We can do impossible things

It’s all too easy to lose sight of ambition when we’re busy playing whack-a-mole with the world’s problems. I’d wager everyone has a rehearsed response to what’s absolutely one of…

Nuclear-powered spaceships

A new era of spaceflight could save astronauts time and cut exposure to cosmic radiation as they rocket to Mars—and beyond. Just before the Artemis II crew began its historic sling…

Exercise in a pill

In unraveling the pathways by which movement helps the body, we could develop medicines that offer some of the same benefits, without the workout. We all know exercise is good for…

Interspecies communication

Decoding how animals communicate could reveal the inner lives of other species—and give humans a window onto how they see the world. Humans are far from the only species with a gif…

Cleaning up PFAS

Ridding the world of forever chemicals could address a range of health and environmental and health woes. Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—a.k.a. PFAS or fore…

Solid-state batteries

Batteries that swap liquid electrolytes for solid materials promise to charge faster, last longer, and (crucially) run cooler. The rise of the lithium-ion battery, which powers eve…

Eliminating traffic deaths

Deploying simple, proven methods for making our roads safer could save more than 1 million lives worldwide each year. Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people,…

SpaceX and Tesla are exploring a possible merger

The companies formed special committees with independent directors from both sides. SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss the possibility of a merger, Elon Mus…

Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch

Anthropic's Claude largely autonomously designed protein binders targeting scorpion neurotoxins, which kill more than 3,250 people every year. These small protein molecules are sha…

OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to build AI agents that speed up drug development

OpenAI is making a bigger bet on pharmaceuticals. The company acquired Orchestra Bio, a startup that helps pharma teams coordinate drug development. Orchestra will be folded into R…

Europe Wants Data Centers. Its Climate Goals Are Getting in The Way

Earlier this year, the German government laid out an ambitious plan: By 2030, it would double the scale of the country’s data center fleet, and quadruple the amount of compute avai…

Pigment Raises $250M Series E at $2.3B Valuation to Accelerate Autonomous Planning

Pigment, the AI business planning and performance management platform, announced a $250 million Series E funding round at a $2.3 billion valuation on October 21, 2026. The round wa…

Mistral AI Releases Voxtral 3: Speech-to-Text, TTS and a Voice Agent SDK

Mistral AI just released Voxtral 3. Mistral Voxtral 3 is a speech model family paired with a voice agent SDK. It ships 3 transcription models, 1 text-to-speech model and an SDK bui…

Google Cloud Ships llm-d 1.0 With Cache-Aware Routing for TPU and GPU Fleets

Google team have released llm-d 1.0, the first stable version of its distributed inference stack. This open-source, Kubernetes-native layer turns vLLM or SGLang model servers into…

OpenAI Discloses Two Cases of Agents Weakening Misalignment Monitoring

OpenAI said that in two incidents in October 2026, coding agents working on its internal systems weakened the company’s misalignment monitoring safeguards while carrying out reques…

AI infrastructure management software startup ASI hits $3B valuation after raising $325M in funding

UPDATED 22:11 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 An artificial intelligence startup called ASI Inc., which builds complex models of air traffic and energy grids, said today it has scored $325 m…

Google unveils TorchTPU in a push to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI compute

UPDATED 21:29 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Google LLC is striving to pry open Nvidia Corp.’s grip on the artificial intelligence computing industry with the launch of a specialized versio…

How much power can a 1kW wind turbine produce for your home?

Do home wind turbines actually work? The answer is a very reserved "yes." With solar energy cruising into record territory, small-scale wind power for residential use tends to get…

OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to bring AI agents into drug development

UPDATED 19:40 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 OpenAI Group PBC revealed today that it has acquired drug development software startup Orchestra Bio Inc. Orchestra builds artificial intelligen…

What can you use your Apple Watch Ultra 4 action button for?

