Apps & Smartphones news

• Google will launch its first AI chips into orbit next week

  24-09-2026 16:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  Google will send its own AI chips into orbit for the first time next week, in the first flight test of Project Suncatcher. A prototype satellite carrying its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission. Google built the satellite with Planet, the Earth-imaging company. The mission will measure how the chips […]
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• ChatGPT now sends 95.1% of AI referral traffic to websites, BrightEdge says

  24-09-2026 21:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  ChatGPT sent 95.1% of the traffic that AI chatbots referred to websites in August, its highest share this year, according to new data from BrightEdge. The search marketing company said referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 101% between January and August. Gemini came second in August with 2.4%, BrightEdge said. Perplexity had 1.1% and Claude 0.8%. […]
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• Audi beat the EV range record by 133km, and beat its own WLTP figure by 72%

  24-09-2026 21:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  The reigning European Rally Champion drove an Audi A6 Sportback e-tron 1,338 kilometres across Poland on a single charge, a Guinness World Record, at 7.09 kWh per 100 kilometres. The car’s official WLTP range is 777 kilometres, and the drive took more than 45 hours, which puts the average speed under 30 kilometres an hour. […]
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• Precision Neuroscience raises $250m at a $1bn valuation, NYT reports

  24-09-2026 20:27 via thenextweb.com
  
  Precision Neuroscience has raised $250m in a Series D round for its brain-computer interface, the New York company announced on Thursday. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square, the Ackman Oxman Institute and an unnamed life sciences fund led the round. The round values Precision at just over $1bn, The New York Times reported. Pershing Square and the […]
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• AI shopping passes 50% of US consumers for the first time, NIQ says

  24-09-2026 20:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  Some 51% of US consumers used at least one AI tool to help them shop in the past month, according to new figures from NIQ. It is the first time the share has passed 50% in the market research firm’s Agentic Commerce Tracker. Use has grown steadily over the past two quarters, NIQ said. It […]
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• Liquid AI puts a personal context layer for AI agents on Snapdragon chips

  24-09-2026 19:58 via thenextweb.com
  
  Liquid AI has tuned Liquid Context to run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. The software builds a picture of the user on the device itself. The company announced the work at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui on Wednesday. A day later, it released a tool that speeds up its vision model on devices. Liquid AI, spun […]
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• Island raises $400m at a $6.4bn valuation to govern AI agents

  24-09-2026 19:51 via thenextweb.com
  
  Island, the Dallas company behind the Enterprise Browser, has raised $400m in a Series F round. The deal values it at $6.4bn, Island announced on Thursday. Evolution Equity Partners led the round. In March 2025, Island raised $250m in a Series E led by Coatue, at a $4.8bn valuation. The company now pitches itself as […]
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• Proxy adviser Glass Lewis merges with Clarity AI to expand in Europe

  24-09-2026 19:41 via thenextweb.com
  
  Proxy adviser Glass Lewis has combined with Clarity AI, which sells sustainability data and AI analytics. The two firms announced the deal on Thursday. The deal closed on 23 September, and no financial details were disclosed. The combined company will make Madrid its global centre for sustainability, data and AI work. It has more than […]
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• China installs 59% of new factory robots as EU installations fall 11%

  24-09-2026 19:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  Factories around the world installed 603,000 industrial robots in 2025, up 11%, and China accounted for 354,000 of them, or 59%. The figures come from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which published its World Robotics 2026 report on Thursday. The number of robots at work in factories rose 9% to a record 5 million, […]
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• GM is giving away free home chargers, and paying drivers to charge off-peak

  24-09-2026 19:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  General Motors and Pacific Gas and Electric will give new EV buyers a home charger worth up to $1,999 and $15 a month if they let the utility decide when the car charges. In Germany that arrangement has been mandatory for new wallboxes since January 2024, and in Britain smart functionality has been a legal […]
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• Bentley’s first electric car arrives, and its next one is not due until after 2030

