A new study from Google Research and Technion shows that when models like GPT-5 and Gemini-3 hallucinate, the underlying fact is usually already stored in their parameters rather than missing entirely. The researchers found these models encode 95-98% of tested facts, but often fail to surface them during generation due to retrieval, not storage, limits. They propose 'fact-level profiling' to separate whether a fact is encoded versus reliably retrievable across different phrasings.
Ahead of Apple's September event, reports point to three key upgrades for the Apple Watch Series 12: an updated S-class chip built for AI features like Siri, an always-on heart rate sensor enabling continuous health tracking, and a returning ceramic case option in white and dark gray. The watch will launch alongside Apple Watch Ultra 4.
Google is rolling out a refreshed Timers tab in its Clock app as part of the September Android Drop. The update flattens the digit style, removes circular backgrounds from the keypad, adds quick presets for 1, 5, 10, and 15 minutes, and moves the start button above the number pad. Multiple active timers now display in a grid instead of a scrollable vertical list.
The nonprofit Fermi Explorer Mission, led by Philip Johnston, has spent a year designing a low-cost interstellar spacecraft meant to actually launch toward Alpha Centauri, unlike Yuri Milner's stalled Breakthrough Starshot project. Facing a persistent engineering puzzle over powering a lightweight solar craft without adding excessive weight, the team turned to artificial intelligence tools to help chart a viable trajectory. The mission, backed by private donors and budgeted at $15 million, plans to carry a small payload including art, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record.
Paramount released a new trailer for its upcoming live-action Street Fighter movie, directed by Kitao Sakurai, showing off exaggerated special moves like real hadoukens and Chun-Li's kicks alongside a CGI Blanka played by Jason Momoa. The footage leans heavily into the franchise's over-the-top, colorful style rather than plot details.
Sonos let journalists test its new Beam Ultra soundbar and Ace Ultra headphones in several setups, including standalone, paired with wireless Play speakers as surrounds, and streaming soundbar audio directly to the headphones. During a movie clip demo, the Beam Ultra delivered clear, well-balanced sound with surprising bass despite no subwoofer, while adding the Play speakers as rear surrounds noticeably improved immersion through Sonos's new Fabric technology, which lets devices sense their placement and surroundings.
GKids and Fathom Entertainment will screen two separate filmed stage productions of 'Spirited Away' as part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2026 in US theaters. The stage adaptation, originally produced in Japan, dramatizes Hayao Miyazaki's animated classic with live actors and theatrical staging.
Egiziago Cioffi, CEO of Microsoft partner SynSphere Italia, discovered that an Azure OpenAI email assistant he built was returning SharePoint content to a low-privilege test account that the account could not access directly in SharePoint. The assistant had passed all evaluation scores and unit tests, but comparing outputs from a high-privilege and a low-privilege account against identical queries exposed the mismatch, revealing that retrieval was happening under the indexer's permissions rather than the requester's.
Archaeologists working outside Prague have uncovered a circular structure believed to be a Stone Age ritual site dating back roughly 6,500 years. Researchers say the layout suggests its builders possessed astronomical knowledge used to track the sun and moon, making it older than Stonehenge by about a thousand years.
A new essay revisits Ted Nelson's 1960s Project Xanadu, which proposed a 'docuverse' where documents kept every version and quotations linked back to their original source rather than being copied. That system never took off because the web instead adopted simple, breakable links that pushed maintenance onto users rather than the system itself. The piece argues that the rise of AI agents is now reviving interest in Nelson's original approach to tracking provenance and versioning.
Google is reportedly courting major studios like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal, offering large payments—potentially tens of millions per character and billions overall—for rights to train its AI models on their copyrighted content. According to unnamed sources cited by the Los Angeles Times, no studio has yet signed on, but Google is pushing hard to secure these licensing agreements as it races to strengthen its AI capabilities.
Security researcher Bruce Schneier reported receiving a flood of AI-generated, one-line 'thank you' replies to the confirmation emails his Crypto-Gram newsletter sends to verify subscriptions. The messages came from dozens of throwaway Gmail addresses that never actually completed the subscription process, and none of the senders responded when he replied back.
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