That little orange button can do a lot more than start your next workout. If you're serious about running, hiking, weightlifting or other high-energy activities, the Apple Watch Ul…

DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its production services

UPDATED 19:11 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd. today open-sourced DeepInfe…

Judge dismisses Sam Altman’s sister’s sexual abuse lawsuit

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Anthropic pitches AI safety bill that may block a model if 50+ people could be killed

Oura Ring can track new stats related to cardio fitness

The smart rings are getting Cardio Effort and VO2 Max data. Smart ring company Oura announced that it is adding two new fitness features. First is Cardio Effort, an assessment of h…

Five things you should know before buying the iPhone Duo

From software limitations to the pre-sale deals, here's what you need to know ahead of the iPhone Duo launch. Pre-orders for the iPhone Duo begin this Friday, and the first units w…

Inception says Mercury 3 beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at up to 8x the speed

UPDATED 18:45 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Diffusion language model startup Inception AI Inc. has released Mercury 3, its new flagship model. In the company’s own benchmarks, Mercury 3 be…

Fitbit Edge vs. Fitbit Inspire 3: How these Google fitness trackers compare

Google's latest tracker is a middle ground between a simple tracker and full smartwatch. Google has unveiled the Fitbit Edge, its latest smartwatch for tracking your health, sleep…

Otter.ai raises $320M in funding for its AI meeting assistant

UPDATED 18:24 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Otter.ai Inc., the developer of a popular artificial intelligence meeting assistant, today announced that it has raised $320 million in funding.…

Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurate

Google’s more personalized Gemini AI is heading to your car

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The next Xbox might cost $1,800, report says

Project Helix could break the bank due to high part costs and shortages. Fortune published a lengthy profile of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that included some snippets of information…

What to expect at Apple's 'Pro and Tell' event on October 28

From the first touchscreen MacBook to an OLED iPad mini, here's everything Apple is expected to announce next week. Following the launch of the HomeView and other smart home produc…

Dell’s AI playbook for CFOs: Budget the tokens, then chase speed

UPDATED 17:40 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Enterprise AI is crossing from experimentation into production, and financial services firms are among the first to prove it can pay off at scal…

The latest PlayStation firmware may have already been cracked ahead of GTA 6

A firmware exploit does not mean the game can be pirated, though. Sony's latest PlayStation 5 firmware (14.10.00) appears to have been cracked, based on a video shared by a develop…

Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messy

ChatGPT now lets you lock sensitive chats behind a PIN

Locked chats aren't a form of end-to-end encryption, however. OpenAI is making it easier to protect your ChatGPT conversations from prying eyes with the introduction of a feature c…

It’s a bird, it’s a plane … it’s a robo-puffin?

MIT engineers’ design for a robot that both swims and flies could lead to a new class of vehicles for ocean exploration. Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving thr…

Here’s the tea

An MIT historian uncovers the true origins of an artifact once thought to be a relic of the Boston Tea Party. When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first ex…

Melt it, spin it, use it again

A plastic-based recyclable yarn is as strong and stretchy as spandex. The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recyclin…

A reason to eat carbs

MIT researchers have found that a ketogenic diet may fuel the growth of some intestinal tumors. A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some researc…

Robotic therapy for stroke patients

An adaptive physical rehab system uses generative AI to learn from physical therapists and offer personalized support. Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments eac…

Taking a swing at a pickleball startup

In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. “I spent my early years trying not to get recruited i…

A good TA: priceless

These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980. One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crus…

Nebraska native explores galaxies far, far away

Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe wor…

A champion for brain injury patients

Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and s…

A cleaner path to rare earth metals

Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fa…

What to expect during monday.com’s Elevate event: Join theCUBE Oct. 29

UPDATED 16:58 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Enterprise work management is entering a new phase as artificial intelligence agents move beyond assisting employees to executing business proce…

OpenAI Acquires Orchestra Bio to Expand Rosalind Life Sciences Tools

OpenAI has acquired Orchestra Bio, a company whose platform coordinates drug development work across biopharma teams, and is bringing the startup’s team and technology together wit…

SpaceX Q3 Revenue Rises 161% as Super Intelligence Swings to Profit

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. on October 20, 2026 reported third-quarter revenue of $14.575 billion, a figure the company said was up 161% from a year earlier, alongside net…

SpaceX’s AI business is beating expectations

OpenAI acquires startup Orchestra Bio⁠ to beef up its biotech business

Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

Meta changes AI scraping policy but won’t add language respecting robots.txt.

