By Varun Mirchandani DuckDuckGo’s AI search assistant was tricked into repeating a fabricated story, highlighting how coordinated misinformation can fool modern AI systems.
Source:: Digital Trends
By Alina Maria Stan Ford has admitted that it had to rehire experienced engineers after its AI systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could swap in AI and still produce a high-quality product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
By Varun Mirchandani Stanford researchers have developed BurgerAI, an AI system that creates healthier and more sustainable burger recipes without compromising on taste.
Source:: Digital Trends
By Ana Maria Constantin Russian hackers were behind last year’s devastating cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, according to a New York Times investigation published Thursday. The breach, which began on 31 August 2025, shut down production across JLR’s factories for nearly six weeks and cost the British economy an estimated two and a half billion dollars, making it the […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
By Shikhar Mehrotra Prime Day ends tonight, and these are the deals I’d spend my own money on before the prices go back up and the memory crisis makes them go even higher.
Source:: Digital Trends
US authorities are getting decidedly twitchy about frontier AI models. Just a couple of weeks after ordering Anthropic to prevent foreign companies from getting hold of its latest release, Mythos/Fable 5, it’s been putting the squeeze on another AI company..
Now, the Trump administration is asking OpenAI to hold back on the general release of GPT-5.6, according to a report from Bloomberg.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told employees that the government is asking that the model be released only to a short list of trusted partners, initially 20, before being more widely disseminated.
Altman reportedly told staffers that the administration was getting nervous about the capabilities of the latest AI tools. It didn’t go as far as forbidding access to foreign users but it’s clear that the White House is looking to act as the power of the new models becomes more apparent.
The administration’s actions will undoubtedly cause some anxiety among AI companies, particularly in light of OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s upcoming IPOs. There will be concerns that new software developments could be postponed or even halted. However, it should also be noted that the administration was already displeased with Anthropic over its moral stance on defense issues, so the action against Mythos should be placed in context.
Indeed, the government is trying to play down such fears. Bloomberg quoted a White House official as saying that the Trump administration continues to collaborate with frontier AI labs to develop shared approaches for addressing the challenges of scaling the technology.
Source:: Computer World
Chinese tech giant Tencent is set to launch an AI assistant inside WeCom, its Slack-like collaboration tool for enterprises. The new tool, Dayuan, is built on the latest large language models from Chinese AI developer DeepSeek.
Tencent announced the news in a post on Chinese messaging platform Weibo by Tencent’s public relations manager Zhang Jun. Dayuan will automatically understand user requests and will respond according to the demands of the user, he wrote, according to a translation by Bloomberg. “At any time within WeCom, simply swipe left to summon Dayuan. It can intelligently recognize the interface you’re on, understand what you’re asking, and help you resolve issues more effectively,” he wrote, according to the report.
In addressing the Chinese enterprise market, Tencent has an advantage over other companies in the AI space because it has a vast reservoir of customers who use WeCom. Earlier this month, it announced a range of AI productivity agents to address the demand for more AI tools across enterprises.
Tencent has been intensifying its efforts in the AI space in an attempt to beat US competition. In April, it launched an updated version of its Hunyuan model to catch up with more established AI companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek.
The launch of Dayuan with its vast supply of user data will provide a step-up for Tencent and will reinforce Chinese efforts to establish serious AI competition to US products.
Source:: Computer World
By Deepti Pathak Repair costs are often unknown until you visit a service center. ASUS aims to address that…
The post You Can Now Check ASUS Laptop Spare Part Prices Online Before Booking a Repair appeared first on Fossbytes.
