AI News Today

Looking to add a smart speaker to your house? Here’s which to choose, whether you’re an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini fan.

A $400 million chip-backed loan points to the next wave of AI infrastructure deals.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has come out strongly in favor of AI tools in kernel development. "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects," he wrote on the kernel mailing list amid a debate over Sashiko, the Linux Foundation's AI-powered code review tool. Torvalds said he would "very loudly ignore" anyone who tries to talk others out of using it. The article Linus Torvalds tells AI critics in the Linux kernel community to fork off appeared first on The Decoder .

The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.

The CEO of Foundation Future Industries, which counts the president’s son as its chief strategy adviser, tells WIRED it’s exploring some “kinetic things.”

Netflix now uses AI in about 300 productions, mostly in post-production. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put specific numbers to the effort: the docuseries "The American Experiment" includes 17 minutes of AI-assisted footage, produced twice as fast at half the cost. The savings will "likely" fund more content rather than shrink the $20 billion budget. The article Netflix's 300 AI productions show how fast the technology is spreading through entertainment appeared first on The Decoder .

<p><strong>BBC Philharmonic/Havlat/Kaziboni/Piatti Quartet<br>(NMC)</strong><br>Einstein’s field equations, Newton’s universal law and artificial intelligence are among the subjects of Laidlow’s ambitious orchestral works</p><p>Robert Laidlow is as at home in the realms of science and technology as he is in the world of classical music. As this NMC debut album demonstrates, his intricate, wildly imaginative work is eminently approachable, even if the core concepts are highly complex.</p><p>Warp,

<p>Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?</p><p>By Robert P Baird. Read by Simon Darwen</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/30/theres-this-deep-mystery-of-what-actually-is-this-thing-the-philosopher-inside-google-deepmind">Read the text version here</a></strong></p><p><strong>Support the

On today’s Uncanny Valley, we unpack OpenAI’s ongoing drama, both legal and reputational, and whether these developments could further hurt the company—particularly in its fight against Anthropic.

Hyundai aims to deploy 25,000 Atlas robots starting with US factories in 2028.

If only someone could have predicted it.

Kimi is launching K3, a multimodal open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters and one million tokens of context. In the company's own benchmarks, it comes close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol while beating Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2, in some cases by a wide margin. The model is also significantly pricier than its predecessor. Full weights are scheduled for release by July 27. The article Kimi's open model K3 nears GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 while signaling the end of super cheap Chinese AI appeare

Creator says he will "very loudly ignore" those arguing for a ban on AI tools.

The company endorsed landmark AI transparency laws in California and New York last year, but its head of US state and local policy says they may already be outdated.

Google is adding personalized AI avatars to Vids that let users create videos starring a digital version of themselves, alongside Gemini Omni-powered tools for generating and editing videos from prompts and reference images.

Roblox's new "Build" feature lets users generate basic games using a single text prompt.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul might have just signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in the state, but she's not against using the technology herself. During an interview with Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Hochul said that her team is using "AI to analyze every single rule, regulation, [and] policy" to check for outdated […]

Across 107 enterprises, AI infrastructure spending is accelerating well ahead of the ability to see or steer its economics. Most organizations run their AI on a familiar base of hyperscalers and model-provider APIs, yet the next dollar is aimed at specialized compute almost none of them use today; a majority intend to switch or add providers within the year, many within a quarter. Buying decisions turn on integration and total cost of ownership rather than headline token price — which is fortuna

Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and integrating the tool more deeply into its ecosystem. A new feature gives each notebook its own cloud computer that can write and run code, initially for AI Ultra and Workspace customers. Separately, Google Search is getting app connections. The article Google rebrands NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook and opens its search app to third-party integration appeared first on The Decoder .

Across 101 enterprises, the infrastructure that feeds AI agents their business context is being built faster than it can be trusted. Retrieval-augmented generation is already the default context source, and provider-native retrieval has quietly overtaken the dedicated vector databases that define the category — yet a majority of enterprises have already watched their agents produce confident, wrong answers traced to missing or inconsistent context. A governed semantic layer is emerging as the fi

Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs outlined a bioresilience program to curb AI misuse in biology while aiding outbreak response. The two organisations published an update on a joint initiative that began quietly and has now built out more than 15 partnerships with government bodies, biosecurity organisations, and research groups over the past 12 months. The […] The post Examining Google DeepMind’s AI bioresilience push appeared first on AI News .

Across 157 enterprises, organizations are granting AI agents more autonomy while trusting the evaluations meant to gate that autonomy less. Half have already shipped an agent that passed their internal evaluations and then failed a customer in production; only one in twenty fully trusts automated evaluation today; and the most-cited weakness is that evaluations do not align with real-world outcomes. Yet two-thirds already allow, or are actively engineering toward, deploying agent changes to prod

German media regulators say Google's AI Overviews are Google's own content, not neutral search results, and that they crowd out regular links. The regulators have issued their first rulings against Google and Perplexity under the country's State Media Treaty. Both companies have one month to appeal. The article Germany puts Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity under media law in first-of-its-kind ruling appeared first on The Decoder .

