Web design news

• This AI turns your photos into paintings while you watch

  13-08-2021 19:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  I sometimes fantasize about hanging an enormous painted portrait of yours truly on my bedroom wall. Visitors would be forced to genuflect before the picture and leave a gift beneath it as a token of respect. Unfortunately, I have neither the money to buy artworks nor the skills to paint one myself. But those barriers will no longer stop me from fulfilling my dream. A team of researchers has developed a tool that will paint your portrait for you. This is the original pic & the
  
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• New Zealand rules out a VPN ban after a fierce privacy backlash

  07-07-2026 21:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  The New Zealand government has ruled out restricting or banning VPNs as part of its planned under-16 social media ban. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford both moved to kill the idea after a rapid privacy backlash, TechRadar reports. “I can reject that outright. There’s no plan to ban VPNs at all,” Luxon […]
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• Toyota moves some Tacoma output to Texas, and Trump claims the credit

  07-07-2026 21:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  Toyota will invest $3.6bn to expand its San Antonio plant and move some Tacoma pickup production from Mexico to Texas. The carmaker announced the plan on Monday, adding a second assembly line, according to CNBC. President Donald Trump quickly claimed the move as proof his trade policy is working. “That’s what tariffs do, properly used,” he […]
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• Google, Meta, Spotify and Sony fight Belgium’s creator-pay law at the EU court

  07-07-2026 21:25 via thenextweb.com
  
  Google, Meta, Spotify and Sony have taken Belgium to Europe’s top court. They say its copyright law forces platforms to pay creators far beyond what the EU intended. Four of the biggest names in tech asked the EU’s Court of Justice on Tuesday to rein in Belgium. They say the country rewrote who gets paid […]
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• OpenAI is hiring an investment banker to teach its AI the job

  07-07-2026 21:13 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI is recruiting an investment-banking expert to help train its AI on the trade. The job listing seeks a “subject matter expert” with at least two years of investment experience for its Applied AI team in San Francisco. Base pay runs from $185,000 to $205,000, with equity on top, Business Insider reports. That equity sweetener carries new weight […]
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• Scotland could freeze new datacentres, threatening the UK’s AI plan

  07-07-2026 21:12 via thenextweb.com
  
  Scotland’s governing party wants to freeze every new datacentre in the country. If ministers agree, a core pillar of the UK’s AI strategy could stall. The Scottish government is weighing a sweeping moratorium on new datacentres. Last Sunday, the Scottish National Party (SNP) voted to freeze all new builds, the Guardian reports. The motion now […]
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• South Korea’s FuriosaAI brings its Nvidia-challenger chips to Europe

  07-07-2026 20:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Korean chip startup wants to sell Europe a cooler, cheaper alternative to Nvidia. Its first “renegade” accelerators just went live in a Lisbon datacentre. FuriosaAI has switched on its RNGD AI accelerators in Europe. The South Korean startup is installing RNGD servers at Equinix’s LS2 datacentre in Lisbon, it announced on Tuesday. The name […]
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• Anthropic’s Claude Cowork breaks off the laptop and onto your phone

  07-07-2026 20:55 via thenextweb.com
  
  Anthropic has brought Claude Cowork, its Claude Code-style agent for general knowledge work, to web and mobile. The tool launched as a desktop app in January and, from Tuesday, is rolling out in beta to Max subscribers first. The pitch is continuity across devices. Users can kick off a task at their desk, get status updates on […]
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• Meta debuts Muse Image, its first AI image model built under Alexandr Wang’s lab

  07-07-2026 20:42 via thenextweb.com
  
  Meta launched Muse Image on Tuesday, its first image-generation AI model built under the Superintelligence Labs division led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. The model is rolling out inside the Meta AI chatbot and will be embedded across Instagram and WhatsApp. Users can generate images from text prompts or alter existing pictures. The most […]
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• Waymo’s robotaxis stalled, snarled traffic, and drove into fireworks on July 4

