The Verge's hands-on with the first RTX Spark laptops details the adaptation work Microsoft and Nvidia have done in Windows. An Arm CPU plus Blackwell GPU and unified memory can run large models locally, and Windows offers a Get Started two-step agent installation experience with launch support for Hermes, Perplexity, and OpenClaw.
NVIDIA has released the open-source 120-billion-parameter multimodal model Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, plus two on-device models — Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB (already available) and Bolt E4B 4GB (available October 23) — covering agent deployment from data centers to local hardware.
Why it matters: NVIDIA discloses parameters, quantization and deployment tiers for the three open Nemotron models, so readers can pick the enterprise, workstation or 4GB on-device option that fits.
Google announced Universal Cart is now available in the US, letting users save and track items across multiple retailers in Search and the Gemini app. The tool supports price-drop and restock notifications, recommends payment options combined with credit card benefits and surfaces promo codes. Checkout is based on the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard Google launched earlier this year, complementing features such as conversational product discovery in AI Mode and Let Google Call.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt that future Rivian vehicles will be able to run AI agents developed by companies such as Anthropic, with details to be announced at the “AI & Autonomy Day” event in December.
OpenAI released a Brazilian Portuguese version of AI for Educators for Teachers’ Day, showcasing how Study Mode helps teachers support students in active, step-by-step learning.
On The Verge’s Decoder podcast, investigative journalist Benn Jordan discussed Flock’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) system: he recently testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s crime and counterterrorism subcommittee, Flock is facing hundreds of local governments canceling contracts, an investigation by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, and Reuters reported plans to cut about 18% of its workforce.
The Verge found that an AI-generated image of Mia Goth posted by the account @miagoth_ received nearly 500,000 likes. The account had a paid blue check and had previously been reported for posting fake AI images; Instagram eventually removed it for impersonating a public figure.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 enters its final day, with 10,000+ founders, investors and tech leaders gathered at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Project Apertus has released Apertus 1.5, adding image and audio understanding and an optional thinking mode to its 8B and 70B models via continued pretraining, and extending the context window to 262,144 tokens — 4x that of Apertus 1.0.
Why it matters: The official release notes fully document the training pipeline, open data and intermediate checkpoints, letting readers trace how the multimodal and reasoning capabilities were built.
During IPO preparations, Anthropic met investors on Wednesday and, per the FT, disclosed quarterly revenue of about $4.8bn (Q1), $11.5bn (Q2) and $16.8bn (Q3), up nearly 50% quarter over quarter. In Q3 every $1 of compute spend generated $1.70 in revenue, adjusted operating margin excluding stock-based compensation was 11%, and distillation accounted for 5–7% of revenue, sharply cut in Q3; the author estimates that in Q2 other labs spent over $500m distilling Anthropic models.
Why it matters: The article compiles key figures Anthropic disclosed to investors — revenue, margins and distillation share — offering insight into its business ahead of the IPO.
Google launched the Universal Cart shopping tool in the US within the Gemini app and Google Search, storing items from multiple retailers in a single cart, with support for adding items in the Gemini app and Google Search AI Mode.
NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 control options are now live on GeForce NOW, letting members adjust quality and performance settings for supported games without needing the latest hardware. Ultimate members on GeForce RTX 5080 cloud rigs can use Dynamic Multi Frame Generation at up to 4X.
Amazon-owned wearable AI device maker Bee has launched two new products: the wrist-worn or clip-on Bee Frontier priced at $74.99, and the credit-card-sized Bee Eclipse, which magnetically attaches to the back of a phone, priced at $99.99.
Amazon has launched two always-listening AI devices, the Bee Frontier ($74.99, on sale today) and the Bee Eclipse ($99.99, coming soon), which can summarize conversations, generate to-dos, and integrate with services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple HealthKit.
A Verge reporter and hacker Sammy Azdoufal tested Energize Lab’s Eiliko companion robot toy and found its service has no protections at all: full conversation transcripts are stored in a searchable database on Chinese servers, and user profiles are automatically generated covering names, ages, occupations, family members, and psychological states.
At meetings with prospective investors, Anthropic disclosed Q3 revenue of $16.8B, up about 45% quarter over quarter — far below Q2's growth of over 140%. Per The Information and the Financial Times, its adjusted operating margin for the first three quarters was 11%, it posted adjusted profits for two consecutive quarters, and each $1 of compute spend in Q3 generated $1.70 in revenue.
Why it matters: The article aggregates Anthropic's revenue, margins and shifting IPO valuation expectations across three quarters, showing its growth slowdown and market reaction.
Modal announced its annualized revenue has surpassed $1 billion and it raised a $750 million Series D led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation. Usage has tripled since its Series C, growing more than 15x year over year. Sandboxes, launched in 2023, alone has reached $300 million in annualized revenue, with nearly 3 billion sandboxes launched cumulatively and the ability to scale to millions running concurrently.
At the AI in Science Summit in Dublin, NVIDIA joined the European Commission’s AI in Science Enablers initiative (part of RAISE), providing European researchers with tools, compute, and training.
Ayar Labs and GUC jointly ran thermal co-simulations on a CoWoS-L package integrating 8 TeraPHY optical engines, 2 XPUs, and 8 HBM4 modules; the package draws over 3kW of power and provides a full-duplex optical interface of more than 100 Tbps.
