Jacob Coxon, who worked on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation and warned that neither company is behaving responsibly as they race toward self-improving superintelligent AI. He said staff at these firms privately believe AI could kill everyone within the decade, with Anthropic aware of the danger but pressing forward anyway out of fear of losing the race to competitors.
Portable power devices often list peak wattage on the box, but real-world performance drops as heat builds up during charging—especially in magnetic wireless chargers, where the induction coils sit in direct contact with the phone. For years manufacturers have relied on passive materials like graphite sheets and heat spreaders to manage that heat, but these can only slow warming, not stop it, once a compact enclosure hits its thermal ceiling.
A 2025 OECD PISA study of over 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries found that, after controlling for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed AI users in science. The performance gap was largest for those using AI to summarize texts or draft assignments, and for those using it either rarely or daily, while moderate, intentional use—especially paired with training to critically evaluate AI outputs—showed smaller drops or even slight gains over non-users.
Ahead of Apple's launch event, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will carry a $100 price increase, starting at $1199, while the new foldable iPhone Duo will start at $1999 with higher-storage models near $3000. These figures come in below the steeper increases many analysts had predicted earlier this year.
Jensen Huang has for the second time this year proclaimed that artificial general intelligence has been achieved, this time tying his claim to OpenAI's newly launched GPT-6 Astra model. He highlighted that Astra was trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips, with 400,000 more coming online soon, even as independent benchmarks show Astra trailing rival Claude in some tasks.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple's upcoming Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 will use the microphone, GPS and other sensors to build daily activity recaps, including summaries of conversations. These recaps will live inside the new Siri app, and users can set the listening feature to run continuously or only in specific locations.
U.S. security agencies have publicly accused six Chinese artificial intelligence companies of systematically using American AI models to train their own systems through a technique known as distillation. The practice allows a smaller model to learn from the outputs of a larger, more advanced one, effectively transferring capabilities without the original research investment.
Microsoft's Bing Wallpaper app, which normally rotates nature and landscape photos, recently displayed a promotional image for a Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts 11-film collection instead. Users on Reddit, Thurrott.com and Microsoft Learn forums expressed surprise and frustration, with some mistaking the ad for adware and others objecting due to JK Rowling's political controversies.
Motorola briefly ran a website pop-up teasing a device called the Signature 27, showing a close-up of its rear camera and the tagline 'A new perspective is coming' while collecting visitor emails. The pop-up appeared on Motorola's US, UK and EU sites before quickly vanishing, and a partially loaded 'Crystals by Swarovski' logo suggests a bejeweled variant is planned, similar to the original Signature phone.
NordVPN has released PriceMice, a free Chrome extension that uses AI to scan hotel booking prices across different countries and surface the cheapest option, including taxes and fees at checkout. Users can then switch their VPN to the country offering the lowest rate before completing their booking. In one test, the tool found a savings of about $120 on a Tokyo hotel by switching the browsing location from India to Taiwan.
Google announced a 13 billion euro ($15.1 billion) investment to build out AI infrastructure in Finland, making it the company's largest single investment ever made in Europe. The move underscores Finland's growing appeal to hyperscalers seeking abundant land and power resources that are increasingly scarce elsewhere on the continent.
At Laracon US 2026, Thorsten Ball, co-founder of the coding agent Amp, gave a talk titled 'How I Prompt,' detailing his personal methods for instructing AI coding agents. He drew on his background at Sourcegraph and Zed, and his role building Amp, which launched shortly after Claude Code and has been praised for its polish and usability.