Actualités — 2026-11-04

Google faced swift criticism Tuesday after announcing that schools using its K-12 software will lose access to Google Search unless they opt in to the company's AI tools. Chris Phillips, Google's vice president for education, said the two products are "deeply integrated," and students at schools that don't opt in would see a message saying Search is unavailable. Senators Bernie Sanders and Richard Blumenthal, former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani all condemned the move. Google responded by turning off access to AI products by default, while letting schools turn on Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search individually. Lire la suite

Third-party AI agents arranged just four Uber rides in the third quarter of 2026, company executives said on an earnings call. Agents fared slightly better on Uber Eats, arranging around 500 orders during the week of Halloween. Uber disclosed the figures as concern grows that AI assistants could pull customers away from delivery and ride-hailing apps. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company is open to working with third-party AI companies but expects customers to keep preferring the Uber app itself. Lire la suite

Anthropic has released FlashProve, an open-source research prototype that uses cryptographic proofs to show a response came from a specific AI model. The system can generate proofs for Llama 4 Maverick, a 400-billion-parameter model, at about 110 tokens per second on a single H100 GPU. The company says the work could help users, evaluators and regulators confirm which model is actually running, without access to the model's weights. The code, formal proofs and technical documentation are available under the Apache 2.0 license. Lire la suite

Shares of several artificial intelligence-linked companies fell Wednesday after midterm results showed Democrats winning major races, including the Texas governor's race. Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in a state where analysts say about a quarter of planned U.S. data center capacity is located. Hinojosa campaigned for an immediate moratorium on data center development in Texas, and investors are now weighing whether state-level restrictions could delay major projects. Shares of CoreWeave and Iren fell about 4% in morning trading, while Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft rose. Lire la suite

Qualcomm says it has finished testing the first chips built with its High Bandwidth Compute memory technology, a step toward using the design in its Dragonfly AI250 data center accelerator. The company said the results confirmed its expected gains in bandwidth and energy efficiency, though it cautioned that comparisons with competing products are estimates and that real-world performance will depend on the final product and workload. Qualcomm expects the AI250 to begin sampling in the first half of 2027, and it is pitching the hardware to cloud providers, hyperscalers and large enterprises. Lire la suite

Saudi Aramco reported adjusted net income of $31.2 billion for the third quarter, up from $28.6 billion a year earlier, as the state oil company pushed further into artificial intelligence. The results, released Tuesday, highlight Aramco’s new 49% stake in HUMAIN, the kingdom’s state-backed AI company. Aramco is paying with key AI assets and about SAR 9.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in cash. The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, keeps the other 51%. Aramco says it plans to use HUMAIN’s infrastructure to bring AI into its industrial operations. Lire la suite

A Reddit user has released an open-source project called TVPort that uses AI coding tools to recompile Nintendo Switch games so they can run on the Apple TV 4K. The project, a fork of the nxnative toolkit, works from a Mac and lets users pick between 30 and 60 frames per second. Some games run well, including Super Mario Odyssey, while heavier titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom still need significant work. The project's creator says some games may never run on the older Apple TV 4K hardware. The effort is part of a wave of projects that use AI tools to clone or port software, a practice that remains controversial in the decompilation community. Lire la suite

Alex Stamos, Meta's former chief security officer, says handing an AI agent the passwords to your financial life is “totally insane.” Speaking on Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology Podcast, Stamos said people are giving agents such as Meta’s Muse and Spear Street Technology’s Instinct full access to their password vaults and asking them to pay bills or file taxes. He said banks now face a growing wave of bot activity that customers permit, and that the arrangement creates a tension between banks trying to block automated access and customers trusting outside companies with their most sensitive logins. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has raised similar concerns. Lire la suite

Kino, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has launched a video editor that stores footage, edits and team comments as code, letting human editors and AI agents work on the same timeline at once. Founder Luke announced the product on Hacker News, saying the company rebuilt its earlier enterprise tool into a self-serve editor in 2025. The editor is free to use, with a $25-per-editor monthly Pro tier that adds more storage, share links and expanded agent access. A desktop app is available now, and a browser version is not yet released. Lire la suite

