Author: Art Ryan

Google Cloud has just introduced a couple of new AI-powered tools designed to help partners work faster, smarter, and with less friction—an ongoing theme across the channel right now. The two additions, SOW Analyzer and Bot-Assisted Live Chat, build on Google’s growing list of partner-focused AI tools. And like much of the new generation of AI in the channel, they’re less about novelty and more about practical, day-to-day gains: cutting back on tedious processes, reducing the back-and-forth, and making it easier to get answers in real-time without having to decode a Cryptex first. A smarter way to handle statements of work…

Apple is considering using AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic to power its updated version of Siri, rather than using technology the company has built in-house, according to a report from Bloomberg on Monday. The iPhone maker continues to build out a project internally dubbed “LLM Siri” that uses in-house AI models, according to Bloomberg. However, Apple has reportedly asked OpenAI and Anthropic to train versions of their AI models that can run on Apple’s cloud infrastructure for testing. Apple was forced to delay its AI-enabled Siri, originally slated for 2025, until 2026 or later due to a series of technical challenges the company reportedly ran…

A small company called Songscription launched last week with AI models that automate music transcription, turning an audio file of a song into sheet music within minutes. Operating on a freemium model, the product is geared toward both professional and hobbyist musicians. “We hope to make playing music more enjoyable,” Andrew Carlins, CEO of Songscription and a student in Stanford’s MBA/MA in Education program, told TechCrunch. “We imagine a future where a rural Nebraska high school band teacher [will be] able to get sheet music for the songs their students want to play, [and] that said music will be arranged specifically for…

The company behind Cursor, the viral AI coding editor, launched a web app on Monday that allows users to manage a network of coding agents directly from their browser. The launch marks Cursor’s next big step beyond its integrated development environment (IDE), the core product developers use to access its tools. While Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, initially offered only this AI-powered IDE, the company has made a concerted effort to put its products in more places and develop more agent-powered experiences for users. In May, Cursor launched background agents — AI systems that solve coding tasks autonomously without user…

Google on Monday announced a series of updates intended to bring its Gemini AI and other AI-powered tools deeper into the classroom. At the ISTE edtech conference, the tech giant introduced more than 30 AI tools for educators, a version of the Gemini app built for education, expanded access to its collaborative video creation app Google Vids, and other tools for managed Chromebooks. The updates represent a major AI push in the edtech space, where educators are already struggling to adapt to how AI tools, like AI chatbots and startups that promise to help you “cheat on everything,” are making their way into the…

As the AI Energy Council gathers, the question hanging in the air is: how do we power the future without blowing the grid? The massive data centres needed to train and run the latest AI are thirsty for electricity. Data centre power use in the UK is on track to multiply six times over by 2034, at which point it could be sucking up nearly a third of all our nation’s electricity. That’s a colossal strain to put on a system that was built for a completely different world, one with predictable, one-way power flows. The AI Energy Council –…

Why family codewords are your best defence against phone scams… It’s a story that’s becoming all too familiar: your phone buzzes, and there’s a WhatsApp or SMS message from a “loved one” urgently asking for money, or you receive a call from what sounds exactly like your child or your partner. But here’s the catch — it’s not them. With the rise of artificial intelligence, scammers are now able to clone voices and send highly convincing messages pretending to be someone close to you. Recognising how convincing these new scams have become, Spain’s Policía Nacional is now urging families to fight…

The New South Wales tenants union has called for nationwide reforms to crack down on misleading rental advertisements after the state government introduced new laws in response to the growing use of artificial intelligence in real estate. The legislation, announced on Sunday, will require mandatory disclosure when images in rental advertisements have been altered to conceal faults and mislead rental applicants. The state government cited examples of real estate agents using artificially generated furniture that showed a double bed in a bedroom that was only large enough to fit a single in listings, or digitally modifying photos to obscure property damage. The new laws…

US chip giant Nvidia has hired two prominent artificial intelligence (AI) experts who hail from China, underscoring the rising global recognition of talent from the mainland and their key contributions to the field’s advancement. Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China’s Tsinghua University, said on their respective social media accounts that they joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company. Zhu, who received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, joined Nvidia’s…

Indian IT majors are aggressively repositioning themselves as AI-native firms, focusing on high-margin applications and integration over high-risk, capital-intensive foundational research. A deep dive into the FY25 annual reports from the industry behemoths — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra — indicates that in the global AI race, India’s tech titans are not competing to invent foundational AI, they are positioning themselves to become premier integrators of it. The shift from general digital transformation to a specific AI focus is captured in the very titles of their annual reports. TCS frames its strategy within “The Perpetually Adaptive Enterprise,” driven by…

