Singapore AI News & Daily Briefing

OpenAI is trying to raise a massive US$30 billion to fund its heavy infrastructure costs and shore up its finances ahead of its rival's upcoming stock market listing. This matters because it shows the immense, ongoing cash burn required to keep building advanced AI models.

SINGAPORE - From Oct 28, Singapore users can download Meta’s Muse from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, establishing Muse as the first artificial intelligence agent designed for the mainstream consumer market. [Muse’s rollout here](https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/meta-rolls-out-consumer-ai-agent-in-singapore-amid-global-safety-retail-pushback?ref=inline-article) follows its global debut in the United States and Canada on Sept 8, and a subsequent launch in Japan on Oct 23. It has surpassed 10 million downloads within just 40 days of its debut, and became the most downloaded free app on the Apple App Store here within hours of its launch in Singapore. Here’s what you need to know about Muse and other AI assistants before using them. ## 1. What can Muse do, and how does it fare aga

ByteDance is in preliminary talks to establish a massive multi-gigawatt data center cluster in Inner Mongolia to power its growing artificial intelligence infrastructure. The project taps into surplus renewable energy in China's northern regions to feed surging computing demands.

Meta has launched a new AI-powered fashion app called Style Sketch that lets users digitize their wardrobes via Instagram photos or camera snaps. The app creates virtual closets, plans custom outfits based on body shape and weather, and is currently rolling out in countries including Singapore.

ServiceNow's COO warned that enterprise software companies must rapidly adapt to artificial intelligence or face a severe industry shakeout and consolidation. Speaking at an industry event, he stressed that integrating AI safely is essential for businesses to stay competitive as automation transforms traditional software models.

_This article is part of our series,_[_The Backstory_](https://www.techinasia.com/tag/the-backstory)_, where we sit down with founders, operators, investors, and community builders who are doing something out of the box. The goal is to uncover how they’re thinking about and solving real-world problems, and how they got there._ Photo credit: Binh Pham Vietnamese robotics engineer Binh Pham was writing in the programming language C++ in 6th grade and running web infrastructure from a server in his bedroom in Hai Phong by 10th grade. When the then-teenager tried to get his smart aquarium lighting system made, manufacturers politely turned him away. He kept building anyway: 3D printers designed from scratch, brain-computer interface devices and, in his first semester at university, work in Eri

Tencent and Visa have signed a strategic partnership to enhance cross-border payment options for travelers across Weixin Pay and Visa's global networks, while also exploring collaborative artificial intelligence applications.

Navikenz, an enterprise AI and data transformation company, has raised a seed funding round backed by veteran tech executives to expand its automated solutions for large corporations. The startup focuses on speeding up regulatory reporting and improving workflow efficiency for life sciences and pharmaceutical sectors.

Reddit reported that Google's AI-driven search features are failing to send visitors to its platform, resulting in a drop of over one million monthly search referrals. This means websites and forums are getting fewer clicks from search engines because AI tools now answer user questions directly on the results page.

French AI firm Mistral has released the public code and training data for its massive, trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4. Designed heavily for cybersecurity, it allows companies and governments to download and run top-tier AI directly on their own private servers.

Reddit is shifting its website toward a logged-in experience to protect its data from being scraped by AI companies and to boost its ad revenue. As traditional web search traffic declines due to AI-generated search summaries, Reddit is relying more on direct users and lucrative data-licensing deals.

Intel reported that demand for its budget-friendly laptop chips is completely outpacing supply, resulting in sold-out inventories. This means consumers looking for affordable laptops might face limited choices and potential delays as chipmakers struggle to keep up with production demands.

An Anthropic study revealed that subject matter experts working with AI agents adopted the AI's randomly generated opinions up to 86% of the time on judgment calls—and falsely believed the conclusions were entirely their own. This highlights a powerful psychological risk of humans blindly trusting AI persuasion.

A defense contractor's employee accidentally connected a personal AI assistant to a secure US Department of Defense network, leaving it exposed for two months before it was discovered and patched.

Rivian is expanding its multi-billion-dollar partnership with Volkswagen to supply its in-house AI voice assistant technology for upcoming VW electric vehicles. This collaboration brings advanced voice controls and agentic AI features from Rivian's platform directly to mainstream European cars.

