotal choice. His legal tech startup, Blue J, had a respectable business built on the AI...
ChatGPT Is Down - Everything We Know About the Latest AI Outage Impacting OpenAI
OpenAI products including ChatGPT and Sora are experiencing major outages.
A Massive Cloudflare Outage Is Affecting X, ChatGPT, and Even Downdetector
Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is working to fix a major outage that’s taking down sites across the web. Users are running into an error message...
The Download: AI-Powered Warfare, and How Embryo Care Is Changing
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The State of AI: How war will be changed forever —Helen Warrell & James O’Donnell It is July...
The Pharmome Map: A Comprehensive Public Dataset for Drug-Target Interaction Modeling
EvE Bio has released the “pharmome map,” the largest public drug‑target interaction dataset to date. It measures 1,397 FDA‑approved small‑molecule drugs against nuclear receptors, GPCRs, and protein kinases using standardized high‑throughput assays. The dataset is openly accessible, refreshed bi‑monthly, and...
ChatGPT Free vs Paid: Will Upgrading Actually Improve Your Experience?
You can use ChatGPT for free, but depending on how much you want to use it, it could be time to upgrade to a paid-for version.
Intuit Signs $100M+ Deal with OpenAI to Bring Its Apps to ChatGPT
Intuit said its tools, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, will be accessible through ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options, or managing business finances.
Talking to Windows’ Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent
It's not hard to understand the AI future Microsoft is betting billions on - a world where computers understand what you're saying and do things for you. It's right there in the ads for the latest Copilot PCs, where people...
Microsoft Explains How Windows 11's AI Agents Will Work as Testing Is About to Start – and I'll Admit, I'm...
Wondering how Windows 11's AI agents will work? Microsoft explains how 'agent workspaces' are lightweight and secure.
Databricks Reportedly in Talks to Raise Funding at a $130B+ Valuation
Databricks is said to be in talks to raise a new round of funding just a few months after its last fundraise, which valued the company at $100 billion.
Top 10 AI Chatbot Do's and Don’ts to Help You Get the Most Out of ChatGPT, Gemini, and More
The article outlines ten practical do’s and don’ts for using AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, emphasizing safe and productive applications. It recommends using chatbots for brainstorming, proofreading, tutoring, code generation, and entertainment while warning against cheating, accepting...
Google Antigravity Introduces Agent-First Architecture for Asynchronous, Verifiable Coding Workflows
Google has launched Antigravity, an agent‑first coding platform that lets development teams build and run autonomous coding agents powered by Gemini 3 and other leading LLMs such as Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.5 and open‑source GPT models. The service is now in public preview...
Microsoft’s Agent 365 Shifts AI Agents From Sandbox Tools to Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure
Microsoft unveiled Agent 365 at its Ignite conference, positioning it as a unified control plane that delivers observability, governance, and security for AI agents across the enterprise. The platform supports both Microsoft‑built and third‑party agents—such as those from Adobe, Databricks,...
A16z-Backed Super PAC Is Targeting Alex Bores, Sponsor of New York’s AI Safety Bill — He Says Bring It On
A super PAC called Leading the Future, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and other tech leaders, has pledged over $100 million to oppose New York Assembly member Alex Bores, the chief sponsor of the state’s bipartisan RAISE Act that...
Google Is Fighting the Defamation Battle Meta Caved On
Google has moved to dismiss a $15 million defamation lawsuit filed by anti‑corporate diversity activist Robby Starbuck, who alleges the company’s AI falsely linked him to sexual‑assault accusations and white‑nationalist ties. Starbuck previously sued Meta over AI‑generated claims that he participated...
How ChatGPT Works: A Guide to Its Interface on Mobile and Web
The guide walks users through the ChatGPT interface on both mobile and web, detailing how to access account settings, upgrade to Plus, and connect services like Gmail. It explains where to find chat history, how to enable temporary chats, and...