Author: Art Ryan

A Public Consultation Turns Heated in Oton A public consultation over a proposed artificial intelligence data center in Oton, Iloilo took an unexpected turn after the project’s Norwegian proponent walked out while residents questioned what the development could mean for their community. The planned Oton Iloilo AI data center has sparked debate among locals and officials alike. Daniel Stefan Robertsen, the businessman associated with the proposal, was seen leaving the consultation as local journalists followed him for comment. According to GMA News, Robertsen responded angrily to members of the media and used profanity while attempting to stop them from approaching…

Singapore is putting a clearer legal boundary around one of generative AI’s ugliest uses: creating sexually explicit images of real people without their permission. The new Singapore AI-generated intimate images law is designed to address this serious issue. New criminal law provisions taking effect on August 17, 2026 will explicitly make it an offense to produce intimate images without consent, including material created entirely with artificial intelligence. Someone convicted can face up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. The change matters because AI image generators have made an old problem much easier to scale. A person no…

Something odd is happening in the secondhand book trade. Recently, there have been reports of AI companies buying secondhand books in large quantities, raising questions about their motives. Booksellers across the UK and Ireland say they have been receiving unusually large orders for books that seem to have almost nothing in common. An obscure magazine issue might appear beside a literary translation and a decades-old specialist title. No obvious collector theme. No neat subject category. And now some sellers are wondering whether the customers are really readers at all. The suspicion: AI companies buying secondhand books as fresh training data.…

The humble travel text message is starting to look a little old. This is where Agentic AI and RCS come in, promising a fresh approach to how we communicate and interact while on the move. UK travel and hospitality companies are rapidly increasing their use of Rich Communication Services, or RCS, as brands look for something more interactive than traditional SMS. And sitting behind that shift is another technology moving quickly into customer communications: agentic AI. New figures from communications platform Infobip suggest RCS traffic among UK travel and hospitality businesses jumped by more than 300% during 2025. SMS didn’t…

Oracle’s enormous Project Jupiter AI data center in New Mexico is still moving forward on schedule, according to the company, despite the kind of regulatory, environmental, and power challenges that can easily derail infrastructure projects of this size. And “size” is doing a lot of work here. Project Jupiter is planned as a roughly 1,400-acre AI data center campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. The development has been associated with as much as $165 billion in long-term investment, making it one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure projects currently under development in the United States. The project is expected…

Direct Travel is giving its Avenir business travel platform a significant upgrade, and AI is moving much closer to the center of the product. The company announced the latest evolution of Avenir on August 6, positioning it as more than another corporate booking platform. The bigger idea is to pull travel data, reporting, servicing, analytics and outside technology into a single environment instead of leaving travel managers bouncing between disconnected systems. That alone is useful. The more interesting part is what Direct Travel plans to build on top of it. Avenir is increasingly being designed around natural-language interaction, automated workflows…

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, and the interesting part isn’t simply that another Gemini model has arrived. It’s where Google has decided to position it. If you’re curious about how Gemini 3.7 Flash vs GPT-5.6 Terra compare, this release offers some notable insights. This is supposed to be the fast, practical workhorse in the Gemini family. Yet its benchmark results put it surprisingly close to models sitting much higher up the AI food chain, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Terra and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5. Google introduced Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, only three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash. Rather…

Siemens and Reinhausen are advancing the future of power solutions for the AI era through a strategic partnership. Together, the companies are developing and going to industrialize a solid-state transformer (SST) for up to 36 kV grid voltage. The technology is going to be developed for the deployment in AI data centers. AI is driving a fundamental transformation of data center infrastructure. The industry is moving from traditional power architectures towards more efficient and scalable solutions capable of supporting the next generation of AI workloads. SSTs are one of the key building blocks of that transition. They enable higher efficiency,…

AI agents have been pitched as digital coworkers: software that can research, plan, use tools and finish complicated tasks without someone constantly watching over them. Taiwan just got a much darker demonstration of the same idea. Hackers used an AI-powered system to attack Taiwanese government infrastructure during a four-day campaign in July 2026. The system could map networks, hunt for weaknesses, attack accounts and change its strategy when something didn’t work. According to Israeli cybersecurity company Dream, which discovered the operation, the AI agents mapped 21 government systems, compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted more than 2,500 personnel records.…

The recent IBM and OpenAI partnership is a significant step as IBM is deepening its relationship with OpenAI, and this time the focus is less about experimenting with artificial intelligence and more about getting it into the messy, complicated parts of large businesses. Announced on August 13, 2026, the new strategic partnership will combine OpenAI’s frontier AI technology with IBM’s consulting, cybersecurity and enterprise deployment capabilities. The companies are targeting financial services, government, telecommunications and retail, along with everyday corporate functions such as finance, procurement, customer operations and human resources. That scope matters. Plenty of companies already have access to…