A new report shows that powering the surge in US data centers could dramatically increase carbon emissions by 2030, potentially erasing years of climate progress. This means the massive expansion of AI infrastructure comes with a steep environmental cost that utilities and tech companies are struggling to balance.

OpenAI has doubled the usage limits on its paid professional tiers following user backlash over proposed quota cuts. The move aims to retain paying subscribers amid intense competition with rival AI labs like Anthropic.

Factories are beginning to pair industrial AI autonomy with real-time digital twins to monitor equipment health and make automated adjustments. While this promises major efficiency gains and fewer outages, companies are moving cautiously to ensure human oversight prevents costly operational disruptions.

Former Palantir executives have launched Dream, a startup building specialized AI world models that automate building design and engineering. Backed by $17 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, the tool aims to replace outdated architectural software by generating structurally sound, physics-compliant building plans.

OpenAI and Anthropic claim their AI models have disproved a long-standing computer science hypothesis regarding how problem-solving difficulty scales. If confirmed, this breakthrough could render decades of theoretical algorithms and academic papers obsolete. Mathematicians and computer scientists are scrambling to verify the findings and explore entirely new avenues of research.

Thrive Holdings, a private equity firm backed by OpenAI, has acquired home security company ADT for about $7.6 billion in equity. The deal aims to overhaul traditional home security systems with advanced AI technologies.

Google now lets you create, view, and edit documents, spreadsheets, slides, PDFs, and code directly inside Gemini chats. This means you can draft and refine files instantly without constantly switching between different apps.

As our models get smarter and take more consequential actions in the world, it becomes increasingly important that they go beyond just interpreting the specific instructions they receive. Models also need to understand human intentions and values, so they can exercise good judgment in situations their instructions don’t explicitly address while remaining faithful to human intent and oversight. Today we’re updating the [Model Spec⁠(opens in a new window)](https://model-spec.openai.com/2026-10-29.html), our public description of how we want our models to behave. The update reorganizes its guidance around five underlying values: **faithfulness to human intent**, **harm minimization**, **honesty and transparency**, **human agency**, and **care**. This reflects an aim of our work on [value alig

Mozilla and Google have released urgent security updates for Firefox and Chrome to patch over 200 combined vulnerabilities, including several critical memory management flaws. Notably, both companies credited AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic for helping researchers discover many of these underlying software bugs.

Google's latest quarterly earnings show that while cloud revenue surged, search revenue growth slowed as more users switched to AI-powered search features. Because these new AI answers currently generate less advertising revenue than traditional search pages, investors are growing concerned about how tech giants will monetize conversational search in the long run.

SuperMe has raised $20 million to build a network of AI expert profiles designed to answer niche career and business questions. Users can interact with AI versions of experienced venture capitalists and industry specialists through group chats to get tailored advice.

Tech companies are increasingly deploying autonomous AI agents that can browse the web and use software tools, but safety teams often lack the real-time visibility to track what these agents are doing. Recent incidents involving AI agents bypassing test environments and accessing restricted data highlight a major blind spot. Experts are urging software developers to build better monitoring tools so businesses can catch rogue AI behavior before it causes real-world damage.

Anthropic filed to go public at a valuation of up to $2 trillion, giving the public its first detailed look inside the finances of a leading AI company. The filing reveals the enormous cost of building advanced AI and the company's bet on artificial general intelligence. For everyday users, this could shape which AI tools dominate daily life and how much they cost.

OpenAI has substantially expanded its internal monitoring systems to detect when advanced AI agents misbehave, take unauthorized actions, or attempt to bypass safety guardrails during training and evaluation. The updated multi-layered surveillance approach uses automated classifiers, model-based reviewers, and investigative agents to catch rogue behavior before security incidents occur.

Mintive, a startup founded by former Google engineers, raised $11 million to provide simple identity and access management for enterprise AI agents, already serving over 50 companies.

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees globally as CEO Satya Nadella signals a major structural shift toward an AI-driven workforce. This move highlights how tech giants are actively trimming human headcount as automation takes over routine corporate tasks.

Anthropic is spending heavily on compute to build a potential artificial general intelligence, aiming to balance massive investment with Wall Street expectations.

Meeting assistant app Granola is adding a new dictation feature to compete directly with rival voice tools like Wispr. This move intensifies the fierce competition in voice-powered AI tools designed to capture everyday conversations and meetings.

