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Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT both surpass 1 billion users
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users, making it Google's fastest-growing product ever, with 63% of users engaging via voice and the app generating over 150 million images daily. OpenAI's ChatGPT had previously crossed the same milestone, marking a remarkable moment where two competing AI assistants have both achieved mass global adoption.
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Made by Google 2026: all the Pixel news and announcements
Google is set to unveil a new lineup of Pixel devices on August 12th, with leaks suggesting the Pixel 11 series will feature a range of colors and a built-in light on Pro models. Teasers from Google indicate AI-powered features will be central to the announcements.
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General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI
River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has raised $1.1 billion in funding led by General Catalyst despite being only two months old. The company is building a vision for personal AI agents, making it one of the largest early-stage AI funding rounds on record.
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Accel closes oversubscribed $550M India fund within weeks
U.S. venture capital firm Accel has closed a $550 million India-focused fund in a matter of weeks, just 19 months after its previous $650 million India fund — of which more than 55% remains undeployed. The oversubscribed raise signals continued investor appetite for India's tech and AI startup ecosystem.
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Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's longtime COO, is leaving to 'start something new'
Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's former COO and special projects lead, is departing after eight years at the company, announcing in an internal memo posted to X that he plans to start "something new." The departure marks another high-profile executive exit from OpenAI, continuing a pattern of senior leadership changes at the AI lab.
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Spotify will label 'AI Persona' profiles and exclude their music from recommendations
Starting mid-September, Spotify will add an "AI Persona" badge to artist profiles that do not represent a real person and will remove their music from editorial, algorithmic, and personalized recommendations by default. The platform will allow artists to voluntarily disclose their AI nature, marking a significant policy shift in how streaming services handle AI-generated music.
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Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful
Amazon customers have noticed that order confirmation emails no longer list specific product names, instead displaying only vague category labels like "Your Beauty item is confirmed." The change appears to be driven by Amazon's efforts to prevent Google and other AI agents from scraping detailed purchase data out of Gmail inboxes.
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Saber denies replacing Rideshare Simulator's writers with ChatGPT
After lead writer Stella Sacco publicly claimed on Bluesky that Saber Interactive "replaced me with ChatGPT" on the Rideshare Simulator game, CEO Matthew Karch denied that any writers were replaced by AI. Sacco maintains her account of events, leaving the two sides in direct contradiction over an incident that has reignited debate about AI replacing creative workers in the games industry.
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Anthropic's unreleased model makes progress on the Riemann hypothesis — and will watermark AI-generated text and images
An unreleased Anthropic model has made meaningful progress on the Riemann hypothesis, one of mathematics' most famous unsolved problems standing for over 150 years. Separately, Anthropic announced it will embed invisible watermarks and C2PA provenance metadata into all Claude-generated text and images to comply with European AI transparency rules, with support to be extended to older models as well.
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The AI takeover of mathematics has begun
Oxford mathematician and Fields Medal winner James Maynard reflects on how AI is rapidly reshaping mathematics, a field traditionally defined by slow, deliberate human reasoning. As AI systems begin solving and making progress on long-standing mathematical problems, researchers across the discipline are soul-searching about what the future holds for human mathematicians.
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Novo Nordisk and AWS bring agentic AI into drug discovery
Novo Nordisk has partnered with AWS to deploy agentic AI tools across its drug discovery pipeline, covering target identification, therapy design, and research workflows. AWS will serve as Novo Nordisk's preferred cloud and strategic AI partner, and the two companies have established a co-innovation hub in London to accelerate development.
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'Zoomsday' hack uncovered using fewer than 20 AI prompts
Researchers at A Security discovered a major Zoom vulnerability — dubbed 'Zoomsday' — that could allow attackers to hijack any participant's device during a meeting, using fewer than 20 prompts on publicly available AI models. Zoom has since patched the flaw, which exploited the platform's annotation feature, but the incident highlights how AI is accelerating the pace of security vulnerability discovery.
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How AI is changing the vulnerability response timeline
AI tools are giving security researchers faster, more powerful methods to analyze code, detect anomalous behavior, and uncover flaws that traditional tools miss — particularly around zero-day vulnerabilities. However, a Minimus analysis notes that while AI speeds up detection, factors like container composition and dependency management still affect how quickly organizations can actually respond after a flaw is exposed.
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OpenAI launches ChatGPT desktop app for Linux
OpenAI has released a dedicated ChatGPT desktop application for Linux, bringing the platform to one of the last major operating systems without native support. The launch extends OpenAI's desktop presence beyond Windows and macOS, catering to the large developer and technical user base that relies on Linux.
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Apple could help you prove your iPhone photos aren't deepfakes
Apple is reportedly developing an "Apple Reference Image" system in iOS 27 that embeds cryptographically signed provenance metadata into photos at the moment of capture, allowing users to verify that an image was genuinely taken on an iPhone. The feature, discovered in iOS 27 beta 5 by 9to5Mac, could become a key tool in combating AI-generated deepfake images.
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