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash, barely three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash arrived. That short gap is worth noticing. This does not look like the usual slow model-generation cycle. Google says the new release grew directly out of developer feedback and algorithmic improvements, with the company positioning it as its most intelligent Flash “workhorse” yet for coding and AI agents. The pitch is fairly simple: better reasoning, better code, stronger agentic behavior — without turning Flash into an expensive heavyweight model. And Google is being aggressive on price. Gemini 3.7 Flash Targets Coding and Agentic Workflows The biggest changes…

Abu Dhabi-based AIREV is pushing its autonomous AI platform deeper into physical computing infrastructure through a new strategic agreement with Qualcomm Technologies. The deal will bring AIREV’s OnDemand platform to Qualcomm Dragonwing products, including the Dragonwing AI On-Prem Appliance. That means AI agents built and managed through OnDemand can operate closer to where an organisation’s data actually lives — inside its own infrastructure, at the edge, or potentially directly on devices. No mandatory trip to the cloud. That detail matters. AIREV and Qualcomm Are Taking Agentic AI to the Edge OnDemand is AIREV’s no-code and low-code platform for creating, deploying…

OpenAI has switched on inference residency in the United Arab Emirates, giving some enterprise and education customers a much tighter grip on where their AI workloads are processed. This is different from simply keeping stored data inside the country. With inference residency enabled, eligible organizations can have GPU-based model execution on covered customer content take place within the UAE itself. Prompts, conversations and uploaded files don’t have to travel to overseas GPU infrastructure for model inference. That puts the UAE in a fairly small group. According to OpenAI’s current documentation, inference residency for ChatGPT is available in the United States,…

Alibaba-owned travel platform Fliggy is pushing AI travel assistants beyond the familiar “here are five hotels you might like” stage. The new Fliggy agentic AI travel assistant is designed to offer more advanced and personalised travel planning. Its latest agentic AI travel assistant, powered by Alibaba’s Qwen model, is designed to actually do things. That distinction matters. Instead of stopping at itineraries and recommendations, Fliggy says the upgraded assistant can handle bookings, changes, check-ins, seat selections, cancellations and more complicated requests that may involve several steps. It is a glimpse of where consumer AI may be heading: less chat, more…

NVIDIA is putting more weight behind a version of AI that doesn’t have to live entirely in somebody else’s cloud. The company has expanded its local AI ecosystem with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a customizable open-weight model built for always-on AI agents, alongside new tools designed to help developers run increasingly capable models on PCs, workstations and edge systems. It’s part of a broader push happening across open-source AI right now. Bigger models are becoming easier to compress. Consumer and workstation GPUs are getting powerful enough to run workloads that once demanded a data center. And AI agents are moving from…

Google’s AI leadership is changing, and this one feels bigger than a routine executive shuffle. Koray Kavukcuoglu, a longtime DeepMind researcher who became one of Google’s most important AI executives, is taking on expanded responsibility for Google DeepMind as the company reorganizes the people building Gemini and its next generation of frontier AI systems. Demis Hassabis isn’t leaving. That distinction matters. Hassabis is moving away from much of the day-to-day operation of DeepMind and into the role of chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet. Kavukcuoglu, meanwhile, is moving closer to the machinery: model development, research teams, Gemini…

The chatbot era isn’t ending, but SpaceXAI clearly wants to move beyond it. The company has launched Grok Bot, an early-beta AI system designed to behave less like a chatbot waiting for another prompt and more like a digital coworker that can be handed a job and sent off to finish it. Grok Bot can work across websites, applications and workplace tools using its own computer in the cloud. It can sign into services, carry out multi-step tasks and return when the work is finished — or when it reaches something that needs human approval. That’s a considerably bigger promise…

Dubai’s push to turn artificial intelligence investment into actual commercial deployment is getting another boost. The Emirates NBD Dubai Future District Fund AI partnership marks a new chapter, as Emirates NBD has partnered with the Dubai Future District Fund (DFDF), opening a more direct route for AI and fintech startups to test their technology inside one of the region’s biggest banking groups. This isn’t being framed as another startup accelerator where companies pitch, collect mentorship and disappear six months later. The idea is more practical: find technologies the bank can use, test them against real banking problems and, when something…

Dubai is pushing artificial intelligence into a part of government that most people probably don’t associate with cutting-edge technology: building permits. Dubai Municipality is developing an AI-powered system designed to review and issue building permits for private and investment villas, with the goal of shrinking a process that can take days into one that may take only minutes. This isn’t just an AI assistant helping an employee read paperwork. The plan goes further. The system is being built to examine architectural drawings, engineering documents and technical requirements, check them against Dubai’s building regulations, and make permit decisions with limited human…

A bad landing. A sharp pivot. A foot planted for a fraction of a second too long. Now, innovative solutions like an AI wearable for ACL injury prevention are offering hope for athletes and active individuals. That can be enough to tear an anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL — an injury capable of taking an athlete out of competition for months. Researchers at the University of South Florida are working on a different approach to the problem: instead of dealing with the injury after it happens, use artificial intelligence to recognize dangerous movement before the ligament reaches that point. The…