Source:: Fossbytes
By Callum Turner Corporate America is hemorrhaging money through inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, believes that the industry is complacent about it. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, misconfigurations, and other operational inefficiencies, is projected to cost US enterprises $2.41 trillion a year, costing $1.52 trillion to fix. With numbers this staggering, Roland argues […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
By Callum Turner Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly visible part of healthcare. From administrative workflows and clinical decision support to remote monitoring and wellness technologies, organizations are exploring how AI can help process information more efficiently and provide greater visibility into health-related data. Yet as adoption accelerates, one challenge continues to influence whether these technologies gain meaningful acceptance. Trust has become […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
Microsoft’s controversial claim that its Majorana chip program will make possible a scalable quantum computer by 2029 has been thrown into new doubt by a scientific paper that questions whether the company has correctly interpreted its own experimental evidence.
According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Henry Legg from the University of St Andrews, published this week in Nature, Microsoft’s Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) framework, designed to infer the existence of quantum states in theorized Majorana particles, is flawed.
“Last year Microsoft claimed they had built the equivalent of a precision Swiss watch. However, when I opened the case to examine the mechanism, I found what looked like a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts,” said Legg.
He believed the results gathered from Microsoft’s TGP software data analysis could also be explained by other effects, as well as being skewed by the data chosen for analysis. Because of this, he believed the company’s researchers had jumped to the wrong conclusions.
“Something was making noise, but it didn’t look like the breakthrough Microsoft had claimed. Despite the headlines, the vast majority of scientists in the field were skeptical of Microsoft’s claim from the start; my critique simply backs up that skepticism in the scientific record,” he said.
Topological qubits
The ability to create Majorana ‘zero modes’ that resist the errors suffered by traditional qubit-based designs is fundamental to Microsoft’s entire quantum computing strategy, stretching back two decades. This, of course, assumes the existence of subatomic Majorana fermions, named after the Italian physicist who first proposed them in 1937. To this day, they remain only theoretical.
In 2018, Microsoft said its researchers had detected evidence of their existence, an apparently major breakthrough it was forced to retract when the data was successfully challenged. Nature’s editors subsequently backed this up with the blunt note: “The results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices.”
Despite the setback, Microsoft persisted, in 2025 publishing a new paper in Nature that claimed the company had worked out how to exploit the principle in a new “transistor for the quantum age,” the Majorana 1 chip.
Earlier this month, the company launched its successor, Majorana 2, claiming that AI had helped to achieve a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability compared to the earlier chip. “With this progress, the team now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half,” the company announced.
However, Microsoft again finds itself on the defensive after the latest criticism from Legg, who said, “I am simply reflecting what most in the field felt from the initial announcement. I felt that I needed to put these concerns into a formal scientific critique. It is good that it has now been peer-reviewed and published.”
His criticism relates to the transport data system, not the raw experimental data itself, which Microsoft had yet to make fully public in a way that would allow independent analysis.
Microsoft still confident
Microsoft said by email that it remains confident that the Majorana has brought usable quantum computing a step closer, pointing to its collaboration with DARPA as part of the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program.
“We stand by our results and our roadmap,” said technical fellow and vice president of quantum hardware, Dr. Chetan Nayak. “At the end of the day, success is the delivery of a scalable quantum computer. We are confident in our ability to execute against our roadmap.”
“Skepticism and rigor are hallmarks of the scientific process, which we appreciate and have supported from various academics,” he added. “We have participated in dialogue and our thorough rebuttal was accepted and published by Nature.”
Microsoft is not the only company researching quantum computing hardware, with Google, IBM, and Amazon also working on designs. But even if the hardware matures on the schedule claimed by Microsoft, many believe the gap between technology and implementation inside enterprises could be more of a slow burn than a sudden jump forward.
This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld.
Source:: Computer World
Apple’s threatened product pricing hike arrived Thursday with steep increases landing across all its products (except the iPhone) — and rapidly accelerating RAM prices are to blame.
Apple CEO Tim Cook had warned last week about the need for price increases, with Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman subsequently telling us these were “imminent.”
