News — Page8

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

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. Read more

A developer has outlined a method for attaching a strict true-or-false logic circuit to an already trained neural network. The idea uses probes to read signals from specific neurons and converts them into yes-or-no inputs, then uses stims to push the network's behavior in a chosen direction. The approach is described in a personal blog post that includes no code and no test results. The author says the post is a way to organize thinking for a larger project he is building. Read more

Fujifilm will invest roughly 10 billion yen, or about $63 million, to increase its magnetic tape production capacity fivefold, the company announced Thursday. Fujifilm says the generative AI boom is driving “exponential growth” in data storage needs worldwide, and it expects demand for archival tape to rise accordingly. The investment will go into its Kanagawa Factory in Odawara, Japan, and will run from fiscal 2026 through 2028. The project is the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities. Read more

Samsung Electronics will use its second chip plant in Taylor, Texas, to make base dies for high-bandwidth memory used in AI processors, South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper reported Tuesday, citing industry sources. Most of the booked volume is for AMD, the paper said, and the plant has already secured orders for its entire output. Samsung declined to comment, and Reuters said it could not confirm the report. If the reporting holds up, the plant would mark a turnaround for Samsung's foundry business, which has lost money for years. Read more

Google's Home Speaker is selling for about $79, a $20 discount, in all four colors. It's the lowest price yet for the Gemini-powered speaker, which launched in June as Google's first smart speaker in several years. Reviewers say it delivers loud, clear 360-degree sound in a compact body that is smaller than the prior-generation Nest Audio. It also adds Matter support, a Thread border router and the ability to serve as an audio output for the Google TV Streamer 4K. Its biggest draw is Gemini, which handles conversational requests and multiple smart home commands better than the old Google Assistant. Read more

A programmer has shown that a modern chess engine running on a 1996 Intel Pentium Pro could likely have beaten Garry Kasparov, the world champion who lost a game to IBM's Deep Blue in February of that year. The engine, a port of Stockfish, is estimated at an Elo rating of about 3300 at classical time controls, well above Kasparov's rating of just under 2800. The experiment also shows how much of the gap between 1996 and today's chess engines comes from better software rather than faster hardware. The machine is online, and visitors can play it. Read more

Advanced Micro Devices reports third-quarter results Tuesday after the market closes, and investors say a modest report won't be enough. The stock has fallen about 17% in two days alongside Intel, which suffered its worst day since at least 1982 after a weak outlook. Analysts expect revenue to rise 41% and earnings to jump 92%, but the chipmaker faces a jittery market over whether heavy AI spending by big technology companies will hold up. Investors want a strong quarter and a bold forecast to justify the stock's gains this year. Read more

Apple is making it harder for minors to access online dating apps and AI companions that feature sexual or romantic content. The company told developers on Monday that any app offering dating or romantic relationship features must carry an 18+ rating. Starting November 16, developers must also add new content descriptors so age ratings reflect what an app actually offers. The policy also requires apps that share a user's real-world location with another person or group to disclose it. The changes follow Apple's broader child safety efforts, including global rollout of its age assurance technology and expanded parental controls. Read more

A widely shared post claims GPT-6 Astra can read a neural network's raw weights and tell what it was trained to do, then write small game-playing networks from scratch and repair a Qwen model's math skills without gradients. A close reading of the post's own experiments shows the headline results depend on tools the abstract does not mention. Only the smaller tests read raw weights with no help, and every test involving a real language model used Python code and ran the network. The critic argues the post combines separate techniques in a way that suggests a deeper capability than the evidence supports. Read more

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat down with WIRED ahead of the midterm elections to discuss data centers, the use of artificial intelligence in schools, and the future of the Democratic Party. The interview, published Nov. 3, 2026, is framed around the headline ‘Our Risk, Their Reward,’ which points to the tradeoffs Mamdani sees in AI and data center development. Read more

UiPath plans to charge companies for each document its new finance AI agents process, rather than selling them a traditional software project. Senior transformation director Mircea Giurcan laid out the pricing model Monday at UiPath FUSION in Dubai. The invoice processing and procurement components of the UiPath Solution for Source-to-Pay will be available from early 2027, with more finance modules, including order-to-cash, due in mid-2027. The shift aims to turn standard finance work, which the company says looks much the same across industries, into a ready-made product rather than a custom automation build. Read more

Salesforce has agreed to buy Cresta, a company whose AI voice agents handle complex customer calls from start to finish, the software maker said Monday. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, subject to regulatory approvals. Salesforce did not disclose a price, though a person familiar with the deal told The Information it is worth $2.7 billion. The acquisition would fold Cresta's technology into Service Cloud, Salesforce's customer service software, and follows several other recent Salesforce acquisitions. Read more