Florida-based Infinite Reality, the metaverse startup that acquired music service Napster in March for $207 million, has rebranded itself as Napster Corp. and launched a division called Napster AI that plans to foster fan interactivity and virtual experiences through its AI products and services, starting with the beta release of Napster Spaces. The new division leverages agentic AI tech of a company called Touchcast that Infinite Reality acquired last month for $500 million. Its flagship product, Mentor, “is a complete AI learning and development department at a click of a button.” Built using OpenAI models and delivered on enterprise-grade Azure, Mentor was introduced in November at Microsoft Ignite. Continue reading Infinite Reality Rebrands as Napster and Launches Agentic AI

Stargate UAE is the first major deal announced by the OpenAI-led Stargate consortium in its march to develop giant data centers for artificial intelligence around the world. The massive Abu Dhabi cluster is expected to go live with 200 megawatts in 2026 then scale up to 1 gigawatt — enough to power a million homes — eventually taking its place as part of a 5GW UAE-U.S. AI technology cluster in the region. Stargate partners G42, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank are participating in the build-out, which OpenAI explains was “developed in close coordination with the U.S. government.” Continue reading OpenAI-Led Stargate UAE Is Latest in Middle East Tech Push

Two years after entering into a collaboration to develop an AI device to succeed the smartphone, OpenAI has agreed to purchase io, Jony Ive’s device and design startup. The $6.4 billion all-stock deal will bring OpenAI to the hardware business and possibly foster the next steps toward ambient computing. “The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco,” OpenAI announced, adding that Ive will assume “deep creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and io.” Continue reading OpenAI Acquiring Jony Ive’s io in a Deal Valued at $6.4 Billion

OpenAI is releasing its Codex agentic coding tool in research preview. Codex lets developers delegate simple, routine programming tasks to software engineering agents that can generate production-ready code, documenting the work as they go. Codex can work on many tasks in parallel doing things like writing software features, answering questions about a codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review. According to OpenAI, “each task runs in its own cloud sandbox environment,” preloaded within the user’s repository. OpenAI began releasing Codex last week to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team users, with support for Plus and Edu coming soon. Continue reading OpenAI Adds Codex Software Agent to Some ChatGPT Plans

Google has formally announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund to identify and invest in artificial intelligence startups. Participating startups will get early access to Google DeepMind’s latest models — Gemini, Imagen and Veo, “hands-on support from Google researchers” and Google Cloud credits. The AI Futures Fund has been ramping up these past several months, working with startups including Fal, Replit and Synthesia, among others. In identifying up-and-coming AI startups, Google is competing against Amazon and Microsoft who have aggressively pursued nascent firms, most notably Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Continue reading Google Launches AI Futures Fund to Finance, Foster Startups

Google is adding a “Simplify” feature for iOS users that uses AI to translate complex or technical text into language that aims to be easy to understand. Simplify leverages what Google calls “a novel prompt refinement approach developed by Google Research,” drawing on the company’s proprietary AI, Gemini, to make complicated writing “digestible — without losing key details.” Google’s research indicates people find Simplify’s plainspeak “significantly more helpful than the original complex text” and improved retention. “Simplify uses AI to make dense text on the web easier to understand — without leaving a web page,” Google explains. Continue reading Google Simplify App Makes Tough Text Easier to Understand

Netflix is testing a short-form video feature for mobile to compete for the attention of those spending time on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. The news came out of the company’s inaugural product and tech event where it also shared plans for an OpenAI-powered search tool that lets users describe their desired content conversationally. Netflix plans to introduce improved real-time recommendations and a redesigned TV homepage, rolling out globally in the coming weeks and months, according to Chief Product Officer Eunice Kim, who presided over the event with Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone. Continue reading Netflix Highlights Original Shows in New Vertical Shorts Feed