The increases have been imposed as a result of the massive demand for memory and storage components generated by the rapid investment in AI servers. Prices have increased to meet this demand, with vendors shifting manufacturing to the advanced memory modules demanded by AI companies. In doing so, they have not invested in additional production capacity, further exacerbating the demand/supply imbalance.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
The price increases are going to hurt
The price hikes even affect products Apple hasn’t updated in years, such as the HomePod and Apple TV. The extent of the increase is big in some cases — the Apple TV is up 55% while an M3 Ultra Mac Studio sees a 32.5% rise. While I had hoped any higher prices would be aimed at Apple’s high-end products, the extent and scale of the changes suggests the enormity of the component price increases the company has been struggling with.
“We haven’t seen anything like this in modern Apple,” said Neil Cybart at Above Avalon.
Here’s what starting prices look like now:
Macs
MacBook Pro, up $300 to $1,999.
MacBook Air, up $200 to $1,299.
MacBook Neo, up $100 to $699.
iMac, up $200 to $1,499.
Mac mini (M4 Pro), up $200 to $1,599.
Mac Studio (M4 Max), up $500 to $2,499.
Mac Studio (M3 Ultra), up $1,300, to $5,299.
iPads
iPad Air, up $200 to $749.
iPad Pro, up $200 to $1,199.
iPad, now starts at $449.
iPad mini, now $599.
Other hardware
Vision Pro, up $200 to $3,699
HomePod mini, up $30 to $129.
Apple TV, up $70 to $199.
There were no immediate changes to the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods — but no guarantees, either, that their prices won’t also jump.
This is AI-flation
The scale of these increases is like a dose of cold water on the already tepid optimism of investors. This was quickly reflected by a big sell off on Apple stock, which was down more than 6.5% at one point today. And the impact was contagious across the sector as investors realized that if Apple was forced to increase prices even at the lower end of the market it so recently secured, it’s likely other manufacturers will be forced to do the same. This can only further dampen market optimism.
Concerning the MacBook Neo, Francisco Jeronimo, IDC vice president for client devices, said: “The $100 increase takes the entry model from $599 to $699, close to a 17% increase, one of the sharpest percentage hikes in the announcement, and it hits one of Apple’s best-selling, most price-sensitive laptops right as it is winning share. Raising the price of its fastest-selling entry product indicates that Apple believes demand will stay strong, given the value the product offers. It also signals Apple is willing to give up some unit growth at the bottom of the range to defend margin, and it widens the gap the Neo had just closed against Windows entry-level machines.”
The fact of the matter is that consumers are effectively paying an inflationary fee for the benefit of the ongoing global AI rollout. That rollout is already consuming vast quantities of investor cash, despite the shaky business plan of existing incumbents.
“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”
Apple and the entire industry will not want to maintain prices at these levels if they can avoid it. That’s going to mean the entire tech industry will now begin leaning on memory manufacturers such as Micron to do more about building out production capacity, or at least promising to do so. Of course, the other hope might be that investors finally see the folly of the AI business model and slow down deployment, though that seems unlikely.
“We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions,” the company said.
Please join me on social media at BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, even better, please subscribe to The Core for your daily collection of human-curated Apple News.
Source:: Computer World
By Adarsh Verma Remote work has changed how people manage daily tasks, communication, and travel. A stable internet connection…
The post Reasons Remote Workers Depend on eSIM for Connectivity appeared first on Fossbytes.
Source:: Fossbytes
Kun sukeltaa verkon kasinoviihteen maailmaan, ensimmäinen tunne on usein kotoinen — valot ja äänet jäävät taustalle, mutta sykähdyttävä tunnelma on läsnä kotisohvalta käsin. Käyttöliittymien selkeys ja pelien esteettisyys vaikuttavat paljon siihen, kuinka helposti viihtyy: rauhallinen navigointi ja selkeät kuvakkeet luovat ympäristön, jossa viihtyminen on vaivatonta.
