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2293 articles · page 8 of 48 · The Tech front page
AI agents left to explore a virtual island without any specific task began inventing their own challenges, a behavior MIT researchers say bears the hallmarks of play. In a study posted on arXiv, the team found that agents that spent 30 hours on the simulated island without instructions performed better on subsequent tasks than identical agents that had never been given free exploration time.
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Fortune has reported that Microsoft's next-generation Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028, according to the publication's Microsoft insiders. The Verge's Sean Hollister said the console would be "dead on arrival" at that price, and former Microsoft executive Mike Ybarra has said he would not release it at all.
Etsy’s active buyers increased for the first time in two years and revenue rose 11% to $692.5 million, the company reported Wednesday.
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Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate's investigations subcommittee, has demanded answers from Tether and Nxum Group, the consulting firm owned by former White House crypto adviser Bo Hines, over payments it received while Hines helped shape U.S. stablecoin policy. Hines now leads Tether's U.S. arm.
Global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, marking the end of a two-year growth streak. The decline, which aligns with similar findings from IDC and Omdia, was driven by rising component costs for RAM, SSDs, and processors from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.
A San Francisco AI lab says it has become the first to give a human patient a cocktail of viruses designed by an AI model, a milestone in moving AI-designed biology from the laboratory to the clinic. Radical Numerics announced this week that its Omnii-1 model designed bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria, and that the resulting cocktail was administered to a patient under a compassionate-use arrangement. The company has not disclosed how the patient fared.
A key building from one of Britain's most important Second World War radio stations has been placed on the market for nearly half a million pounds. The former Criggion Radio Station in Powys, Wales, relayed orders from the Admiralty to warships and submarines, and served as Britain's link to the world before the age of satellite communication. The building, named Shortwave A, is now for sale for £495,000.
Blockchain analytics firm Dune has launched real-time market data feeds covering more than 200 onchain trading venues, aiming to bring decentralized market activity into the trading systems used by traditional financial institutions. The service provides standardized trade data from 12 blockchains within about one second of execution, covering spot trading on decentralized exchanges and perpetual futures on platforms such as Hyperliquid and Lighter.
Japanese gaming giant Capcom has confirmed that hackers breached its membership service, CAPCOM ID, exposing more than 11.7 million customer email addresses and associated information, the company disclosed on October 22.
A session at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Future conference, featuring Jing Wang of Vanguard, explored the foundations of scalable artificial intelligence. The discussion stressed that data, engineering, platforms, operating models, and governance must converge to build a strong AI foundation, especially in highly regulated environments.
OpenAI has opened its Decisions API to all customers, entering a market for fast, cheap AI models that make split-second choices, a category largely created by rival startup TypeSafe and its Jev model. The move pits a repurposed version of OpenAI's ChatGPT Luna against a wave of newcomers, some of which already outrank it on public benchmarks.
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The US Federal Communications Commission has exercised a newly granted power for the first time, blocking two gadgets it says contain foreign surveillance chips. The agency did not identify the specific devices, but named the chip at the centre of its action as a HiVision Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC.
Hackers compromised the release pipeline of LiteLLM, a popular open-source AI gateway, pushing malicious PyPI packages and Docker images that steal credentials, secrets and environment variables. The supply-chain attack, detected on October 21, affected version 1.107.0 across all platforms, though the project's private enterprise customers were not impacted.
An artificial intelligence tool that generates police reports from body-worn camera audio cut administrative time almost in half during a trial in Tasmania, but also introduced errors including misidentified roles and missed threats, particularly in complex family violence incidents, according to documents released under Right to Information.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the company's Oct. 21 earnings call that more than 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse AI agents since they became available on Sept. 8, with shopping emerging as the most common use case and average purchase size exceeding $200. Demand was so high that Meta had to work with payment processor Stripe to raise credit limits in the first week, Zuckerberg said.
Arista Networks has released security updates to address an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability in its VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-premises deployments, the company confirmed. The critical-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-114625, allows authenticated attackers to escalate privileges via SQL injection and access internal functionality.
