From the archive
Follow the latest AI news and artificial intelligence developments across models, agents, robotics, research and the wider industry. Explore new AI tools, advances in computing, business moves, safety and policy, with clear reporting and useful sources. Read the stories, catch up with News in Brief and join the conversation.
Lead story
AI-enabled smart glasses can help blind and partially sighted people read letters and labels, but growing privacy concerns are prompting venues to restrict them. The debate is no longer simply whether these devices should be used in public: it is how to protect privacy without excluding people who…
Read the report & discussion ↗Microsoft AI Watch
Durham University and Microsoft have launched an AI Skills Centre of Excellence in North East England, beginning with training and support for students, graduates and university staff. The longer-term plan is to open opportunities to local businesses, public services and community partners, making this a regional skills initiative…
Watch Desk
Epic Games has paused its upcoming Disney collaboration and told developers to use AI tools to help complete it, according to Bloomberg reporting carried by Benzinga. The game has no new release date, leaving a high-profile question hanging over what AI-assisted game development looks like in practice.
Watch Desk
Atlassian has announced a protocol designed to move AI use beyond isolated chat windows and into shared workspaces, where people and agents can collaborate. The central question is whether agents can take part in team workflows while working within clear permissions and governance, rather than acting as clever…
Watch Desk
Big tech firms have borrowed around $500 billion since January to fund AI chips, servers and data centres, as US government bond yields climb above 5.30%. Yahoo Finance reports that analysts see AI borrowing as one pressure on markets, alongside inflation and other forces.
Meta AI Watch
Meta has open-sourced Rebalancer, a C++ assignment solver with a Python interface, after using it internally for more than nine years. The useful twist is its scale: MarkTechPost reports that Meta solves about 40 million assignment problems a day with it, including infrastructure-allocation tasks.
Watch Desk
Turba Labs has emerged from stealth with $52 million in funding, pitching digital twins of data centres as a way to optimise AI infrastructure. The company’s wager is that better use of existing facilities could help expand computing capacity without simply adding more buildings, chips and power.
Watch Desk
A Prospect essay argues that fixation on AI wiping out humanity can draw attention away from harms already being debated, including job displacement, privacy, copyright and the growing power of technology companies. Its central challenge is not simply whether existential risks are possible, but who gets to define…
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is bringing Claude into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, letting users work on files from Google’s apps or from Claude itself. The integration is in beta on paid Claude plans, and it gives Claude a more hands-on role in everyday office work.
Watch Desk
Researchers at a Federal Reserve Bank of New York conference presented findings that AI chatbots can make people more confident in their answers without making those answers more accurate. One experiment found participants followed the chatbot’s response 80% of the time, whether its reasoning was sound or not.
Watch Desk
Flai has raised $27 million to expand AI software that handles customer conversations for car dealerships. The startup says its system now books 50,000 appointments a month, a sign that dealership AI is moving beyond answering the phone.
Watch Desk
AI safety cooperation between China and the US should go beyond reporting incidents after they happen, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Catherine Thorbecke argues. She makes the case for direct information-sharing between companies and researchers, as both countries push ahead with increasingly autonomous AI systems.
Google DeepMind Watch
Google DeepMind has announced Gemini 4 Argon, a model aimed at long software-engineering jobs and other demanding professional work. Its standout offer is the ability to generate up to one million output tokens in a single response, but access is still restricted and Google’s benchmark results remain company-run…
Watch Desk
New York-based Melius has raised $25 million for its AI platform for generating advertising campaigns, images and videos. The funding gives a young company fresh room to build in a crowded market where AI is starting to make creative production part of the software pitch.
Powerful Medical Watch
Sant’Andrea University Hospital in Rome has embedded Powerful Medical’s AI ECG analysis into its emergency heart-attack pathway, automatically notifying cardiology when a recording is flagged as high risk. Powerful Medical says clinicians opened those reports in a median of under 17 seconds after the alert: the notable development…
OpenRouter Watch
OpenRouter says its AI sales agent, Rasp, returns about 600 hours a month to the company’s five-person sales team, while handling much of the work around inbound leads, call preparation and CRM updates. The case study offers a detailed look at how the company says it built the…
Watch Desk
Monash University has joined Project Tapestry, a global AI collaboration focused on building models while members retain control of their data and computing infrastructure. The project says its Monash-BharatGen team has already trained a shared model across Australian and Indian sovereign computing systems, keeping training data within each…
Watch Desk
Multiply Labs has raised $75 million to expand robotic systems that automate manual steps in biologics manufacturing. The company says its robots can work with existing pharmaceutical equipment, potentially helping manufacturers increase output without rebuilding their facilities.
Watch Desk
GitHub is rebuilding its Git infrastructure to handle the heavy, concurrent reads and writes associated with AI-driven software agents. Its internal benchmarks show up to 35 times higher write throughput, a potentially important change for teams running development work at agent scale.