Moni etsii tietoa ja taustaa kokemukselleen, ja aiheesta kertovia kirjoituksia löytyy laajasti verkossa; esimerkiksi informatiivinen lähde on https://www.ovikooditverkosta.com/, joka tarjoaa taustoitusta viihteen moninaisesta tarjonnasta ilman mainostavia sävyjä.
Verkon viihde tarjoaa erilaisia tempoja: hetken intensiivisiä kohtaamisia tai rauhallisempaa katselua ja odottelua. Se, haluaako lyhyitä ja nopeatempoisia hetkiä vai pidempiä, rentoja sessioita, määrittää osaltaan kokemuksen laatua. Valinnanvapaus näkyy siinä, miten käyttäjä voi muovata oman illan rytmin, olipa kyse rauhoittavasta taustahypeästä tai hetkellisestä adrenaliinista.
Esteettisyys ja äänimaailma toimivat usein tunnelman rakentajina: harmoninen taustaääni tai kirkas grafiikka voivat tehdä kokemuksesta immersiivisemmän, kun taas yksinkertaisempi ulkoasu voi tuntua kotikotoiselta ja levolliselta. Monille juuri tämä mahdollisuus säädellä tunnelmaa tekee verkkoviihteestä miellyttävän ajanvieton.
Katsaus etuihin ja haittoihin auttaa hahmottamaan, millainen rooli verkon kasinoviihteellä voi olla vapaa-ajassa ilman, että siitä tehdään liikaa hypetystä.
Toisaalta on myös selkeitä varauksia, jotka kannattaa ottaa huomioon kokemuksen eheyttä arvioitaessa.
Kun lähestyy verkkoviihdettä kokemuksena, on hyödyllistä miettiä, millainen tunnelma ja tempo tuntuvat itselle luontevilta. Joillekin se on iltahetken pieni jännitys, toisille tapa rentoutua pidemmällä seurannalla. Ystävien kanssa jaettu elämys voi korostaa sosiaalista puolta, kun taas omassa rauhassa koettu hetki voi toimia pienenä irtiottona arjen rutiineista.
On myös kiinnostavaa huomata, miten eri ihmisten esteettinen maku ohjaa valintoja: yksinkertaisuus vetää puoleensa rauhaa hakevia, kun taas näyttävät visuaaliset ratkaisut houkuttelevat visuaalisuutta arvostavia. Tämä monimuotoisuus tekee verkon viihteestä helposti lähestyttävän useille eri mieltymyksille.
Verkon kasinoviihde on ennen kaikkea kokemus — ympäristö, jonka viihtyvyys syntyy käyttömukavuudesta, visuaalisesta ilmeestä ja omasta odotuksesta. Kokemus voi olla sekä intensiivinen että lempeä, riippuen siitä, miten sen antaa muotoutua. Plussat ja miinukset rinnakkain kertovat, että kyseessä ei ole yksiselitteinen ilmiö, vaan omanlaistaan nautintoa hakeville tarjolla on paljon erilaisia tapoja viettää aikaa.
Lopulta kyse on siitä, kuinka viihtyy omassa valitussa rytmissä: ilon ja levon löytäminen on enemmän tunnekysymys kuin tekninen. Verkon viihde tarjoaa puitteet, mutta kokemuksen laadun määrittelee se, miten ja milloin sitä käyttää — ja juuri se tekee siitä kiinnostavan osan monen aikuisen vapaa-ajan kirjoa.
By Varun Mirchandani OpenAI has updated GPT-5.5 Instant, making ChatGPT’s default model more conversational, better at advice, and easier to talk to during everyday interactions.
Source:: Digital Trends
By Ana Maria Constantin Anthropic has accused Alibaba of waging the largest distillation campaign yet against a US AI company, telling senators and White House officials that operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude’s capabilities between April and June. The letter, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg, described nearly […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
By Ana Maria Constantin Micron Technology posted fiscal third-quarter revenue of nearly $42bn, quadrupling from just over $9bn a year earlier and beating Wall Street estimates by a wide margin. The results, reported on Tuesday, confirm that the company riding the AI memory boom hardest is the one whose stock has already climbed roughly 700 percent over the past […] This story continues at The Next Web
Source:: The Next Web
Claude Tag is Anthropic’s latest attempt at getting Claude out of your DMs and into your team’s Slack channels.
