GoKawiil
Tech News
The latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, titled 'Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass,' places the Enterprise crew amid medical crises and paternity drama. The episode leans heavily into soap opera-style storytelling conventions rather than the show's usual sci-fi adventure format.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pushed back on claims that ChatGPT usage consumes excessive water, comparing it to a viral claim that a single query uses as much water as running a shower for six hours. Speaking on the Sources Podcast, he said 38,000 queries equate to the water needed to grow one almond in California, and argued modern data centers no longer rely on evaporative cooling, instead using water similar to an office building.
Nvidia confirmed Thursday it has struck a deal to purchase Hugging Face, the widely used open-source AI model repository, for nearly $13 billion. The announcement ends weeks of speculation about a potential acquisition. CEO Jensen Huang pledged the platform will remain open to the broader AI community after the deal closes.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new flagship model the company describes as a major leap in cybersecurity, coding, and agentic task performance. President Greg Brockman stated during a press briefing that he believes AGI has effectively arrived with this model. The rollout begins with enterprise cybersecurity customers today, expanding to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users over the coming days, plus API and AWS access.
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the AI development platform known for hosting open-weight models, in a deal valued at $13 billion. The acquisition strengthens Nvidia's position in the open-source AI ecosystem beyond its core chip business.
A new open-source utility called balrogg recompresses existing Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files without any loss of quality, typically shaving 8-12% off .ogg files and 3-8% off .opus files. The command-line tool, licensed under GPLv3 and hosted on GitHub, supports batch processing across multiple cores, adjustable compression effort levels from -1 to -9, and optional progress reporting during encoding and decoding.
Nvidia has agreed to purchase AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion, a huge jump from the $7 billion valuation the startup rejected from Nvidia just last year to stay independent. The chipmaker says the acquisition will accelerate adoption of open-weight AI models, which let developers download and customize systems rather than rely on proprietary offerings from firms like OpenAI and Anthropic. The deal, expected to close by 2027, surpasses Nvidia's 2020 purchase of Mellanox as its biggest acquisition to date.
The LTO Consortium, backed by HPE, IBM, and Quantum, reports that shipped capacity of LTO-compatible tape media rose 57% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026. The surge follows a 9% dip in 2025 and comes after 2024's record 176.5 exabytes shipped, with LTO-9 tapes driving much of the latest growth. Quantum's CEO attributes the rebound to enterprises needing durable, cost-effective long-term storage as AI-driven data volumes explode.
HTC is bringing its Vive Eagle smart glasses to the US market after debuting them last year, offering a screen-free, glasses-first design. The device includes a 12MP ultrawide camera, 32GB of encrypted storage, and support for either OpenAI or Gemini voice assistants, running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 chip. Pricing starts at $499 for standard or sunglass lenses, rising to $599 for photochromic versions.
Microsoft will let anyone buy cloud gaming playtime hours through the Xbox Store starting in November, letting non-subscribers stream eligible owned games without Game Pass. At the same time, Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will face a new monthly cap of just 15 cloud gaming hours, pushing heavy users toward buying extra hourly bundles. Microsoft is also testing a free, ad-supported cloud gaming tier for Xbox Insiders.
HTC is finally launching its Vive Eagle smart glasses outside Taiwan, expanding availability to North America, Europe, the UK and Australia a year after their original release. The hardware remains largely unchanged, featuring a Snapdragon AR Gen 1 chip, 12-megapixel camera, open-ear speakers and support for OpenAI or Gemini assistants, with US sales starting today at $499 and European shipments beginning September 21st.