Apple on Tuesday began testing a set of AI-powered audio features in the first developer betas of iOS 27.3 and watchOS 27.3. Two of the features, Live Rewind and Siri Recaps, record and summarize conversations picked up around the Apple Watch's wearer, raising privacy questions even as early testing shows practical value. Apple says it processes audio on-device when possible, does not identify speakers or store raw audio, and redacts sensitive information. A TechCrunch reviewer who tested Siri Recaps for a day found it captured useful details from a car repair visit, but also logged personal household chatter and non-essential remarks. Lire la suite

Supermicro will build and sell AI inference systems that combine SambaNova’s new SN50 chips with Nvidia GPUs, the companies announced Tuesday. The collaboration initially plans for 10,000 SN50 chips. The racks will be sold through Supermicro’s data center building block line, with Nvidia GPUs handling the first stage of running an AI model and SN50 chips handling the second. SambaNova says the design lets operators add inference capacity in data centers they already run, rather than waiting for new builds held back by power and cooling. Lire la suite

A user on Hacker News has launched an "Ask HN" thread asking the community how they use artificial intelligence day to day. The post lays out five questions covering paid AI subscriptions, models accessed through APIs or local hosting, coding tools and interfaces, agent orchestration software, and broader agent platforms. The poster says their own workflow has changed significantly over the past year and wants a current snapshot of what people are using and why. The post does not say how it will be used, and the excerpt does not include any responses. Lire la suite

Paying for a personal Google AI subscription does not keep your Gemini chats out of model training, according to a Hacker News post that quotes Google's own help pages. Saved chat history can be used to train generative AI models, and a subset of chats may be read by human reviewers. The only way to stop the training, the post says, is to turn off the Keep Activity setting, which means chat sessions are deleted after 72 hours. The claims come from a user's post and have not been independently verified. Lire la suite

Nothing CEO Carl Pei says the company will launch its first AI device in December, and the product will not include a screen. Pei announced in a post on X that the device is a tool built with the personality and care associated with Nothing products. He gave few other details. The launch comes just over a year after Pei first announced plans for “AI-native” devices and an AI operating system, and it joins a growing list of screen-free AI gadgets from other companies. Lire la suite

OpenAI has added GIF creation to ChatGPT, letting users generate an animated GIF from a text prompt or an uploaded photo. The feature arrives with the company's new Images 2.6 model, which also speeds up image generation. Users can adjust a GIF's animation speed, edit individual frames, and share the finished file. Before this update, ChatGPT could not create GIFs natively in a single step. The Images 2.6 update is rolling out to all ChatGPT and Codex users on web, desktop, and mobile, and OpenAI says users now generate more than 4 billion images per week across ChatGPT and its API. Lire la suite

The UK government has repeatedly promised that artificial intelligence could add £400 billion ($538 billion) to the British economy. The AI minister now concedes that the estimate is less than a third of that figure. Researchers blame the country's slow pace of AI adoption. The original number, according to reporting on the matter, mainly came from Google. The revised figure marks a sharp retreat from a claim the government used for two years to ease public fears about job losses and economic collapse. Lire la suite

Drax, which operates Britain's largest power station in North Yorkshire, plans to build an artificial intelligence data center on the site with Brookfield and its UK-based AI infrastructure business, Radiant. The project could eventually host more than 1 gigawatt of computing capacity and carry a total investment of up to £20 billion ($26.8 billion), Brookfield estimates. The plan depends on government consent for later phases, planning permission and grid approvals, and a tenant that has not yet been named. Drax said the announcement was made in a stock market statement on Tuesday. Lire la suite

A software engineer who moved from Microsoft's Windows AI team to Salesforce AI Research has published his annual review of how he uses artificial intelligence, and the picture has shifted sharply in a year. He now manages five or six coding agents at once, which he says write more than 90 percent of his code, and he spends about $3,000 a month on tokens. He reports that AI has become his default for search and for explaining well-known concepts. But he says it still fails at product recommendations, original research, and writing, and he has stopped using image generators, which he describes as a net negative. He also has drafted a personal AI policy to guide his use. His verdict is mixed: the tools are transforming his engineering work, but he remains skeptical of them almost everywhere else. Lire la suite

