Generative AI’s least publicised work sits in phone accessibility menus: cameras narrate scenes, apps read photos aloud, captions convert speech to text. Be My Eyes is the most visible example of a use that seldom makes headlines yet changes daily routines. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Be My Eyes offer such tools to blind, low-vision, deaf … Read more
Tesla has crossed a threshold that is simple to announce and hard to prove. In its third-quarter shareholder letter on October 21, the company said Optimus production had started at its Fremont, California factory on high-volume lines, calling the units “the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured.” Yet the same document’s capacity table lists … Read more
OpenAI has expanded advertising inside ChatGPT to 26 additional countries, raising the platform’s stated availability to 89 markets. The rollout, announced on October 21, 2026, is concentrated in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and it arrives roughly eight months after the company began testing ads in the United States. For Spanish users, the service reality … Read more
Google is turning Gemini into a small-business operations console. The company has added a permanent business page inside the Gemini app that combines brand-building tools, financial analysis and connectors to outside services including Shopify, Xero, Canva, Adobe, Dropbox, Wix and Zoho, alongside Google’s own Business Profile, Ads and Workspace. The feature was announced on October … Read more
Google has begun pushing Personal Intelligence into the car, a layer that lets Gemini answer spoken questions by drawing on data from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Maps, YouTube and Search. The company announced the move on 20 October and described the rollout as global — a claim that holds only until you reach the … Read more
OpenAI has begun rolling out locked chats in ChatGPT, a feature that hides individual conversations behind a four-digit account PIN so they disappear from the main history, from pinned chats and from ordinary search. The release notes are dated October 20, and the accompanying help-centre article is strikingly candid about what the lock does — … Read more
A CHI 2025 experiment from the MIT Media Lab is drawing fresh attention for an uncomfortable finding: people who view AI-edited images or AI-generated videos are markedly more likely to misremember what they originally saw—and more confident that their false recollections are correct. The study, co-authored by memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus of the University of … Read more
Pasting a rental contract, electricity bill or lab report into a chatbot is tempting: it decodes the jargon in seconds. The catch is everything that travels with the document. Spain’s Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) captured the risk in its January 2026 decalogue: “Be careful what you entrust to it.” Strip identifiers first: … Read more
A chatbot can confidently cite a 2021 The Lancet study, article 14 of a law, or a line from Einstein. The citation may be flawless in form and entirely invented. For users of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Copilot, fabricated sources can slip into a court filing, journal submission, or business report. Courts and journals face … Read more
Ask how much a single chatbot query costs the planet and the answers scatter wildly: anywhere from a tenth of a watt-hour to several watt-hours, and from five drops of water to roughly 45 millilitres. None of those figures is invented. Each measures a different thing, on a different model, inside a different data centre … Read more