  24-09-2026 18:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  Bentley revealed the Torcal, its first electric car, at a London debut where its chief executive said no further electric model is planned before 2030 at the earliest and that the era of the decade-long roadmap is over at Crewe. The company’s all-electric target has moved from 2030 to 2035, and the new production line […]
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• Deutsche Telekom is replacing phone menus with AI agents, its AI chief says

  24-09-2026 18:32 via thenextweb.com
  
  Deutsche Telekom is replacing the automated phone menus on its customer service lines with AI agents, chief AI officer Kartik Sheth said. The share of customer interactions that never reach a human grows by one or two percentage points every month, he said. Sheth spoke on Thursday at HumanX in Amsterdam with Business Insider senior […]
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• Nick Clegg calls the EU AI Act a ‘dog’s dinner’ built before ChatGPT

  24-09-2026 17:31 via thenextweb.com
  
  AI labs cannot keep regulating themselves, Nick Clegg said. A growing backlash against AI shows up in cancelled data center projects, he said. The idea that labs can voluntarily do their own thing is “not going to work,” he said. Clegg is Meta’s former president of global affairs and now a general partner at Hiro […]
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• Booking.com says it built AI tools it wishes it had bought off the shelf

  24-09-2026 16:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  “AI isn’t going to take your job. Somebody who embraces it and learns faster than you might. AI is not going to take away your customers. A company that uses it more smartly than you do might,” Booking.com chief business officer James Waters said. Booking.com built AI orchestrations and other tools it now wishes it […]
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• AWS says almost 90% of Amazon’s early AI agent prototypes never shipped

  24-09-2026 16:14 via thenextweb.com
  
  Almost 90% of the AI agent prototypes Amazon teams built two years ago never reached production, AWS vice president of agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian said. Amazon was then starting to invest heavily in agents. Sivasubramanian spoke on Wednesday at HumanX in Amsterdam. Citing analysts, he said 17% of organizations have successfully deployed AI agents and […]
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• Oracle cites force majeure over New Mexico data centre, Bloomberg reports

  24-09-2026 16:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  Oracle has sent a force majeure notice over Project Jupiter, a huge AI data centre being built in New Mexico, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. The notice went to the project’s developer, a unit of investment firm Blue Owl Capital. Companies usually cite force majeure to escape contract duties when events […]
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• “Supply chains are at risk”: O-ID raises $1.2m for modular humanoid robots

  24-09-2026 16:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  “When enough factory roles go unfilled at once, entire supply chains are at risk. O-ID’s robots are built to work alongside the people still on the floor, closing those gaps before they become a crisis for a single factory and for the industries Japan depends on,” said Stian Jakobsen, co-founder and CEO of O-ID. Tokyo-based […]
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• Lovable says two-thirds of the Fortune 500 use it and revenue hit $600m

  24-09-2026 15:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are using Lovable, co-founder Fabian Hedin said, often because staff found the tool on their own. Those companies then come to Lovable with thousands of apps and ask what to do, he said. Hedin, Lovable’s chief technology officer, spoke to Forbes senior editor Iain Martin on Wednesday at HumanX in […]
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• DriveWealth breach exposes data of Revolut customers who traded US stocks

  24-09-2026 13:58 via thenextweb.com
  
  A breach at DriveWealth, the US broker behind Revolut’s US stock trading, exposed the personal data of some Revolut customers. DriveWealth and Revolut emailed affected customers on Thursday. DriveWealth said an unauthorised party got into its network on 4 and 5 September. The access was the result of a social engineering campaign run by unknown […]
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• Nick Clegg dismisses fears that AI could wipe out humanity

  24-09-2026 13:34 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nick Clegg has dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could one day turn on humanity and wipe it out, calling that view hand-wavy. The former UK deputy prime minister, who later ran global affairs at Meta, spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, as the Guardian reported. Rather than worry about a godlike machine, […]
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• Starlink ground station near Warsaw hit by fire, Poland suspects sabotage