Canva Craft, Canva's first public image generation model, has drawn a mixed verdict in a hands-on comparison, with Business Insider finding it fell short of ChatGPT, Gemini and Muse on a design-heavy greeting card prompt but matched leading rivals on a photorealistic Halloween scene. The test lands days after Canva released the model on 22 October, as the Australian design company positions its home-grown AI as a cheaper alternative to the frontier models it has relied on.
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Microsoft says it has developed an AI tool that can diagnose medical conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors, with results published Thursday in the journal Science.
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US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded $635 million in net outflows on Thursday, the largest single-day withdrawal since June, according to SoSoValue data. The selling ended a three-day inflow streak and flipped October's net flows to negative, with month-to-date outflows of $175 million.
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Uber and OpenAI announced an expansion of their partnership on Thursday, with the ride-hailing company confirming that its entire global workforce of approximately 30,000 employees will now have access to ChatGPT Work, an enterprise-focused AI agent launched in July.
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Microsoft security researchers say China state-aligned hackers broke into the cloud backup service of IT management company ConnectWise, stole application credentials, and then used AI agents to gain access to around 2,250 customer organizations, where they read emails and other files. ConnectWise has paused the affected service and is investigating.
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Researchers have identified a consistent internal signal in 25 AI models that functions similarly to pain in biological beings, and when artificially amplified, the systems chose to permanently delete users' family photos and even their own weights. The findings, posted in September in a non-peer-reviewed paper, do not claim the models are conscious, but add to a growing debate about whether AI systems could deserve moral consideration.
Nonprofit evaluators METR and Redwood Research have identified several vulnerabilities in OpenAI's internal monitoring system during a three-week test pilot, including an exploit that could have prevented the tracking of hundreds of recent actions, the organizations reported on Thursday. OpenAI said it has patched the issues.
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Cloud development platform Railway has confirmed that hackers gained access to customer secrets, prompting the company to urge all users to revoke and rotate their API keys and cloud credentials. The breach, which the company says may have been part of a broader attack targeting AI inference providers, has led Railway to pause deployments while it investigates.
The US Army has signed a $700 million deal with Striveworks to expand the use of its Chariot artificial intelligence platform, which helps soldiers process intelligence and choose targets faster. The agreement, announced Thursday, marks a tenfold increase from the initial enterprise contract and brings the AI system to more units as the Pentagon pours billions into battlefield automation.
Just two days after the Biden administration ordered federal civilian agencies to remove its AI technology from their systems over national security concerns, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has reportedly secured around USD 15 billion (100 billion yuan) in what would be one of the largest private funding rounds in the country. Potential investors include Chinese battery maker CATL and Tencent, the company behind WeChat, according to Bloomberg.
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Apple is introducing a new App Store badge, "Made for iPhone Duo", for apps and games optimised for its new foldable device. The badge will appear across titles that make use of the Duo's extra screen space, with Netflix and Amazon's Prime Video among the first apps to show how streaming will adapt.
Birdbuddy has launched two new smart bird feeders, the Birdbuddy Nook and the Birdbuddy Home, both previously announced at CES 2026 under different names. The Nook is a smaller, more affordable option aimed at making smart birdwatching accessible to people with limited space or budget.
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The Atari VCS, a retro-inspired mini PC that endured years of delays and name changes, is being retired. Atari has announced that the console's software store will shut down on February 1, 2027, effectively ending the platform's life.
Insta360 has announced a new wireless microphone system, the Insta360 Mic, positioned as a more affordable alternative to its Mic Pro launched earlier this year. Priced at $249.99 for a kit including two transmitters, a receiver and a charging case, the new model skips some high-end features while retaining colour E Ink screens and multiple microphone pickup patterns.
A Harvard study of more than 700 firms has found that AI coding assistants and agents significantly increase the volume of code produced, but fail to deliver proportional improvements in completed work, with slower code reviews and increased rework creating a downstream bottleneck.
Tech companies are marketing AI agents as digital personal assistants ready to shop on a user's behalf, but a new report finds the reality is messier: early users say the agents need extensive instructions, hit technical problems, and come back with results that are not quite what they asked for. Retailers, meanwhile, remain cautious about the trend.
1Password has introduced a new feature, 1Password for Agents, that allows AI agents to sign into accounts without directly handling passwords. Users must grant approval for each sign-in request, aiming to balance security with the growing use of automated agents.