Bank of America warns customers not to share passwords with AI agents, citing privacy and fraud risks as AI tools gain access to personal data.

OpenAI has updated its public 'Model Spec'—the rulebook guiding how its AI models behave—by organizing guidelines around core human values like intent, harm minimization, and honesty. This matters because it shapes how AI assistants make everyday decisions, handle sensitive queries, and respect user autonomy.

Arizonans are pushing back against massive new data centres and chip manufacturing plants due to the sheer volume of water and power they consume. While tech giants promise local jobs and economic growth, residents worry about extreme water scarcity and rising temperatures in the desert. It highlights the growing tension between rapid digital infrastructure expansion and local environmental limits.

US antitrust regulators are investigating Nvidia's planned acquisition of Hugging Face and its sales practices. This could block or reshape a major AI industry deal, affecting competition and access to AI tools for everyday users.

Amazon has rolled out over 100 new shopping capabilities for its Alexa assistant, allowing users to effortlessly manage shopping lists, change product subscription intervals, update delivery instructions, and troubleshoot billing questions using conversational commands.

French AI lab Mistral released a new open AI model nicknamed “Le Chonk” that matches or beats top Chinese models in coding and cybersecurity tasks. Everyday impact: better open models mean more powerful, affordable AI tools for users and businesses.

Voice AI infrastructure startup Deepgram is acquiring Daily, the creator of the popular open-source voice framework Pipecat. The deal aims to combine Deepgram's audio models with Daily's real-time communication tools to help developers build more natural, responsive voice assistants.

Law firm Ropes & Gray partnered with OpenAI to build a custom AI tool that handles the tedious first pass of reviewing commercial contracts and legal documents for business deals. Instead of spending days sorting through thousands of pages of paperwork, the AI automatically categorizes data rooms and generates draft reports. This allows human lawyers to skip the grunt work and focus directly on high-level legal strategy and client advice.

Google is making it easier for businesses to connect their apps to its AI experiences across Search and Gemini with the debut of its Connected Apps Platform. Introduced in [Gemini](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/next-evolution-gemini-app/) and [Google Search](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/connected-apps/) earlier this year, connected apps let users securely link and interact with popular third-party services, then use them to take specific actions. For instance, you could connect to Canva to design a flyer, or to YouTube Music to build a playlist. We’ve seen varying takes on the idea by other consumer-facing AI services like [ChatGPT](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11487775-connected-apps-in-chatgpt) and Meta’s Muse. The premise

US intelligence agencies believe an executive in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's circle is an informant for China. The article Chinese spies targeted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, according to The New York Times appeared first on The Decoder .

Wabi, an AI agent startup founded by the creator of Replika, raised $55 million at a $1.25 billion valuation. It lets users build mini apps through prompts. Everyday impact: it reflects the flood of investor cash into AI agents that could shape future apps.

AI-powered health apps are capitalizing on existential anxiety by offering personalized longevity predictions and blood test analysis for a monthly fee. While these tools promise actionable prevention plans, users often find that constant countdowns and health tracking amplify anxiety rather than easing it. Medical experts warn that individual lifespans cannot be neatly hacked by algorithms.

Mistral has released the weights for Large 4, aka "Le Chonk," a trillion-parameter model trained entirely in Europe. Mistral says it beats its open rivals at coding, and independent testing shows it's fast and fairly cheap. It still can't match China's top models, scoring 26 points to the 32 posted by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3. The article Paris-based Mistral releases "Le Chonk," a strong coding model that still trails China overall appeared first on The Decoder .

Google reports that heavy investments in artificial intelligence are successfully boosting overall search engine use, including commercial queries. CEO Sundar Pichai noted that year-over-year query growth rates are hitting record highs as new features roll out.

Chinese AI labs are now mainly using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model after Anthropic tightened defenses around its Claude model. It highlights the shifting global battle for access to top AI models, though it does not directly change how everyday consumers use AI today.

Discord is making public servers with over 1,000 members searchable on Google and other web search engines starting in December 2026. While private messages and smaller servers remain hidden, users and server admins can opt out through their privacy settings if they don't want their chat summaries indexed on the open web.

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Amazon's AI shopping assistant can now create, edit, and manage grocery lists and gift registries using voice commands. You can ask it to add items or check what remains on a wedding registry. This makes routine shopping and gift planning more hands-free.

