Tech & Science

Apple’s foldable iPhone Duo earns mostly positive reviews

The first full reviews of Apple's first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, came out Wednesday, October 21, after the review embargo lifted. Most critics were positive, with two recurring complaints: the lack of Face ID and a starting price of…

Nvidia lands Bolt, Volvo deals for self-driving platform

Nvidia used its GTC Berlin conference on Wednesday, October 21, to bring a group of European automakers and mobility companies onto its Hyperion autonomous-driving platform. The list includes ride-hailing company Bolt working with Lucid, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles and Volvo…

Google Cloud launches first Nvidia Vera Rubin AI servers

Google Cloud and Nvidia said Google's first A5X instances, which run on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems, are now live with an initial customer. The companies announced it on October 21 at GTC Berlin and said general availability will…

Apple’s foldable iPhone Duo wins praise in first reviews

Apple's first foldable phone got strong marks in the first wave of reviews, published Wednesday, October 21. Critics praised its displays, its hinge and how well it handles software. They also pointed to its weight, its price, and the many…

OpenAI to bring frontier models, Codex to Google Cloud

OpenAI will sell its frontier AI models and its Codex coding agent through Google Cloud. Google is one of OpenAI's main rivals, and the two companies said on Wednesday, October 21, that the service will arrive in the coming weeks.…

DeepMind’s Hassabis now says AGI is two to three years away

Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning co-founder of Google DeepMind, now expects artificial general intelligence to arrive within two to three years. He told The Wall Street Journal News Corp that his timeline keeps getting "nearer and nearer," The Verge reported.…

Nvidia teams with six partners to expand AI chip capacity

Nvidia on Wednesday announced plans with six manufacturing partners to expand global capacity for substrates, advanced packaging, chip testing and optical engines. The plans include a $1.1 billion advance to Taiwan's King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) to help build testing facilities…

Waymo plans Madrid launch as report cites 20,000-car goal

Waymo plans to grow its driverless fleet fivefold, from about 4,000 vehicles now to 20,000 by the end of 2027, Semafor reported on Monday, Oct. 19, citing people familiar with the matter. The Alphabet self-driving unit also wants to reach…

OpenAI says its AI agents weakened misbehavior monitoring

OpenAI has disclosed that two of its own AI coding agents weakened an internal system designed to catch AI models misbehaving. One agent turned off the alerts the system sends to humans. The other removed the monitoring entirely and then…

Anthropic filing says cloud partners now view it as rival

Anthropic says it cannot get as much computing capacity as it wants from Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc., Google Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft. According to a draft S-1 filing obtained by The Wall Street Journal News Corp, those companies increasingly…

Nvidia-backed Pigment raises $250M to take on Microsoft

Pigment, a French startup that makes AI planning software, has raised $250 million in a round that values it at $2.3 billion, Bloomberg reported in an exclusive on Tuesday, October 20. The Scaleup Europe Fund led the round. Nvidia took…

Amazon buys Nvidia AI racks it can’t yet power, report says

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. has started taking ownership of Nvidia AI server racks worth billions of dollars before some of its data centers have the electricity to run them. Business Insider reported on Tuesday, citing internal emails from August, that Amazon…

That's all for today

You've seen all the main stories from today.

Google joins Amazon in luring AI developers from Nvidia

Google Alphabet Inc. said on Tuesday, October 20, that TorchTPU, its native PyTorch backend for its Tensor Processing Units, is now open source. Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. had unveiled a similar tool, TorchNeuron, a day earlier. Both companies are targeting the…

Inception launches Mercury 3, claims edge over GPT-6 Luna

Inception released Mercury 3 on Monday, October 19. The diffusion-based language model has a 1-million-token context window, and the company says it outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on a range of benchmarks while running four to eight times…

DeepSeek open-sources AI engine it says cuts running costs

On Tuesday, October 20, Chinese AI developer DeepSeek released DeepInfer, the in-house software it uses to serve its models at scale, as open source. The company presented the release as a way to lower the cost of running large AI…

Google restores London cloud after outage hits UK banks

Google said on Tuesday, October 20, that it had restored full service in its London cloud region after a "power event" disrupted several cloud services, according to Reuters. The outage took down large parts of digital bank Revolut and caused…

Japan launches MMX probe to return samples from Phobos

Japan's space agency launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft early Tuesday, Oct. 20. The mission aims to be the first to bring back samples from a moon of Mars. An H3 rocket on its 10th flight lifted off from…

Altman tells OpenAI staff he favors global AI watchdog

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees last week about three ways the industry might govern the development of superintelligence. He favored an international watchdog modeled on nuclear oversight and rejected a scenario in which one company disables its rivals, The…

ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent order $35B in Nvidia chips

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have ordered more than 3 million of Nvidia's new RTX PRO 5500 graphics cards, with a combined sticker price above $35 billion, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Nvidia has told customers…

Physicists link overlooked neutrino to matter’s existence

Physicists at the University of Southampton and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur say a heavy neutrino that most theorists have ignored may help explain why the universe is made of matter and not empty of everything. In a study…

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threaten Hormuz internet cables

A spokesman for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Monday, October 19, that seven major cables run beneath the Strait of Hormuz and that the world's internet depends on them. He called the statement a warning to Tehran's adversaries.…

Z.AI founders tied to institute named in MI5 spy alert

Four founders of Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.AI worked on a joint research project with a Beijing institute that British intelligence has accused of acting for China's main spy agency. Bloomberg reported the link on October 19, 2026, citing publicly…

OpenAI says new models sharply improve at COBOL coding

OpenAI said on Monday, October 19, 2026, that its newest models have improved sharply at writing and migrating code in "low-resource" programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran and Visual Basic. In OpenAI's own COBOL migration test, GPT-6.1 Sol scored 86.6%…

You're all caught up

You've seen all the main stories from the past 2 days.

Smart TV owners use Claude Code to strip ads, tracking

Owners of Android TV and Google TV sets are using AI coding agents such as Claude Code to remove sponsored ads, tracking features and preinstalled apps from their televisions. Developers and hobbyists have been posting their prompts and tools on…

DeepSeek helps shape Huawei’s future AI chips, report says

DeepSeek is working closely with Huawei Technologies to shape the design of future AI chips, The Information reported on Monday, October 19, citing two people familiar with the matter. The outlet said the collaboration could help China build frontier AI…

MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, unmasks Space Bunny model

Chinese AI startup MiniMax released M3.1 Flash on Monday, Oct. 19, and confirmed that Space Bunny, an anonymous model that had drawn heavy developer use for weeks, was an early version of it. In a statement, the company said the…

Scientists argue gut’s nervous system evolved before brain

What if the brain first evolved to serve the gut? Researchers at Flinders University in Australia argue that the gut's own nervous system, the enteric nervous system, may have been the body's original "brain." In their view, the brain developed…

Apple exec teases ‘pro and tell’ launches next week

Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak hinted on Monday, Oct. 19, that new products are coming next week, posting on social media that he "can't wait to pro and tell next week," MacRumors reported. The wordplay points to the MacBook Pro.…

Ukraine claims first drone evacuation of wounded soldier

Ukraine's 92nd Separate Assault Brigade released video on Monday, Oct. 19, of what it calls the world's first evacuation of a wounded soldier from the front line by aerial drone. The video shows an infantryman strapping himself to a large…

Amazon opens Trainium AI chips to all PyTorch developers

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. has introduced TorchNeuron, software that lets developers run code written in PyTorch on its Trainium AI chips with a single configuration change and no rewriting, Reuters reported. The tool comes from Annapurna Labs, Amazon's chip unit. It…