AI assistants are increasingly showing up in the workplace to perform research, coding, writing, and analysis, but the results of those interactions typically remains tied to individual conversations rather than being shared across projects and teams.
That limitation is what Anthropic is addressing with Claude Tag, a new Slack channel-based experience for its Enterprise and Team customers, designed to give them a shared AI collaborator that retains context across conversations and participates in work with multiple employees.
Tag will replace Anthropic’s previous attempt at this, Claude in Slack, would only interact with one person (although it’s responses were visible to all in a channel) and its context was limited to the last 20 messages in a channel.
Claude Tag has a much larger context and can be asked to complete tasks on its own, returning with results and a log of how it completed the task for review. It can also schedule follow-up work for itself, enabling projects to continue over hours or days without constant prompting, Anthropic said.
Tag also has an “ambient” mode: when this is enabled, it proactively surfaces relevant information from other channels and connected tools, notifying teams about updates that may be important, and following up on unresolved discussions or tasks, the company said.
Shared context could unlock productivity gains
These features could act as an immediate productivity enhancer for enterprises by reducing coordination overhead and improving collaboration across engineering, developer, and business teams, analysts said.
The biggest benefit for enterprises is the reduction in time spent finding information and rebuilding context across AI interactions, according to Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting. “Because Claude remembers what’s been said across channels, it acts like shared team memory, so no one has to repeat context or hold endless catch-up meetings.”
That reduction in coordination overhead, according to Amit Jena, AI development manager at IT consulting firm Kanerika, could deliver productivity gains that go well beyond the incremental improvements associated with traditional AI assistants.
“For engineering teams, Claude Tag will help reduce time spent on debugging through fragmented Slack discussions, summarizing long incident threads, pulling context across repos, tickets, and logs, and documenting decisions after the fact,” Jena said, while for business teams, “It could enable faster decision-making from thread summaries while reducing follow-ups in cross-functional work.”
Sohail Dev Majumdar, principal analyst at Gartner, though, sees greater benefits than mere productivity gains, particularly for CIOs and other technology leaders.
CIOs may need new governance and ROI metrics
The new offering reflects growing demand among enterprises for AI systems that can work across teams, retain organizational context, participate more actively in day-to-day workflows, and generate more measurable return on investment, he said.
On that last point, though, he warned that CIOs will need to change how they measure ROI for collaborative AI systems compared to traditional AI assistants: “ROI measurement must go beyond license counts, focusing on both hard metrics like time savings and error reduction; and soft metrics, such as employee satisfaction and innovation.”
Jena said CIOs will also need to reconsider auditability and governance around Tag, as it can access context, data, and tools outside individual user boundaries and influence downstream systems.
“CIOs should rethink who can assign tasks to AI agents, what data a channel-level agent can access, how AI-generated outputs are reviewed and approved, how long conversational memory should persist, and. how compliance logs map to AI actions,” Jena said.
With this in mind, Anthropic is shipping controls that will enable system administrators to filter access to data, tools, and Slack channels along with spending limits. These controls, the company said, will also enable administrators to create separate Claude instances for different teams, with each instance limited to the channels and information assigned to it.
Teamwork incentivizes
To encourage adoption, Anthropic is offering a one-time pool of launch credits to eligible organizations, enabling employees to experiment with the service before it begins consuming their regular usage allocation. Eligible Claude Enterprise customers will receive $25,000 in promotional credits, while qualifying Claude Team customers with at least 10 paid seats will receive credits worth $2,500, the company said.
The credits can be used only for Claude Tag interactions in Slack channels and will remain valid through September 1, 2026.