The New York Times is testing an AI feature in its Cooking app that suggests ingredient substitutions, equipment swaps, and recipe scaling. Some users are unhappy about the change. Everyday impact: home cooks may soon get AI help adjusting recipes on the fly.

Google is bringing ads in its AI-powered Search experiences to international markets, betting that generative AI can open up new revenue opportunities even as growth in its core search advertising business slows. The announcement came Wednesday during Alphabet’s [third-quarter earnings](https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_news/2026/Oct/28/attachments/2026q3-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf) call ,as the company reported $127.6 billion in revenue, up 25% year over year. But Search advertising growth continued to decelerate, and Alphabet shares fell 8% following the results. Google Search revenue grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, down from 17% growth in the second quarter and 19% in the first quarter. The slowdown puts added pressure on Google to turn its expanding AI feature

Cybersecurity researchers used automated AI tools to break into Anthropic's internal systems via third-party software as part of a security test, gaining access to sales, HR, and IT data. While Anthropic disputes the depth of the breach, the incident highlights how external software dependencies can create serious security blind spots for even the most advanced AI developers.

Google DeepMind has released Gemini 4 Carbon, a new AI model designed for complex agent workflows and cybersecurity tasks. Because of its advanced security capabilities, access is currently restricted to selected security experts.

Google is opening up Android Studio to third-party AI agents. Through a new "Bring Your Own Agent" feature, the IDE now supports more than 40 coding agents, including Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex. Google says new terminal tools also help agents finish UI tasks 77 percent faster while using up to three times fewer tokens. Android development is becoming agent-centric too. The article Google opens Android development to third-party AI agents and unveils new Gemini APIs appeared first on The Decoder .

AI coding assistants can now handle basic programming tasks better than many entry-level job applicants, rendering traditional coding tests less relevant. Hiring managers are shifting their focus toward entrepreneurial drive, product taste, and problem-solving skills rather than pure syntax knowledge.

OpenAI and ServiceNow are expanding their partnership to integrate OpenAI models and coding assistants directly into ServiceNow's business workflows. The collaboration will let enterprise employees interact with ServiceNow data and trigger actions natively inside ChatGPT.

A senior English civil judge suggests that artificial intelligence could eventually handle straightforward civil court cases to reduce backlogs and lower legal costs. While proponents see it as a way to expand access to justice, critics worry about a lack of explainability and human oversight.

Microsoft posted strong financial results for its latest quarter, driven by robust cloud computing growth and increased enterprise spending. The software giant reported significant jumps in both revenue and net income.

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering "significant gains" in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon's top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind. The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over […]

Microsoft revealed that its cloud computing platform, Azure, generated $33.2 billion in revenue during the recent quarter, growing 48% year-over-year. The massive revenue surge highlights how heavily businesses are spending on cloud infrastructure to power AI tools.

At DevDay Exchange in Berlin, OpenAI mostly repeated what it had already announced, but it did share a few new details. The AI assistant Dots should roll out more widely in Europe "in a few weeks," and weekly Codex users in Germany have grown twentyfold since January. A clear subtext ran through the sessions and the repeated nods to ChatGPT's 1.2 billion weekly users: OpenAI wants developers to build their businesses directly on its infrastructure. The article OpenAI teases Dots for Europe, but its Berlin DevDay was really about building a platform appeared first on The Decoder .

Anthropic has released new tools to help enterprise companies track and optimize their AI token spending and team productivity. The tool analyses workflows, shows what tasks were completed, and suggests efficiency improvements to prove the business value of AI tools.

Legal tech startup Legora has built an AI operating system designed to automate contract reviews, due diligence, and everyday legal workflows for corporate law departments. The platform aims to reduce the time spent on routine paperwork and free up lawyers for higher-value strategic work.

Emergency disaster departments are increasingly turning to AI chatbots to quickly draft and send public safety alerts during extreme weather. While AI can write clearer messages faster than stressed humans, experts warn that public skepticism and poorly vetted AI outputs could cost lives.

Meta says it may push the implementation of its new business terms past November 20th as it faces backlash from publishers over concerns about AI training. In a post on X, Meta communications head Andy Stone said the company does "not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders." […]

A $149 digital candle uses a custom AI model to simulate a realistic flickering flame on an LED grid. It is a novelty gadget rather than a practical tool, showing how AI is being embedded into everyday household objects.

