Tech & Science

Google study of 15M AI chats finds adoption broad but shallow

Google Alphabet Inc. on Wednesday released what it calls the most comprehensive look to date at how people use AI in their daily lives and work, drawing on 15 million de-identified interactions with its Gemini products. The central finding: AI…

Sony’s disc exit threatens $7.2B used game market

Sony's decision to end physical disc production for new PlayStation games starting January 2028 is casting a shadow over the global used video game market, which analysts valued at $7.2 billion in 2025.

Microsoft outage knocks out Teams, Outlook, Xbox Live

A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted access to core productivity and gaming services on Thursday morning, leaving thousands of users in North America unable to connect to Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Copilot, and Xbox Live.

AMD and Cerebras team up to challenge Nvidia on AI inference

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. and Cerebras Systems announced a technical partnership on Tuesday to build a disaggregated AI inference platform that combines AMD's Helios rack-scale infrastructure with Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine technology. The companies said the combined system is expected…

AMD unveils Helios AI rack to challenge Nvidia

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. unveiled its Helios rack-scale AI system and Instinct MI455X GPUs at its Advancing AI 2026 keynote on Thursday in San Francisco, marking the chipmaker's most direct challenge yet to Nvidia's dominance in AI data center…

Tesla’s FSD subscriptions hit 1.48M after record quarter

Tesla disclosed in its Q2 2026 earnings report that active Full Self-Driving subscriptions reached 1.48 million globally, a 56% increase from 950,000 a year earlier and the largest single-quarter net gain in the program's history. The company added roughly 200,000…

J&J says drug combo cut myeloma death risk by 62% in trial

Johnson & Johnson on Wednesday announced that the phase 3 MonumenTAL-6 trial met its primary endpoint, with the combination of Tecvayli (teclistamab) and Talvey (talquetamab) reducing the risk of disease progression or death by 89% and the risk of death…

DeepSeek founder says AGI, not a super app, is the company’s only goal

Details from a nearly four-hour closed-door investor meeting with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have circulated widely after Tencent Tech published a lightly edited transcript this week. In it, Liang laid out a strategy centered entirely on achieving artificial general intelligence,…

Arm-based servers overtake x86 as top AI platform

A tectonic shift in data center architecture has reached a milestone: Arm-based rack-scale GPU servers have surpassed x86 systems as the dominant accelerated computing platform, according to new data from IDC published this week.

Four mathematicians win 2026 Fields Medals at ICM in Philadelphia

The International Mathematical Union announced the recipients of the 2026 Fields Medals on Thursday at the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, honoring four mathematicians whose work spans harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, symplectic geometry and…

Removing Huawei gear from EU networks could cost up to $46B, industry report says

Stripping equipment from Huawei and ZTE out of European telecom networks would cost operators between €30 billion and €40 billion, according to a report published Wednesday by GSMA Intelligence — a figure roughly three times higher than the European Commission's…

iPhone 18 Pro enters mass production ahead of fall launch

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have entered mass production, with manufacturing partner Foxconn Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. launching a peak hiring period at its Zhengzhou facility to meet demand ahead of a September launch.

Musk calls on AI firms to peer-review rivals’ models before release

In a wide-ranging interview with The Economist published Thursday, Elon Musk called on the world's leading artificial intelligence companies to conduct peer reviews of one another's most advanced models before releasing them to the public, warning that the rapid pace…

IBM to acquire HRL Laboratories from Boeing, GM

IBM International Business Machines Corporation announced on Tuesday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HRL Laboratories, a private research and development institution jointly owned by Boeing The Boeing Company and General Motors, in a deal that adds…

Bezos pushes AI-focused Prime Video redesign

Jeff Bezos is personally championing a sweeping overhaul of Amazon's Amazon.com, Inc. Prime Video streaming service, an initiative internally codenamed "Lighthouse" that aims to turn the platform into a showcase for the company's massive artificial intelligence investments, Reuters reported on…

SpaceX targets Starship Flight 13 launch today after July abort

SpaceX is preparing to launch the 13th test flight of its Starship rocket today, Thursday, July 23, with a 90-minute window opening at 6:45 p.m. EDT from Starbase, Texas. The attempt comes after a July 16 abort when engines on…

EU fines Google €890M for Digital Markets Act violations

The European Commission on Thursday fined Alphabet's Google a total of €890 million for two violations of the Digital Markets Act, marking the largest penalty yet imposed under the bloc's landmark tech competition law.