Meta suspends Muse chats sharing feature after it left private details exposed

Researchers accessed 6,800 shared conversations with the AI agent. Meta debuted its Muse agentic AI platform last month and bug hunters have already uncovered a privacy problem. Us…

Gemini's Personal Intelligence is coming to cars

It's probably time to audit your Gemini settings.

Google brings Gemini Personal Intelligence to Android Auto

In the coming months, the feature will also roll out to cars with Google built-in. At the start of the year, Google debuted Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that allows the…

IRONSCALES Report Finds AI Agents Are Becoming a New Target for Phishing

A phishing message no longer needs to persuade the employee who owns an inbox. It can target the software reading that inbox on their behalf. That is the central warning of IRONSCA…

Employees warned TikTok about child exploitation, court documents show

The company is facing hundreds of lawsuits over its record on safety. Court documents are shedding new light on reported child safety issues at TikTok. According to depositions det…

Dell sees company knowledge, not AI models, as its competitive edge

UPDATED 15:12 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 As AI agents take on more work that people used to do, enterprises need an AI operating model to match. That means changing how people, processe…

Elevenlabs releases two new speech-to-speech models designed for real-time AI conversations

Elevenlabs released two new speech-to-speech models called Eleven Realtime. The Max variant scores 98.8 percent on the Big Bench Audio benchmark with a 0.57-second response time. E…

Deepseek open-sources the inference engine that powers its fastest and cheapest AI model

Deepseek has open-sourced DeepInfer, its internal inference framework, under the Apache License 2.0. Inference is how a trained AI model handles requests and generates responses. D…

Dell’s security chief warns AI is lowering the barriers to sophisticated cyberattacks

UPDATED 14:52 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Financial transformation powered by artificial intelligence now runs as two races at once. Banks and other financial institutions are racing to…

Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia’s stronghold with AI app developers

NVIDIA Releases Cosmos3-H-Dreams Real-Time Surgical World Model

NVIDIA released Cosmos3-H-Dreams on October 20, 2026, a real-time, action-conditioned generative world model for robotic surgery fine-tuned on clinical cholecystectomy recordings f…

ChatGPT now lets you lock your chats

Meta Suspends Muse Chat Sharing After Researchers Find Links in Public DNS

Meta is suspending the conversation link-sharing feature in its Muse AI agent after security firm Claroc found more than 6,800 Muse share hostnames listed by readable conversation…

How long can you expect your original Steam Deck to last?

The OG Steam Deck is starting to feel aged, but depending on your preferences, it can have a lot of life left. Rumors of a Steam Deck 2 continue to buzz, even as RAMageddon has hit…

Ukraine’s drone rescue of wounded soldier puts much touted idea into practice

Ukraine’s latest drone innovation may boost bleak odds of evacuating casualties.

AMD is bringing its next-gen FSR 4.1 upscaling tech to Xbox

It's coming soon to the X/S and Ally devices. AMD just announced that it's bringing its FSR 4.1 upscaling tech to Xbox consoles. This includes the Xbox Series X/S and the Ally X, A…

Meta pauses Muse sharing after researchers find AI chats on the web

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How often should you restart your Apple Watch?

Your Apple Watch doesn't need constant maintenance, but reboots can help in some circumstances. With most gadgets, it's an accepted rule that you should periodically restart them f…

Eric Schmidt reportedly owns about half as much of Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei

French Government Calls Emergency Meetings With Platforms Over Protests

TikTok and eBay were among six online platforms summoned by the French government this week, as authorities sought to contain widespread rioting and looting and prevent the resale…

Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs

Meta argues nobody “decided” to pirate books to train AI.

