Spotify expands audiobooks to more than 180 markets by the end of 2026
Spotify will offer audiobooks in more than 180 markets by the end of 2026, up from 22 today, the company said at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday. The global rollout will reac…
Tirana mayor Erion Veliaj uses AI avatar to address voters from jail
Erion Veliaj, the mayor of Albania’s capital, Tirana, has spoken to voters through an AI copy of himself, promising free school meals. The video was posted on his official Instagr…
ChatGPT for Teens is unsafe for under-18s, Common Sense Media says
ChatGPT is unsafe for anyone under 18, even in the teen mode OpenAI launched in August, according to a new risk assessment from Common Sense Media. The US nonprofit gave ChatGPT f…
Siena raises $17M Series A to build AI agents for consumer brands
Siena, a New York-based startup that develops AI agents for consumer brands, has raised $17 million in its Series A round, with York IE as the lead investor. The new capital raise…
Japan’s Rapidus teams up with 17 firms to win customers for 2nm chips
Rapidus, Japan’s state-backed chipmaker, has signed up 17 chip design firms to help it win customers before it starts making 2-nanometre chips. They include Synopsys and Cadence f…
SpaceX reportedly in talks to borrow $40B to buy Nvidia AI chips
SpaceX is in talks to borrow $40bn to buy AI chips from Nvidia, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Today, Bloomberg reported that the talks are underway, citing people famil…
Intel will stay on Musk’s Terafab chip project, CEO tells Bloomberg
Intel will keep working with Elon Musk on Terafab, his project to make advanced chips in Texas, chief executive Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg. Tan made the comments before a Tokyo eve…
EU considers bigger levy on large companies to tax Big Tech
The European Commission is looking to collect more money from Apple, Meta, Google, and other US tech companies, according to the Financial Times, which spoke with six officials wh…
Spotify expands audiobooks to over 180 markets
Spotify will make 350,000 titles available in over 120 languages for this expansion
How to find out if Amazon thinks you have ‘flat buttocks’
"I stumbled upon a page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless," one shopper wrote on Threads.
Apple is reportedly partnering with LG to launch a smart lock, thermostat, and doorbell
Apple appears poised to push into the smart home market with a slate of new devices and a key partner.
Ex-Ramp engineers raise $20M for platform Melius after scrapping their first product
The startup crossed over $1 million in anualized revenue within two months of its post-pivot launch.
Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet
Sigil Wen, backed by a Silicon Valley's who-who, has built an on-device AI assistant that promises to be free, fully private, and capable for everyday tasks.
How AI decision models could change content moderation
On Tuesday, Musubi announced a lightweight decision model made for real-time moderation called PolicyLM-1.7B, released with open weights.
AI computing startup Lambda to raise $4B ahead of planned IPO
Nvidia-backed Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion pre-money valuation ahead of a planned 2027 IPO, led by Coatue and Blackstone.
The next hurdle for AI agents: getting websites to let them in
Personal AI agents promise to shop, book flights, and make reservations for you. But deliberate blocks and anti-bot defenses are getting in the way, leaving consumers caught in th…
Sierra announces Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for personal AI agents
Sierra and Meta are developing Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard defining how personal AI agents authenticate with businesses and what those businesses let them do, with G…
Google launches EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model for devices
Google has released EmbeddingGemma 2, an open 740-million-parameter model that maps text, code, images, audio and video into a single space and runs entirely on a phone or a small…
Hark releases an AI personal assistant with a focus on privacy
The AI lab's personal assistant is an operating system from the future designed to compete with Muse, Dots and Instinct.
AMD’s chief says demand is outrunning supply, and that AI should police itself
AMD’s Lisa Su said chip demand is running ahead of supply and will stay very high for years, and urged the AI industry to work together as an ecosystem on safety rather than namin…
Hark debuts an AI agent a year before its first devices
Brett Adcock’s Hark has released Hark Pro, an agent that buys groceries, books cars, pays bills and refills a child’s lunch card, free with $20 and $100 monthly tiers, a year befo…
India’s JioHotstar takes partnership route for Middle East expansion
JioHotstar will be offered inside Starzplay rather than through a stand-alone service.
Santé raises $15 million to bring AI to the neighborhood liquor store
Every bottle sitting unsold on a liquor store shelf ties up cash. Deciding when to discount it, which customers might buy it and whether to order another case requires information…
Lucid production falls 38% as the EV maker clears inventory
Lucid built 2,954 vehicles in the third quarter, its lowest quarterly output since early 2025 and a 38% fall from the second quarter, while delivering 3,806 as it cleared inventor…