In a SEMICON West interview, Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said the company has deployed more than 40 task agents, and some customers can hand a spec to the Synopsys Autonomous Agent to automatically generate and verify RTL — a process that used to take multiple engineers several months — though fully autonomous chip design remains out of reach today.
Agentic AI requires extensive if-then-else decision orchestration, work handled by CPUs; industry estimates suggest the CPU:GPU ratio could rise from roughly 1:4 in typical LLM scenarios to nearly 1:1, pushing up both CPU demand and prices.
Semiconductor Engineering examines how open-weight AI models affect chip architecture, noting the focus is shifting from peak TOPS to memory bandwidth and capacity, sustained throughput, numerical format flexibility, and deployment security.
The AMBA ecosystem is developing a new specification, AMBA C2C, which builds on AMBA CHI C2C to provide a unified, scalable chiplet interconnect foundation covering both AXI and CHI protocols.
AI training and inference have different demands for memory, compute, and interconnect, pushing AI infrastructure toward heterogeneity. UCIe provides die-to-die standardized connectivity, and with chiplet solutions lets compute, I/O, and memory interfaces be flexibly integrated in one package. At the system level, PCIe, CXL, UALink, and Ethernet must be combined with technologies like HBM4E and LPDDR6, using open standards and interoperability validation to leave room for architectural evolution.
At sub-5nm nodes, interconnects have replaced gate delay as the main bottleneck for SoC power, performance, and area (PPA); via resistance rises exponentially as dimensions shrink, worsening electromigration (EM) and IR drop risks.
The actual reach of a PCIe retimer is not set by the spec but by multiple factors including SerDes architecture, controller intelligence, channel quality, and diagnostics. PCI-SIG typically requires about 36 dB insertion loss tolerance, but leading vendors' retimers can tolerate 40 dB or more, enabling longer PCB traces, more connectors, and greater manufacturing variance. As PCIe Gen6 advances, designs beyond compliance testing, interoperability, and observability become key to real-world deployment reliability.
At OCP Global Summit 2026, AMD CEO Lisa Su called this the year of inference, estimating inference accounts for about 60% of the market, and raised CPU TAM forecasts three times due to agent workloads, expecting the market to exceed $200 billion by 2030.
The Nordics are building a leading European technology ecosystem with NVIDIA technology, expected to deploy 1 gigawatts of AI cloud compute by the end of 2027.
At its first Config event in India, Figma launched Figma Specs, a Markdown editor that lets teams and agents follow a unified design language, design libraries, and codebases, and opened code layers for public testing.
Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini introduced their startup Ricursive Intelligence at TechCrunch Disrupt: using AI to automate chip design so each iteration learns and improves subsequent designs.
Gudea, which calls itself an internet storm tracker, uses AI to analyze how information spreads, who drives it and how fast it扩散s across more than 500 sites including X, Reddit and TikTok, helping organizations respond before sentiment becomes a crisis.
Simon Willison had Claude Opus 5.5 Max build a Three.js game called Tree Appreciator in the Claude iPhone app, where the gameplay is appreciating differences between two algorithmically generated trees. Claude ran for 3 hours 7 minutes and produced a fairly playable spot-the-difference game with music, animations and an achievement system.
Block (Square's parent company) is building an AI-powered security system with OpenAI technology. Its security team uses AI to investigate threats faster and can produce patch proposals within minutes, improving security response efficiency.
According to The Wall Street Journal, consultancy McKinsey & Company will require some entry-level job applicants to have a 10-minute conversation with an AI-simulated client during interviews. The AI simulation is designed to reflect 80% of scenarios in McKinsey consultants' daily work.
Lam Research and imec are expanding their joint R&D collaboration with two new directions: advancing manufacturing readiness of 3D integration and advanced packaging, and advancing Aether® dry resist applications in imec's high-NA EUV research environment.
At AI Engineer NY, OpenAI's Joseph Kim proposed a usefulness threshold, arguing that as model capabilities improve, financial analysts will hand work such as investment idea generation and trading to agents.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company's Gunshot Detection microphones detect only gunshots, but its website and a spokesperson confirmed the system can also detect fireworks, sideshows and potential car crashes, with the detection library continuing to expand.
Epic has released a public Preview of the all-new Epic Games Launcher, saying it was rewritten from scratch with AI vibe coding, launches to the store page several seconds faster than Steam, and runs more smoothly.
On a podcast, Leash Bio's Ian Quigley explained how its DNA-encoded library (DEL) technology tames high-throughput protein-small-molecule interaction data and trained the Hermes model, which matches Boltz on public benchmarks using only the company's own data. The team also uncovered tens of thousands of lab-in-the-loop simulation data points, grew into Minos within two months, and today released a preprint, blog post, and open dataset for reinforcement learning where AI agents do verifiable scientific reasoning.
Eight US states — Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana — have each sued OpenAI, alleging it prioritized profit over safety in developing ChatGPT in violation of their consumer protection laws.
Why it matters: With eight separate lawsuits against OpenAI, the article lays out the allegations and each state's claims in detail, shedding light on regulators' specific concerns about ChatGPT and child safety.