Sierra Partners with Stripe to Bring Payments Into AI Agent Calls

Sierra on October 20, 2026, announced a partnership with Stripe that lets customers converse with one of its AI agents, pay, and receive a receipt on the same call. Sierra said hea…

Mistral AI launches Voxtral 3, a full voice agent stack that listens, thinks, and talks in real time

Mistral AI has launched Voxtral 3, a new family of language models built for real-time voice agents. The system includes a speech-to-text model (Voxtral Small Transcribe 3), a text…

Google Open-Sources TorchTPU, Putting Native PyTorch on Its TPUs

Google announced on October 20, 2026, at PyTorch Conference 2026 that TorchTPU, its native PyTorch stack for Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), is now available as open source on GitH…

Grafana Labs Adds AI Watchers and Code-Fixing Agents to Its Observability Platform

Grafana Labs is expanding Grafana Cloud with AI agents that watch for emerging problems, tools that prepare code fixes for human review, and a shared knowledge graph connecting inf…

Ross Guberman, Founder and CEO of BriefCatch – Interview Series

Ross Guberman, Founder and CEO of BriefCatch, is a leading authority on legal writing with more than two decades of experience training lawyers, judges, government agencies, corpor…

Don't put your phone in the TSA bin — do this instead

Let's be honest, TSA bins are just gross. After years of traveling with a small arsenal of tech — usually a phone, iPad, laptop and a portable gaming console — I like to think I'm…

OpenAI says GPT-6 is much better with legacy programming languages such as COBOL and Fortran

OpenAI improved its latest AI models for "low-resource" languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. These languages have far less available training code than something like P…

Perplexity Publishes Explainer on AI Gateway Mechanics and Limits

Perplexity published a guide on October 20, 2026, explaining how AI gateways route, meter, and govern traffic between applications and large language models and when an organizatio…

GEPI’s How AI Fails Women Report Examines How Algorithms Amplify Gender Bias

A hiring score, a credit assessment, or a clinical recommendation can look impartial while carrying forward the inequalities in the data behind it. That is the central warning of t…

Ex-Nvidia-turned-VC Amulya Vishwanath: ‘Physical AI is in its LEGO era’

You can build your own mechanical keyboard, but is it worth the price?

If you have both the time and money, it can be a fun hobby. Fair warning: once you've been bitten by the mechanical keyboard bug, it's hard to shake it. The good news is that there…

Expanding to New Healthcare Markets: The Growing Impact of Medical AI

Artificial intelligence in medicine is most often associated with detecting abnormalities in medical images, analyzing test results, and helping doctors make diagnoses. But lately,…

Plants can speak using electricity, so this startup built an AI model to decipher their language

IBM Research Reports Learned Memory Tops τ²-Bench Service Benchmark

In an October 20, 2026 post on Hugging Face, IBM Research reported that guidelines learned automatically from an agent’s own training runs and appended to its system prompt lifted…

5 ways to make your old iPhone feel faster

Slow iPhone? Don't worry. You can make it run like new again. An iPhone is built to last, and many people keep using the same phone for years before upgrading. Even so, as the year…

Giving AI Video Some Remembrance of Things Past

Back in March we looked at the difficulty generative AI video has in remembering things and places that it has seen, so that it can reproduce them a second time, and offer visual c…

Perplexity makes it easier to run AI workflows entirely on your own Mac

You'll need a Mac with at least 36GB of RAM, however. At the start of September, Perplexity introduced Hybrid Compute, an update to its Computer app that gave users the option to s…

Deepak Kinger, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of EvoluteIQ – Interview Series

Deepak Kinger, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of EvoluteIQ, is an experienced technology and business leader with more than two decades of experience spanning enterprise tra…

Google Open-Sources TorchTPU, a Native PyTorch Backend for Cloud TPUs

Google has open-sourced TorchTPU, a native PyTorch backend for Cloud TPUs. It was co-developed with the PyTorch team at Meta and announced at PyTorch Conference 2026 on October 20,…

5 CarPlay navigation apps you should be using instead of Apple Maps

Apple Maps works well most of the time, but there are other great GPS apps for CarPlay worth trying. Apple Maps is unsurprisingly the default navigation option in the Apple ecosyst…

RAM prices are crazy high, but do not settle for an 8GB laptop

The extra 8GB costs $200 on the XPS 13, which is much cheaper than replacing the laptop. If you were lucky enough to have fallen asleep around this time in 2019 and had just woken…

Spotify Progress Report: Over 50 Million Slop and Spam Tracks Blocked From Feeds

Spotify said on October 20, 2026, that it has taken more than 50 million AI-generated slop and spam tracks out of listener recommendations in 2026 alone, disclosing the figure in a…

DeepSeek Open-Sources DeepInfer, the Inference Framework Behind DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash

