Japan’s SoftBank has committed to investing $2 billion in U.S. chipmaker Intel as the company struggles to gain traction in the exploding artificial intelligence space and catch up in the mobile market. SoftBank has agreed to purchase roughly 87 million Intel shares at $23 per share to become the company’s fifth or sixth-largest shareholder. The move comes as the Trump administration deliberates converting the U.S. government’s CHIPS Act grants into a 10 percent equity stake in the company as part of its effort to revive American semiconductor manufacturing. Such a deal would make the government Intel’s largest stakeholder. Read more

Meta Platforms has two headset prototypes that caused a stir at SIGGRAPH 2025 last week in Vancouver. Boba 3 features an ultrawide 180- degree horizontal by 120-degree vertical field of view, with 4K LCDs achieving 30 pixels per degree (PPD). Human vision is approximately 200×135 degrees, while the Quest 3 offers less than 110×96. The other device, Tiramisu, touts 90 PPD — 3.6x the pixel density of the Meta Quest 3 — and aims for “a new milestone for realism in VR.” The prototypes are the latest steps on Meta Reality Labs’ “mission to pass the visual Turing test” by creating “virtual experiences that are indistinguishable from the physical world.” Read more

Comcast NBCUniversal continues to lay the groundwork to spin most of its cable television assets off into a new publicly traded entity called Versant, announcing Monday that MSNBC will by year’s end be rebranded as MS NOW — short for “My Source for News Opinion and the World.” The channel’s new logo will no longer include the iconic Peacock, which remains part of the parent company’s NBC branding. The plans were shared in an internal memo from Mark Lazarus, the NBCUniversal Media Group chairman who has been chosen to run Versant as founding CEO. Read more

Hisense Channels is a new FAST service launched by TV manufacturer Hisense and Xumo, the streaming joint venture between Charter Communications and Comcast. Boasting in excess of 200 premium channels from content providers including Scripps, Stingray and Radial Entertainment, Hisense Channels is debuting on Hisense smart TVs, where viewers can access it from the TV’s homepage screen — no need for a subscription or download. The move is an expansion of the existing partnership between Xumo and Hisense, which is interested in simplifying content discovery with built-in streaming access. Read more

Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 now have the discrete ability to end “abusive” or “harmful” conversations in consumer chat interfaces. Anthropic says the feature was developed as part of its exploratory work on the protection and well-being of its AI models. The company also envisions broader safety uses, although it does point out that having a model defensively terminate a chat is an extreme measure, intended for use in rare cases. “We’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare,” Anthropic explains, qualifying it is unsure “such welfare is possible.” Read more