Google has quietly launched a film and television production initiative called “100 Zeroes” to fund projects (initially from respected indie studios) that are positive about tech and could help promote a positive take on Google’s own products and services. Google is teaming with talent management and production company Range Media Partners on the initiative. While product placement is expected to be one element (for example: a movie character uses an Android device rather than an iPhone), Google is reportedly more focused on a broader plan to promote a general positive view on technology, especially to younger demographics such as Gen Z. Continue reading Google Launches Initiative for Positive Film, TV Views on Tech

Apple has teamed with Anthropic on a “vibe coding” AI platform that will write, edit and test software for developers. The system is essentially an update on Xcode, Apple’s free integrated development environment (IDE) that will be powered by Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model, according to reports. Apple’s plan is said to be introducing the software internally then deciding later whether to launch it publicly. Apple developed the proprietary Xcode suite of tools and began using it in 2003 to code, debug, test and vet submissions to the App Store for software that runs on all of its operating systems, from iOS to visionOS. Continue reading Apple Reportedly Using Anthropic’s Claude for AI Code Tool

Artificial intelligence is making big inroads in shopping, with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all announcing AI-enhanced purchasing. Unveiled at the Visa Global Product Drop event, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI “to find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences,” Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said, noting “each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.” That news came a day after Mastercard introduced Mastercard Agent Pay and PayPal emphasized agentic efforts at its Dev Days event last week. Agentic commerce is the use of AI to transact on behalf of a customer or business. Continue reading Visa, Mastercard and PayPal Embrace AI Agentic Commerce

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s shopping capabilities, adding product recommendations to help users discover products and brands. The chatbot’s results for shopping queries will now automatically include things like prices, images and ratings, much like searches using Amazon or Google Shopping. The company says that products it features in shopping search results “are chosen independently and are not ads.” With the company under pressure to turn a profit, a challenge for many AI startups, that could of course change. The company is reportedly already working with partners to ensure pricing is up to date. Continue reading OpenAI Improves ChatGPT for Shopping with Built-In Pricing

China’s Alibaba Group has released a Qwen3 LLM series said to be at the leading edge of open-source models, nearly achieving the performance of proprietary models from AI competitors OpenAI and Google. Alibaba says Qwen3 offers improvements in reasoning, tool use, instruction following and multilingual abilities. The Qwen3 series features eight new models — two that are mixture-of-experts and six built on dense neural networks. Their sizes range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. The size and scope of the Alibaba slate maintains China’s accelerated AI pace in the wake of DeepSeek’s game-changing debut. Continue reading Alibaba Touts Advance in Open-Source AI with Qwen3 Series

Perplexity AI has entered into a deal with Motorola to preinstall its artificial intelligence search engine technology in Motorola smartphones, giving buyers three free months of Perplexity Pro, which costs $20 per month and includes a deep research feature. Earlier this year, Motorola launched a Moto AI beta program to test core features like “Catch me up,” “Pay attention” and “Remember this” prompts. Based on feedback, Motorola says it has enhanced these features further as well as developed new AI experiences that will be available on the new generation of Razr and Edge devices. Continue reading Motorola Will Preinstall Perplexity on New Razr, Edge Models

News from Adobe MAX London 2025 spanned new Firefly image models to a refreshed web app that includes third-party image generators, an AI agent that automates Photoshop, an updated Firefly mobile app coming soon to iOS and Android, and the Firefly Video model in general release. The latest release of Firefly “unifies AI-powered tools for image, video, audio, and vector generation into a single, cohesive platform and introduces many new capabilities,” according to Adobe, which says that since its debut nearly two years ago, creatives have used Firefly to generate more than 22 billion assets worldwide. Continue reading Adobe Unveils Two New Image Models and Array of Products

Character.AI, a platform offering AI chatbots for socializing and role play, has released a video generation model called AvatarFX in closed beta. Promising the ability to make photorealistic images “come to life — speak, sing and emote — all with the click of a button,” the technology combines audio and video to create a variety of visual style and voice, from realistic 3D — including “non-human faces (like a favorite pet)” — to 2D animations, according to the company. AvatarFX also has the ability “to maintain strong temporal consistency with face, hand and body movement” and can “power videos with multiple speakers.” Continue reading Character.AI Introduces New Video Generator in Closed Beta