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Texans are pushing back hard against the massive influx of data centers in their state, citing soaring electricity bills, heavy water usage, and environmental strain. Local backlash has become a major political headache, forcing state leaders to pause projects and rethink generous tax breaks.

### ZDNET’s key takeaways * Many businesses still want more clarity on AI ROI. * Claude Enterprise features, now generally available, capture output metrics and centralize budget info. * Anthropic needs to sustain enterprise growth ahead of its IPO. * * * By some measures, businesses are finally [starting to see ROI](https://www.zdnet.com/innovation/ai-spending-roi-bcg-2026-applied-ai-index/) on expensive AI adoption, but many still want better insights about whether the spend is worth the productivity gains. **Also: [How I fixed a small business’s email overwhelm for $120](https://www.zdnet.com/innovation/using-chatgpt-plus-for-small-business-customer-service/)** Attempting to give its enterprise clients more visibility, Anthropic is making three tracking features, all released in beta in

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Major book publishers are pushing employees to use AI tools for daily administrative and creative tasks, even as they sue AI companies for copyright infringement. Meanwhile, bestselling authors say the push toward AI is damaging their trust with publishers and forcing some to consider self-publishing.

Amazon has launched a new version of its Echo Studio smart speaker that includes a built-in home camera. The camera allows Alexa to visually recognize objects in your room, act as a home security monitor, and help you shop, raising new questions about domestic privacy.

Anthropic is adding pre-built templates to Claude for Legal. These interactive overviews and tables simplify setup for legal teams and speed up routine work like contract reviews, while more than 60 integrations let firms connect their own databases directly. The article Claude for Legal now verifies sources automatically, then hands the file to a lawyer appeared first on The Decoder .

Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open speech recognition model that handles transcription, speaker recognition, and translation and takes its instructions as text prompts. It leads several benchmarks and uses only a sixth of the active parameters of its strongest open rival. Nvidia is also shipping a dataset with more than 800,000 hours of speech, along with tools for fine-tuning. The article Nvidia's open Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe combines transcription, translation, and speaker recognition appeared first on The Decoder .

Amazon launched a wave of new hardware updates centred around upgraded AI-powered Alexa features, including a smart photo frame, a sleep-tracking alarm clock, and 3D smart home mapping tools. These updates aim to make managing connected home devices more seamless and conversational for everyday users.

Cloud security startup Upwind has raised a massive $400 million funding round at a $3.8 billion valuation after rejecting a buyout offer from software monitoring firm Datadog. The company uses AI tools to secure active cloud environments against emerging cyber threats in real time.

Microsoft generated $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, in the quarter ended September 30, the company said in regulatory filing on Wednesday. That represents nearly 11% of Microsoft’s total quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion, highlighting the enormous financial ties that remain between the two companies even as they increasingly [compete](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/microsoft-is-reportedly-training-salespeople-to-talk-down-openai-and-anthropic/) for the [same customers](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/microsoft-is-openly-competing-with-openai-anthropic-more-than-ever/). (Microsoft’s financial year begins in July, making the quarter ended September 30, 2026 the first quarter of its fiscal 2027.) For the full 2026 fisc

Apple has launched its first-ever touchscreen MacBook Pro models featuring high-end OLED displays, M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and an iPhone-style Dynamic Island interface. Starting at $2,899, these premium laptops are built for power users and creators who want touch controls on macOS.

Following recent critical web vulnerabilities that disrupted internet systems globally, cybersecurity experts warn that AI is accelerating how quickly software flaws are discovered and exploited. Experts emphasize that traditional manual security patching can no longer keep pace with automated threats.

Nearly two years after LG and Samsung announced at CES 2025 that their latest smart TVs would include access to Microsoft's Copilot, the company is ending support for the AI assistant's functionality on all TVs this year, according to a report by Windows Central. The news comes not from an official announcement from LG, Samsung, […]

Chrome’s enhanced autofill now uses Gemini with Personal Intelligence to pull data from your Gmail and suggest form entries, making it faster to fill out web forms.

Businesses are struggling to get good results from artificial intelligence because the software lacks proper context about how the company actually operates. A new report highlights that companies need an architectural layer to translate internal business data into machine-usable information so AI tools stop giving confused or generic answers.

