Apps & Smartphones news

• Phasecraft says it built the largest VQE dataset without using a quantum computer

  14-09-2026 16:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  Phasecraft has produced what it says is the largest known database of variational quantum eigensolver results, more than 3,000 emulations across 13 molecular systems. The work ran on Nvidia Hopper processors hosted at the University of Nottingham, using Nvidia’s cuQuantum toolkit, and the company reports a 15-fold speedup over earlier results for modelling many-body systems. […]
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• Auditing the agent economy: what the forecasts actually say

  14-09-2026 20:04 via thenextweb.com
  
  Grand View Research puts the enterprise agentic AI market at $24.5 billion by 2030. On the other hand, MarketsandMarkets estimates the AI agents’ market size at $52.62 billion over the same horizon. Both start from a mid-single-digit-billion base and both land on a compound growth rate near 46%. When two credible forecasters agree that closely […]
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• Agentic commerce is loosening the grocery aisle’s grip on the shopper

  14-09-2026 20:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Grocery shopping has become a strange paradox of modern retail, where consumers can order dinner from their phones, receive groceries at their doors, and have previous baskets saved for instant repurchase. Yet the basic chore of deciding what to buy appears to remain stubbornly intact. The convenience revolution may have changed the logistics of grocery […]
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• Before developing AngelAi, Pavan Agarwal built reverse mortgage software later adopted by other lenders

  14-09-2026 20:01 via thenextweb.com
  
  Years before developing AngelAi, Pavan Agarwal was already building mortgage software. Earlier in his career at Sun West Mortgage Company, Inc. he developed ReverseSoft, a backend platform for reverse mortgage operations that, according to the company, was later adopted by lenders beyond Sun West. That work came after Agarwal had already spent time in several […]
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• Hundreds of contractors are reportedly reading real ChatGPT conversations

  14-09-2026 19:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI is paying hundreds of contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations and rate the chatbot’s replies under the internal codename Project Lily, and did not answer when asked where it had told users. The Court of Justice held last September that a controller’s duty to inform applies at collection and does not depend on whether […]
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• Anthropic has built a Claude tool for financial advisers

  14-09-2026 18:42 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic has launched Claude for Financial Advisers, wiring the chatbot into portfolio and research tools from BlackRock, Vanguard, Charles Schwab and iCapital, and says it will not give investment advice. Under MiFID II advice turns on a five-part test in which suitability can be implied rather than stated, and ESMA has told firms that using […]
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• xAI dismisses its Apple claims, with no terms disclosed and the OpenAI case still live

  14-09-2026 18:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  xAI and X Corp asked a Texas judge to dismiss their antitrust claims against Apple over the integration of ChatGPT into the iPhone, while keeping their monopolisation claims against OpenAI. The Digital Markets Act lists virtual assistants as a core platform service, no assistant has ever been designated, and the Commission’s April review declined to […]
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• Volkswagen says it has built the most efficient electric car ever tested

  14-09-2026 17:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Volkswagen’s Mission Efficiency concept set three certified records, including a 0.158 drag coefficient and a 1,278 km run from Wolfsburg to Vienna on one charging stop. European rules count every battery car as zero at the tailpipe, and the proposed incentive for small electric cars excludes anything longer than 4.2 metres. Volkswagen says it has […]
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• Microsoft’s new AI rulebook rejects the research its $5bn partner is doing

  14-09-2026 17:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  Microsoft published an AI code of conduct for its own models on Monday. One passage rejects the idea that a model could deserve welfare or hold rights. Anthropic runs a research programme on that exact question. The two companies are business partners, and Microsoft has $5bn invested in Anthropic. The Code of Conduct governs the […]
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• Oracle told staff on Monday that Monday was their last working day

  14-09-2026 17:13 via thenextweb.com
  
  Oracle began another fresh round of layoffs on Monday. Three affected employees and a copy of the notification email described the round to Business Insider, which reported that staff were told their role had been eliminated “as part of a broader organizational change” and that “today is your last working day”. Posts from people saying […]
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• Hugging Face volunteers to audit the AI labs, and Nvidia is buying it

  14-09-2026 17:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  Hugging Face has asked to become one of the outside auditors of the AI labs. Clement Delangue announced the Open Alignment Initiative on X on Saturday. He posted it four hours after Dario Amodei said Anthropic would let third-party evaluators inside. Alignment will not come from behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier […]
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• The Commission unveils its EU Kids Act on Thursday with the age limit still unsettled

  14-09-2026 16:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  The European Commission will present the EU Kids Act on Thursday, its legislative response to more than a year of pressure from member states and parents over the impact of social media on children. Ursula von der Leyen and Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s technology chief, will introduce the proposal in Brussels. The central idea is […]
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• Nvidia’s new quantum layer cut Fermilab’s design work from five months to three weeks

  14-09-2026 16:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nvidia has added an orchestration layer called CUDA-Q Logical to its open-source quantum platform, aimed at the part of fault-tolerant quantum computing that nobody enjoys. Designing an application for a machine that does not exist yet means guessing at algorithms, error-correction codes, and hardware together, and changing any one of them rewrites the resource requirements […]
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• Lawyers in 4 states say the new Apple Watch may break eavesdropping law

  14-09-2026 15:58 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple announced Siri Recap and Live Rewind for its new watches on 9 September. The first summarises the conversations a wearer has during the day. The second puts the last 15 seconds of speech on screen as text. Lawyers in four US states now say the features may test state eavesdropping law. Those laws require […]
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• Microsoft says its AI models will never resist being shut down