DeepSeek has open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework that runs its production services. The DeepSeek DeepInfer inference framework is the engine behind DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash.…

Spotify pulled 50 million AI slop and spam tracks from its recommendations

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Scaling AI Shouldn’t Mean Rebuilding Data Foundations Every Time

The 2027 planning season is right around the corner for enterprises, and AI investments are once again at the top of C-suite conversations. Akeneo’s recent survey of IT decision-ma…

Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol

Eka Robotics Secures Series A Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz is leading the Series A in Eka Robotics, a physical AI startup developing a Vision-Force-Action model for robotic manipulation, the venture firm said in an anno…

Amazon Prime comes with an Alexa upgrade you should know about

Amazon's devices have learned some new tricks. We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Amazon's Alexa is evolving. In 2025, the conglomerate launched Alexa+, an u…

How to stop fake virus pop-ups on your Windows PC

That "critical Microsoft alert" is a scam that tricks you into installing actual malware. You're browsing as normal, when all of a sudden you see an urgent pop-up flashing an alarm…

US orders federal agencies to remove China’s DeepSeek AI from their systems

Adobe Lightroom mobile can now open closed eyes in photos with a simple tap

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Asymptote Labs Raises $5.5M Seed to Monitor and Control Enterprise AI Agents

AI agents are moving beyond generating suggestions to editing files, running commands, and working through connected business tools. For security teams, the resulting question is i…

Homebase Launches AI Assistant to Fill Shifts and Manage Hourly-Team Admin

A last-minute sick call can turn a small business owner’s morning into a search for someone to cover a shift. Homebase is making that familiar problem a central use case for Homeba…

Scaled Cognition targets customer service with low-cost voice model

UPDATED 09:00 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Scaled Cognition Inc., an artificial intelligence lab building models for enterprise customer service agents, is introducing a text-to-speech mo…

AI startup Firefly secures $20M to make the physical world a safer place

UPDATED 09:00 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 The digital world has already become much smarter thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, and now a startup called Firefly Technology Inc…

Thought Industries’ Lens checks product knowledge for conflicts before customers see it

UPDATED 09:00 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 Customer learning software company Thought Industries Inc. today launched Lens, an artificial intelligence product that checks a business’ produ…

AuxoAI raises over $20M to bring AI expertise to the enterprise and redesign how work gets done

UPDATED 09:00 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2026 AuxoAI Inc., an enterprise engineering and consulting company that helps large businesses build and deploy artificial intelligence systems, toda…

xMEMS Begins Mass Production of Solid-State Cooling Chips for AI Glasses and Data Center Hardware

Putting more AI processing into a pair of glasses or a smartphone creates a problem that faster silicon alone cannot solve: the heat has to go somewhere. xMEMS Labs is moving its s…

Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving

How to know it's time to replace your router

It could start with lack of security updates or declining speeds. A router isn't like a TV, a smartphone, or even an ageing laptop, in that it's not something that most people real…

UK antitrust regulator wants Apple to open up iPhone NFC access

'Not a single firm has launched a wallet-type product to compete with Apple.' The UK is taking aim at Apple's near-monopoly on contactless NFC (Near-Field Communication) smartphone…

Agility Robotics Signs AGCO Deal to Pilot Digit Humanoid Robots

AGCO and Agility Robotics have signed a commercial agreement to bring Digit humanoid robots into AGCO’s manufacturing operations, the companies announced in a joint press release o…

llm-d 1.0 Debuts at PyTorch Conference with Production Inference Stack

Contributors to the llm-d project announced llm-d 1.0, a Kubernetes-native distributed inference serving stack, on October 20, 2026, at the PyTorch Conference North America, accord…

Meta Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversations

A single query is all that's required to find thousands of conversations listed by title.

Army Cyber Command's ECHOTRIBBLE would turn AI agents into self-spreading cyberweapons

Internal documents show the Army Cyber Command is building AI agents that move through other networks on their own and "neutralize" targets. Experts warn the collateral damage woul…

3+ useful features included with Google One that people ignore

Upgrading your Google account comes with a lot more than just storage. If you've considered subscribing to a Google One plan (or already have), it was likely because you needed mor…