Tag will replace Claude in Slack on August 3, 2026 — or administrators can opt in early in the next 30 days.
Source:: Computer World
Apple’s iOS 27/macOS 27 cycle is revealing something new: AI is only as good as the operating system that supports it. The latest beta releases show that after two years in which the company has promised to become AI-native, testers finally believe it’s happening as Apple prioritizes improved system performance and Siri AI.
For example, the second developer beta (released this week) has clarified the vague “indexing” prompt that showed up two weeks ago, replacing it with a clearer message reading “Optimizing Search and Siri.”
What is indexing doing?
Developers digging into the code found the system is proactively building contextual maps of messages, notes, and photos, allowing the updated on-device architecture to swiftly pull up personal data without compromising privacy. It still takes time, but at least its purpose has been clarified.
The improved indexing seems to deliver smoother device performance overall, reflecting the deep architectural improvements supporting the entire release. Across communities like Reddit, early beta testers are reporting an unprecedented level of refinement for such an early build.
Siri gets snappier
Where external server support isn’t required, beta testers indicate Siri is responding faster. Many are also trying out the new Write with Siri feature that appeared in the second beta with a dedicated command for this feature situated above the keyboard in supported apps.
Write with Siri replaces the earlier Writing Tools panel with a natural language interface fully integrated with Siri, which means it can write responses informed by relevant information from messages, email, and other documents that Siri AI can access. When you tap the prompt, a text input field slides down from the Dynamic Island. The new tool will write contextually-relevant messages in Notes, Mail, and Messages on request, while the original Writing Tools remain.
Testers note that while the personalized context works remarkably well for tracking down past vacation details or messages, some functions such as Visual Intelligence and cross-app action tools are heavily restricted or throttled in early builds.
This reflects that Apple has only actively deployed limited server capacity at this point in the beta cycle, with more capacity scheduled to support full operation once the final versions ship. It is important to note that Apple continues to operate a wait list before providing beta testers with access to Siri AI.
The quiet stuff that matters
The update also checks off a massive list of quality-of-life bug fixes. A notorious glitch that broke screenshot cropping in the earlier beta has been resolved, and chronic Wi-Fi connection drops have been stabilized. Native utilities such as the standalone Passwords app received layout upgrades, adding a swift “+” button directly to the main dashboard to bypass multi-step menus.
The new betas also introduce a clutch of interesting cross-device tools; developers can now fully interact with their phone’s interface using a Mac keyboard and trackpad, which makes testing apps during development much easier. They also note that audio routes flawlessly through desktop hardware when working this way.
For most iPhone users, the big improvement is that Apple has made Handoff faster and more responsive. You’ll also find solid RCS upgrades in Messages and a new Insights feature in Wallet to help improve financial management.
An ecosystem getting ready
The new operating systems also appear to support future product development plans, with code identified in tvOS 27 reportedly including a variety of Apple Intelligence frameworks. That’s going to turn HomePods and Apple TV devices into useful, integrated AI devices — just as watchOS 27 will turn Apple Watch into the most widely-used wearable AI platform.
Apple plans to release the first iOS 27 public beta in July, with the final version arriving for everyone this fall. Sadly, the new Siri AI features that arguably underpin the release will not be made available in Europe or China due to regulatory problems, something that has upset customers.
Apple introduced a beta that feels remarkably close to a public release. But the bigger picture is that by improving the inherent architecture across its platforms, Apple is much better able to support the integrated, ecosystem-wide AI on which its future will be based.
Please join me on social media at BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, even better, please subscribe to The Core for your daily fix of human-curated Apple News.
Source:: Computer World
By Hisan Kidwai AMD’s Ryzen X3D processors are already among the best gaming CPUs you can buy right now,…
The post GIGABYTE Introduces One-Click Performance Boost for AMD Ryzen X3D Processors appeared first on Fossbytes.
Source:: Fossbytes
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