A new book posted to the arXiv preprint server aims to explain the mathematical foundations of generative artificial intelligence. Written by Tianhua Chen and first submitted May 28, 2026, the compact text skips a survey of recent architectures and instead follows the ideas that link major model families. Those include PCA, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, normalizing flows, GANs, Wasserstein GANs and energy-based models. The author describes it as a foundation-building primer for mathematically curious researchers, practitioners and students. A revised version followed on September 8, 2026. Lire la suite

Figma has built its own AI model to handle the small, repetitive edits designers make on their canvases, such as adjusting spacing, changing colors and reworking layouts after feedback. The model is a core part of the Figma agent, which the company recently rolled out to all users. Figma says typical tasks are about 20% faster than in beta, the new agent beats or matches the previous production version 62% of the time in testing with expert designers, and users undo its work 60% less often. The company is now moving beyond supervised fine-tuning toward reinforcement learning to improve the model further. Lire la suite

NVIDIA is adding its DLSS 5 neural rendering technology to RTX Remix, the free modding platform that lets users add ray tracing and AI-upscaled textures to older games. The feature arrives on October 23, after a debut on the company's new RTX Spark chip on October 16. DLSS 5 has drawn heavy criticism online for altering games' original artistic intent, and it costs a significant amount of frame rate. Third-party apps already let PC owners with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards install it in most games, though anti-cheat software can block some titles from launching. Engadget's reviewer found the tech worth using in a few games, but said its performance cost limits who should bother. Lire la suite

Sonos is letting U.S. users sign up for early access to its new voice assistant, Sonos 27voice, as part of an app update rolling out this week. Americans can join the waitlist on November 6, with access starting November 12. The update also adds Presets, which let owners save music and playback settings for one-tap playback, and System Health, an iOS-only tool for diagnosing speaker setups. The releases are part of Sonos's effort to recover from a disastrous 2024 app redesign that CEO Tom Conrad has promised to reverse. Lire la suite

Fal, a San Francisco startup that runs image, video and audio AI models for developers, has raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, double its value in April, Bloomberg reported. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which closed in October, with participation from Nvidia, T. Rowe Price, Sound Ventures and HOF Capital. The company says demand for inference, the work of running trained AI models, has pushed it to $800 million in annualized revenue this year. Fal plans to use the money to add computing power and grow its 185-person team. Lire la suite

Itch.io, the game hosting platform, has added a “No AI” filter that lets users screen out projects using generative AI. The option now appears in the browsing menu and in search. Applying it to games cut the number of projects shown from more than 1.77 million to fewer than 425,000. The company said the filter fills gaps it called “critically lacking.” The site already bars excessive AI-generated uploads and asks creators to disclose generative AI use, but its rules rely largely on self-reporting. Steam, a much larger marketplace, has similar disclosure rules but no way to filter those games in its store. Lire la suite

Apple is letting developers integrate its Siri AI assistant into third-party apps, allowing it to draw on a user's personal context, handle natural language requests and use on-screen awareness to complete tasks. The capability is part of the iOS 27.3 update, which began rolling out Tuesday as a Developer Preview. A new "app skills" feature lets developers combine several tasks into a single action, and Apple is extending the same expanded capabilities to its own apps, including Mail, Maps, Messages, Photos and Safari. Lire la suite

The head of PIMCO, one of the world's largest bond managers, told a Hong Kong investment summit that the AI market will face a downturn and that “things are going to break.” His warning comes as the AI buildout drives a wave of corporate borrowing, with Meta, Oracle, Alphabet and Microsoft all selling bonds. PIMCO's Emmanuel Roman estimates the buildout could create $2 trillion in financing needs over five years. Apollo Global Management's president also cited significant uncertainty about AI pricing and economics. Investors are still buying the debt, but a growing number of finance executives are sounding caution. Lire la suite