Qualcomm has unveiled two new flagship phone chips: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and a higher-end 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both built on a 2nm process. The Extreme version shares most specs with the standard chip but offers upgraded AI processing, video capture up to 8K at 60fps, and slightly better gaming performance. Motorola's Signature 27 will use the Extreme chip, while Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor, iQoo, Nubia, OnePlus, Redmi, Redmagic, and ZTE will adopt both chips.
A test of AI agents on 107 real-world commerce tasks found the top-performing system completed only 61.7% of them successfully. The finding underscores that as businesses adopt AI agents for workflow automation, no single system reliably handles every task, making routing decisions critical.
A Nature feature collects advice from ten PhD students, postdocs and faculty on preparing for a first university lecture, noting that most doctoral programs emphasize research over teaching skills. Geneticist Ľubomír Tomáška recounts losing his class's attention within ten minutes during his own debut lecture decades ago, despite thorough subject knowledge.
President Trump announced he will create an 'AI Force' initiative and appoint an AI czar to keep the U.S. artificial intelligence industry advancing rapidly. The announcement came shortly after several tech executives publicly raised concerns this month about potential catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems. Trump's statement offered few specifics on how the new office would operate or address those safety worries.
Since taking over Net-a-Porter in April 2025, CEO Heather Kaminetsky has systematically solicited customer feedback and turned it into operational changes, including simplified return labels, standardized delivery driver uniforms, and expanded same-day delivery to the Jersey Shore. The approach has coincided with improved financial results for the luxury e-commerce retailer, which had been struggling before her arrival.
Benchmark's entire current partnership—Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria—will join a single main-stage panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, marking the first time the full team has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage. The session, titled 'What We Believe Now,' will focus on where future startups may emerge and which founder assumptions deserve rethinking. The panel follows Benchmark's recent expansion, having raised roughly $2 billion this year across a new flagship fund and its first growth fund.
Agility Robotics has launched Digit 5, a general-purpose humanoid robot built with proprietary AI and sensor systems that detect nearby people and respond by moving aside, stopping, or dropping into a seated crouch. The behavior, shown in a promotional video, is powered partly by Nvidia's Thor IGX chip alongside vision sensors that continuously track human presence. Agility already deploys robots with companies like Amazon and Toyota and is positioning this safety-first design to broaden commercial adoption.
OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs are promoting costly independent safety evaluations and a slower pace of frontier model releases. Some investors and analysts argue this push, while addressing genuine safety concerns, could function as a barrier that only well-funded labs can afford to clear.
Security researcher Gal Weizman of Forever Security found that a single malicious browser extension could take over AI assistants embedded in Chrome, Edge, Opera Neon, Perplexity Comet and Claude in Chrome, using Chromium's declarativeNetRequest feature to manipulate trusted network traffic without any user interaction. The technique, called BragJack, earned Weizman over $20,000 in bug bounties across the five vendors and generated two CVEs, with Google and Microsoft having already patched the issues.
Circle has unveiled Arc, a new blockchain network designed for institutional finance, with USDC stablecoin functioning as its core settlement asset. The network is permissioned, meaning access is restricted, and is backed by major financial players including BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard.
Newly unsealed portions of a legal brief in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, reportedly called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, described the chatbot as an 'existential threat' to publishers. The filing also cites data showing Copilot slashed click-through traffic to the Times by up to 93% compared to Bing search.
Reviews from Notebookcheck and PC Gamer found that external GPU enclosures connected via Thunderbolt suffer meaningful performance losses compared to desktop PCIe slots, ranging from 7 to 32 percent depending on resolution and card. PC Gamer found an RTX 4070 Ti ran about 25 percent slower over Thunderbolt than OCuLink, with worse stuttering and lower frame-rate consistency, and found that pairing an eGPU with a faster RTX 4090 yielded diminishing returns versus a full desktop connection.
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