Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Amazon’s assistant can’t always remember who I am or where my daughter goes to school — but it can now reliably turn on my lights.
According to The Verge’s senior AI reporter, Luca Guadagnino’s dark comedy hit all the familiar tech milestones.
The future of computing might be always-on, autonomous agents, but should we hand Meta or OpenAI this much personal data?
It banned AI robocalls in 2024, but the Associated Press reports Brendan Carr’s FCC is considering a waiver that would allow political calls “using an artificial or prerecorded voice—including an AI-generated voice— without obtaining prior express consent.” If the waiver’s granted, it could mean an influx of AI calls ahead of the midterm elections.
Another quarter another record profit, fueled by AI demand for the company’s memory chips.
Projected quarterly operating profit is 782% higher from a year earlier. Revenue forecast of about 195 trillion won is up nearly 127% from the same period last year.
Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.
Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It’s the first time Trump has ever given out the awards, which usually don’t go to well-known tech execs, judging by previous recipients.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
Haiku 5.5 is only outpaced by Anthropic’s Opus models in Fast Mode. Anthropic also says it costs “around 75% less” on average than last year’s Haiku 4.5, and it’s the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort level. Haiku 5.5 is available now “on all platforms.”
[Anthropic]
Michael Smith, who pleaded guilty earlier this year, was also ordered to pay over $8 million. According to the DOJ, that’s the amount he earned in royalties from using bots to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs from 2017 to 2024.
[U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York]
Meta’s new AI agent will be getting a native app on Windows, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri announced at today’s event. No timeline on when, though. Meta launched a Mac Muse app in September.
The tool checks images, video, and audio files for Google’s SynthID watermark, a system that embeds a near-invisible marker into AI-generated content.
Google first made its SynthID Detector available to media professionals last year, but now anyone can use it by logging into synthid.com.
Delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats have changed how diners eat and how restaurants operate. AI could force a new kind of reckoning for the industry.
It’s now available to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in India on desktop and Android, along with the Android version of Google’s Gemini in Chrome browser assistant. Auto browse launched earlier this year, allowing Gemini to complete multi-step tasks in Chrome, like shopping, filling out forms, or researching hotel prices.
The next big thing in AI, at least if you ask the tech companies, is assistant agents. David and The Verge’s Allison Johnson have both been testing products like Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, and startups like Instinct, in an effort to find out how much you can really get done by messaging with an AI tool – and whether the productivity is worth the tradeoffs.
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Here’s the high-level idea of the Personal Agent Protocol, according to a blog post from the AI company Sierra:
The principle behind the Personal Agent Protocol we’re building is that consumers decide what access to give their personal agents, and companies set parameters for what those agents can do. It enables companies to work with personal agents in the way that is best for their customers: through their existing websites and APIs, or through an agent of their own.
Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart are also helping develop it.
Claude for Google Workspace, now in public beta on all paid Claude plans, adds a sidebar where you can prompt Claude to edit your files, similar to Google’s Gemini sidebar. Anthropic’s also launching new connectors for creating and editing Google Workspace files directly in Claude.
EmbeddingGemma 2 can work with more than just text, featuring capabilities across coding, images, video, and audio. Google says the upgraded model has 740 million parameters and is designed to perform on-device tasks like finding a video clip from a voice memo or searching through audio recordings based on a text prompt.
Though AI studio Fable has not yet announced which distributor will put its animated Gods Don’t Give Gifts feature into theaters, Variety reports that the project is now slated to premiere on December 4th — which would make it eligible for submission for the upcoming Oscars.
An IPO prospectus viewed by Reuters included Amodei’s compensation, which the outlet says is higher than last year’s pay for Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Anthropic is expected to file for its IPO this fall, potentially valuing the AI company at over $2 trillion.
Tech companies with new AI hardware want you to agree that always-listening, often-recapping devices don’t count as recording.
French AI startup Mistral says its new trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4 — also called Le Chonk — is the best open-weight model developed outside of China. It says it’s particularly strong at coding, cybersecurity, and tasks in finance, engineering, and manufacturing. The model is currently available in preview, with weights dropping at the end of October.
That’s New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper, who’s not thrilled that ChatGPT is generating cartoons featuring his signature. He’s one of more than 15 cartoonists whose signatures were recreated by ChatGPT, according to Nieman Lab, which says the chatbot is still generating fake signatures even after the company was notified.
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
Take a look. It was “made possible” thanks in part to Valve’s ARM port of the game it made for the Steam Frame and with some help from Claude.
As Google explains:
Markdown is a standard text format widely used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to preserve structured content, like tables, headers, and bulleted lists, without the bulk of heavy file formats. Previously, you needed to import and convert Markdown files into a Doc format, which often altered formatting, stripped comments, and fragmented files.
You’ll also be able to preview Markdown files in Drive. The feature starts rolling out today.
