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Meta's Muse AI app reached the top of app store charts, with reporting attributing its momentum to Alexandr Wang's involvement at the company. Wang's approach reportedly caused friction among some Meta staff even as the app gained traction.
Some iPhone 18 Pro Max owners on AT&T's network reported losing all cellular connectivity, including the ability to dial 911, according to MacRumors, which estimates thousands of customers affected. Apple is rolling out an iOS 27.0.1 update alongside a separate carrier-settings patch to prevent the issue going forward, but says these fixes won't restore service on phones already affected. Apple told CNET it will give free replacement devices to those customers, who should contact Apple Support or AT&T.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is building small cylindrical home sensors that use AI facial recognition to detect people and activity without saving video footage. The devices would pair with Apple's upcoming AI home hub launching Oct. 13, delivering text alerts like "someone is outside the back door" instead of stored clips. Apple has not responded to requests for comment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Plug and Play Solar Act (SB 868), sponsored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, allowing renters and homeowners to use plug-in solar systems without a full interconnection agreement. The law caps output at 1,200 watts per home, requires registration and third-party safety certification, and mandates that systems not feed power back to the grid during outages.
In an interview, CHICKEN Scheme maintainer and co-maintainer of the irregex library Peter Bex described his path from a childhood C64 into BASIC, C, and eventually Lisp/Scheme, which he studied at university through The Little Lisper/Schemer and SICP. He discussed his ongoing core contributions to CHICKEN Scheme, including numerical tower code, irregex upkeep, bug fixes and security patches, alongside broader topics like Scheme standardization, databases, and Clojure.
Lyft has agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle a May 2020 lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleging the company misclassified drivers as contractors instead of employees. Pending court approval, at least $237 million will go toward back pay for minimum wage and benefits owed to drivers who worked between April 2016 and December 2020. Uber, which was named in the same lawsuit, has not yet reached a settlement.
A McKinsey partner publicly questioned on LinkedIn whether the 'glass cliff' phenomenon—where women are more likely to be appointed CEO during a company crisis—actually exists. The exchange occurred under a post by author Julia Carreon, who was promoting her new book addressing this and related issues facing female leaders.
The University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) institute, which offers a Master's in Technology Innovation, into a 48,500-square-foot space inside Microsoft's Building 92 under a rent-free lease. Microsoft contributed a $42 million in-kind donation to build out the space, marking the first time a UW program has established full-time operations on Microsoft's campus. GIX previously operated in Bellevue's Steve Ballmer Building after launching in 2015 with Tsinghua University and roughly $70 million in Microsoft backing.
Cerebras Systems' stock closed Friday at $166.43, down nearly 20% for the week and its lowest price since its May IPO. The decline followed a SemiAnalysis report that OpenAI will use Nvidia GPUs, not Cerebras chips, to power the 'Ultrafast' mode of GPT-6.1 Sol, and coincided with the expiration of lockup restrictions freeing up to 19.4 million insider shares, about 8% of shares outstanding.
Owners of the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential began losing the weather display from their devices' screens during August and September, leaving only the time showing. Within the last day, users on Reddit and in reader comments have reported that the weather information has started reappearing on their devices.
Amazon is selling the Samsung Galaxy S26 FE for $659.99, a $40 discount off its $699.99 list price, marking the phone's first price cut since its recent release. The device features a 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, Samsung's Exynos 2500 chip, 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB of storage, and ships with One UI 9.
Ai2 released AstaBrief 8B, an 8-billion-parameter open model that converts a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a fully cited report in a single generation pass. It is now available in Asta's 'Generate a report' feature as a 'Fast mode' alongside a Claude-powered 'Thinking mode,' and Ai2 is also releasing the training data. Across the Asta pipeline, Fast mode averages 51.1 seconds per report versus 178.5 seconds for the proprietary models previously used.