Humanoid robots waddled, stumbled and occasionally face-planted their way through a 3-on-3 soccer tournament in Beijing on Saturday that looked more like the first day of little league than the rise of a robotic Lionel Messi. Pileups were frequent as players toppled over each other in slow-motion collisions, goals were left open, and defending appeared optional. Some robots hogged the ball, others struggled to stay upright, and two or three had to be loaded onto a stretcher and carried off the field. While the play was absurd, the tech powering it was anything but. Each team operated fully autonomously, driven by AI, with no human…

On Monday, Chinese technology giant Baidu plans to make its Ernie generative AI large language model open source, a move by China’s tech sector that could be its biggest in the AI race since the emergence of DeepSeek. A Baidu spokesman confirmed the plan and said the open sourcing will be a gradual roll-out. Will it be a shock to the market on the order of DeepSeek? That’s a question which divides AI experts. One big change is that Baidu wasn’t always on the open source bandwagon. “Baidu has always been very supportive of its proprietary business model and was vocal against open-source, but disruptors like…

The Union ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) has chosen highway projects across the country where AI-driven technology will be implemented. Of the 16 pilot projects chosen across the country for the implementation of the technology in 2025-26, one is the Rs 700 crore project in Goa for the four-laning of 22km of the highway from Bendordem to Canacona. The ministry will use Automated and Intelligent Machine-aided Construction (AIMC) for this project, which was successfully tested in the construction of the Lucknow-Kanpur expressway project. Officials said that the Bendordem to Canacona project was sanctioned and will be awarded soon.…

Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before.But did you know that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models are also making headway in creating working robots? Recent diffusion-based approaches have generated structures and the systems that control them from scratch. With or without a user’s input, these models can make new designs and then evaluate them in simulation before they’re fabricated.A new approach from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)…

In a strategic development reshaping the global artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure landscape, OpenAI—the Microsoft-backed organisation behind ChatGPT—has begun deploying Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to support its AI operations. The move, reported by Reuters and other outlets, marks OpenAI’s first major shift away from exclusive reliance on Nvidia’s Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), historically central to the company’s training and inference workloads. The shift underscores a broader industry trend toward multi-supplier, multi-cloud strategies aimed at addressing growing computational demands, controlling operational costs, and avoiding supply-chain bottlenecks. According to the report, OpenAI is now renting Google’s TPUs through Google Cloud, expanding its hardware ecosystem.…

Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid has urged students from vocational colleges to take center stage in efforts to advance the digital transformation in Indonesia, especially by mastering artificial intelligence (AI). Hafid’s message was conveyed by her special staff member, Alfreno Kautsar Ramadhan, during an event entitled “The Introduction and Implementation of AI in Yogyakarta: Leveraging AI to Produce a Digitally Capable Generation” at the Yogyakarta Multi Media College (STMM) on Friday. “By learning how to leverage AI, you will not be replaced. Instead, you will emerge as prominent actors in the era of technological disruption brought by AI.…

The Rundown: Anthropic published new research on how Claude is used for emotional support and affective conversations, finding its use is far less common than reported, with companionship and roleplay accounting for under 0.5% of interactions. The details: Why it matters: Recent media revealed some extreme cases of AI romance and dependency, but the data shows those are still few and far between (at least via Claude). However, Anthropic is dev-focused and less mainstream than ChatGPT or platforms like Character AI — so the numbers likely look a lot different elsewhere in AI. Source: https://breakingai.news/

The Rundown: Lockheed Martin’s AI takeoff began with data cleanup — cutting its tools by 50% and replacing them with a single unified system that runs on IBM’s watsonx.data to drive faster, smarter engineering. Learn how Lockheed Martin leveraged watsonx to: Read the full story. Source: The Rundown

The Rundown: Google launched the full version of Gemma 3n, its new family of open AI models (2B and 4B options) designed to bring powerful multimodal capabilities to mobile and consumer edge devices. The details: Why it matters: The full Gemma release is another extremely impressive launch from Google, with models continuing to get more powerful despite shrinking in size for consumer hardware. The small, open model opens up limitless intelligent on-device use cases. Source: The Rundown

The Rundown: Airia is an enterprise platform that ensures secure creation, orchestration, and deployment of AI agents — enabling businesses to automate workflows and integrate systems with confidence, while maintaining robust security and compliance standards. With Airia, you’ll experience: Book a Demo today. Source: The Rundown