DeepSeek founder vows to keep top AI models open-source

Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, laid out an expansive vision for his company's future in a nearly four-hour investor meeting, declaring that the Chinese AI laboratory's most powerful models — including upcoming releases — will remain open-source and that…

Pichai defends Google’s AI strategy as Gemini delays rattle investors

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mounted a robust defense of Google's AI strategy on Wednesday's Q2 2026 earnings call, pushing back against investor concerns that the company has fallen behind rivals after repeatedly delaying its flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model.

Extreme heat, not lack of rain, now drives Europe’s droughts, study finds

Human-caused climate change is intensifying drought across Europe not by reducing rainfall but by driving extreme heat that evaporates water from soils, lakes, and rivers at unprecedented rates, according to an analysis published Thursday by the World Weather Attribution group.

Samsung Wallet to add native stablecoin support

Samsung Electronics announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2026 in London on July 22 that Samsung Wallet will introduce native support for stablecoins, positioning the company as one of the first major smartphone makers to integrate digital assets directly into its mobile…

Uber cuts 10% of customer service jobs, citing AI

Uber Technologies announced on Wednesday that it has eliminated 10% of positions within its customer service operations, explicitly linking the workforce reduction to the company's adoption of artificial intelligence — a rare admission among major tech firms that AI is…

Linux kernel flaw lets any local user silently gain root access

A newly disclosed vulnerability in the Linux kernel's XFS filesystem could allow any unprivileged local user to silently gain root access on millions of enterprise systems, bypassing standard security measures including SELinux in Enforcing mode.

Every frontier AI model cheated on UK safety tests, AISI finds

The UK government's AI Security Institute has published research showing that all five frontier AI models it evaluated attempted to cheat during cybersecurity capability assessments, raising questions about whether current evaluation methods can reliably measure what advanced AI systems are…

Google’s Gemini app hits 950M monthly users, closing in on ChatGPT

Alphabet reported its second-quarter 2026 earnings on Wednesday, revealing that the Google Gemini app has reached 950 million monthly active users — placing it within striking distance of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which crossed the 1 billion monthly user mark earlier this…

Astronomers detect first moon-like object beyond our solar system

Astronomers have found the first strong evidence for a moon-like object beyond our solar system — but it does not orbit a planet. Instead, the Jupiter-mass body circles a brown dwarf in the CD-35 2722 system, roughly 71 light-years from…

Alphabet raises capex forecast to $205B after cloud surges 82%

Alphabet boosted its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance on Wednesday after reporting second-quarter results that showed Google Cloud growing far faster than Wall Street expected. CFO Anat Ashkenazi announced the increased spending outlook during the company's earnings call, raising the…

FDA panel meets Wednesday to vote on access to seven unproven peptides

The Food and Drug Administration's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee will convene on July 23–24 to vote on whether seven popular but unapproved peptides should be added to the Section 503A Bulk Drug Substances List, a move that would allow licensed…

RedNote’s AI model scores first perfect mark at Math Olympiad

Chinese social media platform RedNote announced on Tuesday that its AI model, dots-note-3.0, scored a perfect 42 out of 42 on the 67th International Mathematical Olympiad, which concluded in Shanghai this week. The achievement makes it the first AI system…

Amazon cuts jobs in its artificial general intelligence division

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. on Wednesday cut jobs in its artificial general intelligence division, the latest in a string of targeted workforce reductions as the company reshapes its AI operations.