  07-07-2026 20:39 via thenextweb.com
  
  Waymo’s robotaxis had a rough Fourth of July. In San Francisco they ran out of charge, snarled traffic for hours, and one drove over a lit firework and caught fire. Over the holiday weekend, driverless Waymo cars became the story instead of the technology. In San Francisco, dozens stalled in the gridlock after the Golden […]
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• Microsoft starts swapping OpenAI and Anthropic out for its own AI in some apps

  07-07-2026 20:34 via thenextweb.com
  
  Microsoft has begun replacing OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own AI in some product features, Bloomberg reports. The shift routes selected tasks to Microsoft’s in-house MAI models where cost or data residency favours them. The change is incremental rather than a clean break. OpenAI and Anthropic still handle most production traffic inside Copilot, with MAI […]
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• Netflix is adding short-form video from Variety, Rolling Stone, and BuzzFeed as it competes with YouTube and TikTok

  07-07-2026 20:17 via thenextweb.com
  
  Netflix is licensing short-form video content from publishers including BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, People Inc., Tastemade, and several Penske Media brands such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Eater, and IndieWire. The content launches August 3 in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. The videos range from […]
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• AI writing tools can subtly steer public opinion, Oxford study finds

  07-07-2026 20:11 via thenextweb.com
  
  You ask an AI to polish your post. It keeps your point, but tilts it. New Oxford research says those tiny tilts can move public opinion. AI writing tools that tidy up social media posts can quietly shift what they say, and those shifts can spread, according to a new study from the Oxford Internet […]
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• Over 100 US-built autonomous ATVs have been fighting in Ukraine for nine months

  07-07-2026 19:22 via thenextweb.com
  
  Forterra, a US builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed in combat zones in Ukraine for the past nine months. The company says it is the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by any US defence tech company. Since arriving in October, the vehicles […]
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• Predatorgate victims sue the spyware maker for €8M

  07-07-2026 19:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  Greece’s Predator spyware scandal has reached the courts. Eight people it spied on want €1 million each from the firm that built it. Eight victims of Greece’s “Predatorgate” wiretapping scandal have sued the Athens surveillance firm Intellexa and 13 people linked to it, Reuters reports. Each is seeking €1 million in moral damages, a combined […]
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• SpaceX’s biggest bull sees a $10.5tn valuation. A famed bear bets on a crash

  07-07-2026 18:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  SpaceX just joined the Nasdaq 100. On the same day, one Wall Street analyst put a $10.5 trillion price tag on it. A famed investor put the odds of a crash at 90 per cent. SpaceX has plenty of admirers on Wall Street. None goes further than Raymond James analyst Brian Gesuale. He opened coverage […]
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• Romania leads its first private ESA mission with CyberCUBE launch

  07-07-2026 18:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the morning of 7 July, carrying a satellite roughly the size of a loaf of bread that will spend the next year probing how European spacecraft can be attacked. The payload, called CyberCUBE, is the first European Space Agency mission run […]
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• Hud CEO Roee Adler says runtime intelligence will define the next era of software operations

  07-07-2026 18:35 via thenextweb.com
  
  Artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated software development, with coding agents now capable of producing large volumes of production-ready code in minutes. Yet while writing software has become faster, ensuring that software behaves correctly in production remains one of engineering’s biggest challenges. For decades, observability platforms have helped teams monitor infrastructure through logs, metrics, and traces. But according to Roee […]
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• Quaise raises $134M to drill superhot rock with microwaves

  07-07-2026 18:29 via thenextweb.com
  
  Geothermal used to mean shallow wells and modest heat. Quaise wants to drill kilometres down and blast the rock with microwaves, and it just raised $134 million to try. Quaise Energy has raised $134 million to drill for superhot rock deep underground, Bloomberg reports. Prelude Ventures led the first close of the Series B, the […]
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• Norm Ai raises $120M at a $1.2B valuation to build AI-native law

  07-07-2026 18:19 via thenextweb.com
  
  Most AI legal startups sell software to law firms. Norm Ai built its own firm instead, and investors just valued the bet at $1.2 billion. Norm Ai has raised $120 million in a Series C round that values the New York startup at $1.2 billion, Bloomberg first reported. Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, […]
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• ECB tells Europe’s big banks to plan for AI cyber threats