Google is giving its AI note-taking app a new name. The company announced on Thursday that NotebookLM is becoming Gemini Notebook, but will remain a standalone app even as it integrates more deeply across Gemini and Google Search. Google first revealed Gemini Notebook - then called Project Tailwind - in May 2023 before widely releasing […]

Companies coming to market are raising money at fastest pace this century.

<p>Case is one of first brought by an AI company against a user ⁠for allegedly using a tool to generate child abuse material</p><p>Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has sued a South Carolina man arrested ⁠earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging he misused the company’s AI system Grok to ⁠create child sexual abuse ⁠material.</p><p>xAI ​alleged in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, that Terry Harwood violated the company’s ⁠terms of

<p>Keith Thomas can move arms and hands, and feel sensation of touch after ‘double neural bypass’ and months of training</p><p>A man who was paralysed from the chest down in a swimming accident six years ago has been able to feed himself and drink from a cup thanks to a brain implant that bypasses his spinal cord injury.</p><p>Keith Thomas of Massapequa, New York, could not lift his arms off his wheelchair when he agreed to trial the technology in 2021, but after surgery to implant electrodes in

OpenAI and keyboard manufacturer Work Louder have unveiled the Codex Micro, a compact hardware controller designed for working with AI agents. The article OpenAI wants developers to stop typing commands and start using a joystick to control their AI agents appeared first on The Decoder .

Sakana AI is integrating Nvidia's open-source Nemotron models into its Fugu orchestrator, which dynamically combines multiple language models for specific tasks. The core argument: Open models only become competitive with Frontier systems when used in a coordinated manner. However, the announcement does not yet provide specific benchmark figures for the new combination. The article Sakana AI's orchestrator adds Nvidia Nemotron to prove "collective intelligence" can rival single frontier models a

The deal, which was rumored to be in the works last year, marks an important step for Apple's AI ambitions in a key market.

1Password has launched a new browser integration for Claude that allows the Anthropic chatbot to access stored security credentials like usernames and passwords. The 1Password for Claude feature means that users can authorize Claude to complete multi-step tasks like booking travel and managing online accounts on their behalf without having to manually input their login […]

Google must give rival AI assistants and search engines greater access to key parts of Android and Google Search after the European Union ordered the company to comply with the bloc's digital antitrust rules. The two decisions, handed down Thursday, could weaken Google's control over two of the tech industry's most important platforms and have […]

I’m sick of “opt-out” toggles for automatically enabled generative AI features. It’s past time to make “opt in” the default setting for sensitive features.

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, a multimodal open-weights model with 975 billion parameters. It leads U.S. open-weights models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, though top Chinese open models still beat it on some tasks. Pricing starts at $1.87 per million input tokens, and Thinking Machines is pitching Inkling as a base for fine-tuning rather than the most powerful model available. The article Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati's Thinking Ma

Google shipped an update to its open AI model Gemma 4 that speeds up performance on Nvidia Hopper GPUs, fixes tool calling bugs, and addresses problems with truncated responses. The article Gemma 4 gets a stealth update that fixes tool calling bugs and truncated responses under the same name appeared first on The Decoder .

Neko Health has raised $700 million to expand its AI body scans in the United States, starting with a clinic in New York. The company’s preventive screening service combines medical imaging, blood tests, proprietary sensors, and clinician review. The Series C round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners. Existing […] The post Neko Health raises $700 million to expand AI body scans in the US appeared first on AI News .

<p>Uncrewed systems are the future for armed forces and the Netherlands is leading the way ‘to keep people out of danger zones’</p><p>On each side of the target ship, a black vessel keeps a watchful distance. Defender 1 and Defender 2 are the eyes and ears of the navy – but they have nobody onboard, and their paths are controlled by a computer system.</p><p>This is the future of the Royal Netherlands Navy, according to Capt Sjoerd Feenstra, head of the expertise centre for unmanned systems. He i

<p>Or will they forge a path of their own?</p><ul><li><p>See more of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/fiona-katauskas">Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here</a></p></li></ul> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/jul/16/will-the-new-ai-roadmap-keep-the-tech-giants-in-line">Continue reading...</a>

<p>When the PM talks about new laws applying to the ‘next generation of large-scale datacentres’ what does he mean?</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/16/albaneses-ai-blueprint-sparks-calls-for-datacentre-moratorium-until-new-regulations-in-place">Albanese’s AI blueprint sparks calls for datacentre moratorium until new regulations in place</a></p></li></ul><p>Expectations were high as the prime minister took the stage at the University of Sydney on Wednesd

Microsoft is looking to sell its in-house AI models as more efficient and cost-effective than its competitors' models.