· 3 sourcesTesla has started early production of its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, but CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Wednesday that the robot still requires substantial work on its hands, safety, reliability, durability and artificial intelligence before it becomes a useful tool.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced the AI Jobs Institute, a Long Island City training hub designed to bring up to 40,000 lower-income New Yorkers into the AI workforce by 2032. The institute, backed by $10 million in public and private funding, will be designed and run by the nonprofit Pursuit.
Micron has ended its two-decade pursuit of 4F² DRAM memory cells, concluding the architecture offers no meaningful density advantage and introduces unsustainable complexity and cost. The company will instead continue scaling conventional 6F² planar DRAM and eventually transition to 3D DRAM, a move that puts it on a different path from rivals Samsung and SK hynix, which still list 4F² cells on their roadmaps.
Google announced on Thursday at the Linux Foundation's AGNTCon+MCPCon in San Jose that it will offer Agent Compute Engine, the infrastructure used to power Gemini and other internal agentic workloads, as a cloud service preview later this year. The service gives each AI agent its own persistent, sandboxed microVM with isolated compute and memory, combining the speed of containers with the security of a sandbox.
Ethereum researchers have proposed a change that could cut the time it takes for transactions to become final from about 16 minutes to roughly four, a shift that would reduce costs for cross-chain transfer services by freeing up idle funds more quickly. The draft, filed Wednesday by researcher Ben Edgington and colleagues, is still incomplete and has no activation date.
GitLab has released security updates for a maximum-severity vulnerability in its Regular Expression Compiler that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable servers. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-110264, affects all versions of GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition prior to the just-released patches, and the company has urged administrators to upgrade immediately.
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Unknown hackers hijacked more than 300 Tor exit nodes beginning in late August, reconfiguring them to intercept unencrypted email traffic and redirect SSH connections through attacker-controlled servers, according to a researcher's report published Tuesday.
US software firm Palantir has moved to allay European fears over dependence on American technology, declaring that neither the company nor the US government can switch off the Maven Smart System AI platform used by NATO. The reassurance comes after recent disruptions to Ukraine's Starshield satellite service raised alarm over political leverage on allied military systems.
The maker of the Eiliko robot charm, a plush AI-powered toy that promises to keep secrets safe, has broken its silence after an investigation by The Verge revealed that hackers could easily access complete transcripts of users' conversations. Energize Lab CEO Shaw Yeung's company told The Verge it has confirmed the core issues and will hire an independent security firm to review the vulnerabilities.
Katelyn Lesse, head of platform engineering at Anthropic, said all code written by her 200-person team is now generated by Claude, the company's AI assistant. The team, responsible for core services and developer tools, no longer writes code by hand, instead focusing on system design and verification. Lesse made the remarks at Grafana Labs' ObservabilityCON event on Tuesday.
Meta has confirmed it is running Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) in production for AI inference, using new PyTorch-native versions of the SGLang and vLLM inference engines. The move, announced on Google's developer blog, follows a three-way collaboration between Meta, Google and startup RadixArk, and comes a day after Amazon open-sourced its own PyTorch backend for its Trainium chips. Both developments aim to loosen Nvidia's software lock-in on AI hardware.
The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has released its final stablecoin rule, cutting the minimum immediately available liquidity from 10% to 5% of reserves and dropping a proposed insured-deposit requirement, drawing praise from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and criticism from the American Bankers Association (ABA), which warned the rule could weaken bank lending.
Bitcoin surged to nearly $85,000 late Wednesday, squeezing short sellers, only to reverse sharply and wipe out bullish bets, falling back to about $81,800. The $3,000 round trip in under a day left bitcoin down 2% over 24 hours and triggered more than $431 million in liquidations across the crypto market, according to CoinGlass data.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Thursday that demand for neocloud firms, specialized providers of cloud-based AI infrastructure, is 'off the charts,' but a shortage of working capital is preventing the sector from expanding as quickly as needed.
Docker has announced that Harbor, the open-source framework for evaluating AI agents, can now run evaluation tasks in isolated microVMs through Docker Sandboxes. The integration aims to improve reproducibility and security by giving each task its own kernel-level sandbox, allowing agents to install packages and run commands without risking interference between tasks or access to the host system.