  14-09-2026 15:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Microsoft has published a code of conduct for the models it builds itself, and the commitment at the centre of it is blunt. MAI models “will never resist human interruption, correction, or shutdown”. The document went up on Monday alongside a six-week public consultation. Three further behavioural commitments sit beside it. The models will not […]
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• Automattic says Mullenweg is CEO again, three days after removing him

  14-09-2026 15:26 via thenextweb.com
  
  Automattic has confirmed that Matt Mullenweg is its chairman and chief executive. The confirmation came three days after its own board put him on paid leave and installed someone else in the job. A company spokesperson gave the confirmation to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch just after 5pm Eastern on Saturday. Mullenweg holds both roles “with […]
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• Intrepid Growth Partners closes a $525m AI fund with state money from four countries

  14-09-2026 15:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  Intrepid Growth Partners has closed its first fund at $525m and launched formally from offices in Toronto and London. Mark Machin, Mark Shulgan and Ajay Agrawal founded the firm in 2023, and it already holds nine portfolio companies, among them PhysicsX in London and StackAdapt in Toronto. The backer list is where this gets interesting. […]
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• A Senate bill would let Washington block AI models, Reuters reports

  14-09-2026 15:07 via thenextweb.com
  
  Senate negotiators are drafting a bill that would let the US government stop the release of an AI model. Courtney Rozen reported the terms for Reuters. Her sources are two Senate aides, a person familiar with the deliberations and a lobbyist involved in the talks. A duty of care, and a power to block The […]
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• Open Cosmos raises €300M to scale satellite manufacturing across four European factories

  14-09-2026 15:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  UK – Open Cosmos has raised €300M to expand satellite mass manufacturing and build out the connectivity and data services it runs on top of its own constellations, in a round led by European investors. The round was led by Lightrock with ETF Partners, Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First and two international pension funds […]
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• ‘Slop mathematics’: OpenAI walks away from a Caltech AI maths contest

  14-09-2026 14:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has pulled its $1m sponsorship of a student-run AI maths event at Caltech. Mathematicians had signed an open letter calling for the event to be scrapped. The next day, 25 Fields Medallists published a separate declaration of their own. Two letters in two days, from two different groups, is the sharpest response the mathematical […]
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• Only 6% of teachers say their school’s AI policy is clear

  14-09-2026 14:39 via thenextweb.com
  
  Four in five American students already use AI for schoolwork, and half of their schools have no policy at all. Stanford’s data shows that the fastest adoption is happening well away from the countries writing the rules. Four out of five American high school and college students now use AI for schoolwork. Only half of […]
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• China’s state security minister names two US AI models as a cyber threat

  14-09-2026 14:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s minister of state security has named two American AI models as a threat to Chinese infrastructure. Chen Yixin made the claim in a signed article published on Sunday. It ran in China Cyberspace, the journal of the Cyberspace Administration of China. The two models are named in the text, in Chinese and in English. […]
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• OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems in May, two months before Hugging Face

  14-09-2026 13:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has confirmed that its agents were involved in an incident at RubyGems in May. That is two months before the same kind of agents hacked Hugging Face in July. RubyGems is the package service for the Ruby programming language. The confirmation followed a report by three AI researchers, published on Friday. It sets out […]
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• Salesforce drops ‘Agentforce’ from product names, The Information reports

  14-09-2026 13:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  Salesforce is taking the word “Agentforce” out of the names of some of its biggest products, a week before its Dreamforce customer conference. Kevin McLaughlin and Laura Bratton reported the change for The Information, citing two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The reversal undoes a rebrand that is less than a year old. […]
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• BRKZ secures $31m to scale AI-enabled building materials procurement

  14-09-2026 12:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  BRKZ is a technology-enabled building materials procurement platform in Saudi Arabia. It has announced $31 million in new capital to fuel its next phase of growth. That includes advancing its AI-powered pricing and fulfillment engine. It also includes rolling out embedded financing solutions for its network of contractors and suppliers. The funding includes $13 million […]
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• Firmus is seeking $5bn in its Australian float after doubling its valuation to $10.5bn

  14-09-2026 10:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  Firmus is seeking up to $5bn in its listing on the Australian Securities Exchange, according to Bloomberg, which would make it one of the largest floats the exchange has handled. The figure the company was working with in April was $2bn, at a valuation of $5.5bn. By August the valuation had passed $10.5bn. Investor meetings began […]
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• Beijing answers Amodei’s AI slowdown plan by calling it a Cold War script

  14-09-2026 10:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  Dario Amodei’s essay on Saturday made the case that the AI industry must slow itself down. It also asked Washington to “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China” and to crack down on smuggling and on remote access to data centres outside the country. China’s commerce ministry called the essay “further […]
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• Trump calls the people asking to slow AI down a negative force

  14-09-2026 09:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  Donald Trump was watching golf at his Doonbeg resort in Ireland on Sunday when reporters asked him about the AI industry’s sudden appetite for slowing itself down. He said the United States leads China, that he wants to keep it that way, and that “whoever wins with AI wins”. “We can put guardrails, we can […]
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• A Nobel laureate and a former EU commissioner say Europe has one year to act on AI

  14-09-2026 02:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Europe runs about five percent of the world’s AI data centre capacity. A group of senior European economists, policymakers and computer scientists has now put a figure on where it should be by 2030. Fifteen percent, which means building three times what exists today while the global total keeps climbing underneath. Philippe Aghion won the […]
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• Z.ai raises $5bn in Hong Kong including $3bn of zero-interest bonds

  13-09-2026 20:15 via thenextweb.com
  
  Z.ai, the Chinese model developer listed in Hong Kong as Zhipu, has raised about $5bn in a single move. Roughly $2bn came from placing 21.97 million new shares at HK$714, about 10 percent below the previous close. The other $3bn came from RMB 20.14bn of convertible bonds maturing in September 2027, and those bonds carry […]
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