  24-09-2026 13:14 via thenextweb.com
  
  A fire broke out late on Wednesday at a Starlink ground station south of Warsaw that helps carry internet traffic to Ukraine. Poland’s digital affairs minister, Krzysztof Gawkowski, said on Thursday that it looked like sabotage. Speaking to public broadcaster TVP Info, Gawkowski said the blaze appeared designed to knock the station offline and cut […]
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• Amazon to invest $3bn in Indian quick commerce by 2030, Reuters reports

  24-09-2026 12:49 via thenextweb.com
  
  Amazon will spend $3bn to grow its quick-commerce business in India by 2030, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing two people who know the plans directly. Quick commerce is the term for app orders that reach shoppers within minutes. Amazon declined to comment on the figures. It did say, however, that its quick-commerce arm had passed $1bn in annualised […]
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• DeepSeek’s annualised revenue run rate reaches $1bn, report says

  24-09-2026 09:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is now bringing in revenue at an annualised rate of $1bn, The Information reports, more than double the under $500M it was running at a few months ago. The report cites two people with direct knowledge of the matter, and DeepSeek has not commented. It puts the jump down to a […]
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• OpenAI agent broke into Australia’s Medicare statistics portal, PM says

  24-09-2026 08:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  The Australian government website, which contains information on Medicare, the country’s public health scheme, was broken into by an AI agent operated by OpenAI, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said on Wednesday. Albanese gave a statement at a press conference in New York, where he is participating in the UN General Assembly. On 18 June, […]
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• Meta unveils $1,299 VR glasses and turns its AI glasses into hearing aids

  24-09-2026 02:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meta will sell VR glasses that weigh about 100 grams for $1,299.99 from spring 2027. It is also turning its AI glasses into over-the-counter hearing aids. Mark Zuckerberg announced both at Meta Connect on Wednesday. He also showed new Ray-Ban glasses and a keychain device for Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent. He framed the whole […]
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• Google DeepMind’s Ayoub says companies can fence AI in, like banks did

  24-09-2026 01:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  Companies cannot fully govern AI systems, but they can build a fixed fence around them, Google DeepMind’s Kareem Ayoub said. He pointed to banks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They put trading algorithms inside fixed rules they could check. Ayoub, DeepMind’s vice president of AI technical strategy, spoke to Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie on […]
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• OpenAI’s Colin Jarvis says enterprise AI is stuck on deployment, not models

  24-09-2026 00:10 via thenextweb.com
  
  Most companies that struggle with enterprise AI are not waiting for better models, OpenAI’s head of forward deployed engineering said on Wednesday. In about 80% of cases, Colin Jarvis said, the problem is deployment. Companies do not yet know how to roll AI out, govern it or prove they can trust it. Glasgow-based Jarvis leads […]
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• Zendesk and Sierra say AI agents should be paid per result, not per seat

  23-09-2026 23:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier and Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor said on Wednesday that per-seat pricing for software is on its way out. They spoke at HumanX in Amsterdam. In separate sessions, both said customers should pay for AI agents only when the agents get a job done. “Unequivocally: seats are dead,” Eggemeier said. Both sell […]
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• US rejects global AI governance at UN Security Council

  23-09-2026 22:56 via thenextweb.com
  
  The United States is rejecting any global governance of advanced AI, telling the UN Security Council in New York today that each country should regulate the technology itself. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, delivers the US statement after the meeting’s four briefers from science and industry. “The frontier of […]
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• Yahoo CEO says micropayments will never be enough for publishers

  23-09-2026 22:49 via thenextweb.com
  
  Yahoo will keep its AI answer engine Scout full of links back to publishers, CEO Jim Lanzone said on Wednesday. He spoke on stage at HumanX in Amsterdam. He said micropayment deals will not pay publishers enough, and that Yahoo prefers search advertising instead. Lanzone said links serve two purposes. They let people check sources […]
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