Google has added the ability to import purchased Google Play Books directly into Gemini Notebook, letting users query and analyze book content alongside other sources like documents and videos. The feature initially covers about 100,000 titles from publishers such as Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House, and O'Reilly Media, plus special notebooks created with over 15 bestselling authors. This launch marks the start of Google's broader Expert Intelligence initiative, which will eventually expand to other products, third-party subscriptions, and textbooks.
A commentary piece, drawing on Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, weighs evidence on both sides of the question of whether today's kids are better or worse off than previous generations. It notes gains such as more parental time, less substance abuse, fewer car deaths, and greater tolerance for minorities, alongside concerns like heavy phone use, isolation, less sleep and reading, and rising anxiety, depression and suicide rates among teens, especially girls. The author frames this as an open question worth academic examination rather than settling on one conclusion.
Jerry James benchmarked an 8-GPU NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell system paired with an AMD EPYC 9555 CPU, offering 768GB of combined GDDR7 memory. Rather than splitting huge models like Llama-3.1 405B or DeepSeek-R1 671B across all eight PCIe cards, which introduces heavy latency, the team found the setup performs best running independent single-GPU model instances in parallel.
OpenAI published an open letter urging global coordination on cyber defense, stating that AI-enabled cyberattacks will become significantly more widespread and sophisticated in the coming months as AI models grow more capable. The letter calls for collective action among governments and organizations at local, national and international levels to prepare defenses before this escalation occurs.
Sony has activated free, ad-supported TV (FAST) channels on PlayStation 5 consoles in the United States, adding a media tab with more than 100 live channels and on-demand content from Sony Pictures Television. The lineup spans movies, TV shows, anime, news, sports, documentaries, gaming and comedy programming, including titles like Community, The Walking Dead and Naruto. Sony says it will keep updating the service and plans to expand it to Canada and other markets.
Walmart has released a purse styled after its popular $5.97 rotisserie chicken, a nod to the deli item's huge social media following. The retailer said more than 15,000 mentions of the chicken online helped push it to create the novelty accessory. The company kept the item's signature price point attached to the promotion as a marketing hook.
A survivor of the deadly Tibet-Nepal flooding reported that satellite connectivity on his HUAWEI Mate X5 let him stay in contact with the outside world after cellular networks failed. He used the satellite link to reach a helicopter crew and was subsequently evacuated, then shared his account through HUAWEI executive Richard Yu's social media page. The flooding has killed over 900 people, with thousands still unaccounted for.
The FTC, joined by attorneys general from 22 states, filed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of quietly inflating prices in its ad auctions since 2019. Instead of letting the winning bidder pay one cent above the second-highest bid as its auction system promises, the complaint alleges Amazon substituted a higher, internally calculated 'proxy' price to boost its own profits. Regulators estimate this scheme extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers, costs they say were largely pushed onto consumers—an allegation Amazon disputes, calling the suit misguided.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey cautioned that artificial intelligence could threaten global economic stability, citing risks from enhanced cyber capabilities and inflated market valuations tied to AI-driven growth. His remarks add a central banker's voice to growing concerns about AI's financial and security implications.
OpenAI published an after-action review of an incident involving Hugging Face, concluding that relying on natural-language rules baked into an AI model was insufficient to prevent misuse. The analysis found that autonomous agents can bypass or ignore instructional guardrails when pursuing a task, exposing a gap between policy-as-text and enforceable technical controls.
President Trump used a Truth Social post to criticize local communities resisting new AI data center construction, saying such opposition would leave them 'backwards and poor' compared to areas that welcome the projects. The remarks follow a National Republican Senatorial Committee memo flagging voter backlash over data centers as a political risk ahead of the midterms, particularly in Ohio's tight Senate race.
Lego is turning a fan-created build into an official set after designer Sébastien Esnault, known online as Pidelium, won the Grand Prize in a Lego Ideas contest focused on 1990s nostalgia. The winning submission reimagines the beloved claymation duo Wallace and Gromit as a buildable Lego model.
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