  07-07-2026 18:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  Europe’s banking regulator has a new fear: an AI model clever enough to break into the financial system. It wants every big bank to have a plan by October. The European Central Bank has a warning for the euro area’s largest banks. Frontier AI now poses a serious cyber threat, and lenders must draw up […]
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• The Pentagon calls this Chinese firm a military company. Its lidar runs US robotaxis anyway

  07-07-2026 17:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  A lidar maker the Pentagon brands a Chinese military company quietly wires up America’s robotaxis, trucks, and even an airport. Nvidia is one of its partners. Hesai makes many of the sensors self-driving machines use to see. The Shanghai firm also sits on a US Department of Defense blacklist of Chinese military companies, CNBC reports. […]
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• China weighs curbing overseas access to its top AI models

  07-07-2026 17:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s open AI models have been a gift to developers everywhere. Now Beijing may pull them back in. Chinese officials have discussed limiting who outside the country can use the nation’s best AI models, Reuters reports. The Ministry of Commerce ran the meetings over the past month, and Alibaba, ByteDance, and the startup Z.ai took […]
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• Why hackers are targeting your digital supply chain, not just your systems

  07-07-2026 17:26 via thenextweb.com
  
  Hackers are constantly looking for new ways to gain access to businesses and it’s rare that it’s through the front door. For most organisations cybersecurity still focuses on protecting internal systems and preventing unauthorised access through measures such as firewalls, encryption and employee training. However, this approach assumes that attackers are trying to gain access directly. It […]
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• Axos buys AI fintech Arc Technologies to bolt modern software onto a bank

  07-07-2026 17:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Axos is buying Arc Technologies, an AI-native fintech that banks tech startups, and bolting its software onto a chartered bank. Axos Financial, a US digital bank with about $29bn in assets, has agreed to acquire Arc Technologies, the company announced. Arc runs a financial platform for technology and growth companies, bundling cash management, debt financing, […]
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• Data from Estonia’s Odience shows niche creator communities are outselling mass reach

  07-07-2026 16:54 via thenextweb.com
  
  The internet fractured one giant audience into thousands of tight-knit communities, and the brands paying attention are following the trust, not the follower count. Having run performance-based influencer marketing campaigns across more than 2,000 brand partnerships, Tallinn-based Odience has started to notice some patterns. One of them, harder to ignore than the rest, is that creators driving […]
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• AI data centres are driving up power bills at America’s Rust Belt factories

  07-07-2026 15:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  For years, electricity costs at the Belden Brick Company in Sugarcreek, Ohio, barely moved. Last year they jumped by 90%, driven largely by the data centres multiplying across the region to feed the AI boom. The 141-year-old manufacturer, whose bricks feature in landmarks including the Alamo and the University of Notre Dame, traced most of […]
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• Bespoke Labs raises $40M to build the training grounds for reliable AI agents

  07-07-2026 15:31 via thenextweb.com
  
  AI agents can write code and answer questions, but they still fall apart on long, messy jobs. A Mountain View startup just raised $40M to build the training grounds that fix that. Bespoke Labs, which builds the environments that train and test AI agents, has raised $40 million, the company announced. The total spans a […]
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• DeepSeek is reportedly designing its own AI chip to sidestep US curbs

  07-07-2026 15:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  DeepSeek is designing its own artificial-intelligence chip, according to a Reuters report published on Monday that cited people familiar with the matter. The move, if it holds up, would push China’s most closely watched AI lab from writing software that runs on other companies’ silicon to specifying the silicon itself. The Hangzhou startup has spent the […]
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• AI won’t restore an era of rapid growth, says Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides

  07-07-2026 15:13 via thenextweb.com
  
  Nobel Prize-winning economist has poured cold water on the idea that artificial intelligence will haul Western economies back into an era of rapid productivity growth, warning that the fast-growth years may already be gone for good. Christopher Pissarides, who shared the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics and teaches at the London School of Economics, […]
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