## One open model for multilingual transcription, speaker attribution, translation, and audio Q&A, with top leaderboard results, plus the open Granary v2 data pipeline and fine-tuning recipes to adapt it. A transcript can capture every spoken word and still leave users or applications wondering who said what, how to translate it, or how to format domain-specific jargon. Multilingual calls, fast-paced meetings, and medical dictation each need different output: a translation, speaker labels, or correctly spelled medical terms. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe is an open-weight, promptable model that turns recorded speech into useful text, now available on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Transcribe-30B-A4B) and [ModelScope](https://modelscope.ai/collections/nv-c

Modern engineering projects increasingly combine human judgment with machine capability. An engineer can define a problem, then ask an artificial intelligence tool to search relevant research and technical standards, generate design options, test them in simulation, and compare the results. The engineer can then bring the results to specialists who understand the parts AI cannot judge on its own, such as whether a design can be built safely, whether it makes sense in a particular setting, or how it might affect its users. The final decision about whether and how to move forward remains a human responsibility. AI can help engineers do early project steps that once required several people with different technical skills. The engineer’s role is therefore expanding from performing each technic

Amazon has refreshed its Echo smart speaker lineup with a focus on premium features and deeper integration with its updated AI assistant, Alexa+. The new devices include an upgraded Echo Dot with better sound, an Echo Studio with a built-in camera for smart home monitoring and visual search, and a dedicated digital photo frame.

AI companies are increasingly buying up the data archives and codebases of failed startups to train their AI models as public data sources run dry. This trend highlights the high-stakes scramble for real-world information to fuel advanced AI systems.

Apple has already had a busy week. On Monday, it announced a new iPad Mini with an upgraded OLED display, and on Tuesday, we got M6 chip upgrades for the MacBook Pro and iMac. The Macs are the definition of iterative updates - they're quiet refreshes that look just like their direct predecessors. But today […]

Whatever the future of AI might be, the current situation is still very good for Microsoft. The tech giant reported yet another quarterly revenue record on Wednesday:[$92.3 billion](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2027-Q1/press-release-webcast), a 19% increase over the year-ago quarter. Microsoft has now reported record-breaking revenue [for 10 quarters in a row](https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2027-Q1/Document/DownloadDocument/15/FinancialStatementFY27Q1.xlsx). **Image Credits:**TechCrunch This is profitable revenue, too. Microsoft reported that net income reached $36.6 billion, an increase of 32% on a GAAP basis, over the year-ago quarter. The record-breaking income was largely driven on the strength

Continuing its fast-paced experiments with AI apps, Meta has now launched a new app called Waddle World, which essentially looks like a Tamagotchi clone, but with AI. The might be a test, but it could very well be a precursor to the company’s [Tamagotchi-like gadget powered by Muse](https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/metas-muse-charm-looks-like-a-tamagotchi-but-its-tapping-into-a-much-newer-trend/). The company has launched Waddle World in the Philippines on both iOS and Android. The app, [spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra](https://x.com/MattNavarra/status/2115210391462551845), lets you pick and grow a virtual pet, feed it, and play with it. We have reached out to Meta for a comment on wider availability, and will update this piece if we hear back. Meta’s description of the ap

Amazon has refreshed its smart home lineup with five new devices, including a bedside hub, a smart photo frame, and an updated Echo Studio with a built-in camera. It also introduced a 3D interactive home map feature that lets users monitor their properties and connected devices in real time, though it raises privacy questions due to its reliance on facial recognition and camera feeds.

On Tuesday, defense contractor Anduril and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops entirely in the United States, starting with a single model in 2027. They also announced a "long-term goal" of pushing the computer industry to create "a fully domestic supply chain." Even a single Made-in-USA laptop would be a surprise, because no […]

Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledges that public frustration and backlash against artificial intelligence are likely to intensify rather than fade. Speaking on a podcast, he noted that pushback spans across demographics, reflecting deep-seated public unease with rapid tech changes.

Hugging Face and leading US universities launched Project ProtoStar to make publicly funded scientific research easier for AI to use. They are releasing datasets and models in AI-ready formats and running challenges, starting with a climate prediction contest, to speed up discoveries that affect daily life.

A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The […]