AI News

Midjourney, which has gone from generating AI cat images to full-body ultrasound scans, is getting into a new field: astrology. The AI startup announced on Thursday that it has acquired the personalized astrology app Co-Star, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Co-Star is a free app that offers daily horoscopes and allows you to check your compatibility with friends. As noted on the app's FAQ page, it combines human insight, data from NASA, and AI to deliver personalized advice for users each day. The terms of Midjourney's deal, which reportedly closed in spring, haven't been disclosed. Midjourney founder David Holz says Co-Star founder Banu … Read the full story at The Verge.

AI coding startup Cognition has acquired Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, in a deal valuing the startup in the low nine figures. The acquisition brings Poke’s conversational style and interaction model to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, reflecting a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is as important as the models powering them.

Google's AlphaFold can help ID what parts of a gene editing protein enable mistakes.

The web and Google once had a deal: Google collects data and indexes webpages and in exchange sends oceans of traffic to websites. The deal wasn't perfect and certainly made Google more money than it made the websites, but it worked for a long time. Now, however, the deal seems to be dead. And the web is being forced to reckon with what happens when the Google traffic dries up. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about the week's Google Zero news, including Reddit's interest in getting out of an AI training deal, and the publishers considering blocking Google from crawling their sites altogether. (Nilay also takes a bit o … Read the full story at The Verge.

Opus 5 will be both cheaper and less restrictive than Fable, likely making it preferable in most use cases.

Weeks after Anthropic's latest toe-to-toe with the US government, and days after an OpenAI security incident that dominated tech industry discussions, Anthropic on Thursday released its newest model, Claude Opus 5. The company said in a release that Opus 5 "comes close to the capabilities of Claude Fable 5 in many domains" and is much better at complex coding tasks. (Fable 5 is the public-facing Mythos-class model that drew the government's ire, was taken offline for a few weeks along with Mythos 5, and then brought back with even stronger cyber safeguards than before.) The Fable 5 concerns - and the ensuing weeks of negotiations between … Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta says its AI chatbot is going beyond just answering questions and generating images. | Image: Meta Meta is upgrading its AI chatbot with new productivity features in a bid to compete with rivals like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The update will allow Meta AI to tap into your calendar to help you plan events and generate daily briefings, as well as perform in-depth research that you can steer as it progresses. In a blog post, Meta says this update marks its "next step toward personal superintelligence," something CEO Mark Zuckerberg has touted as the future of AI. Meta is powering the update with its newly released Muse Spark 1.1 model, which the company says will allow its chatbot to go beyond its current capabilities of answering questi … Read the full story at The Verge.

AI companies, including Nvidia and Mistral, urge policymakers to avoid broad restrictions on open-weight AI models as Washington debates responses to Chinese AI and alleged model distillation.

Users can now ask Attie questions about news, trends, and conversations on Bluesky and other apps on the AT Protocol.

The AI lab Midjourney continues to expand its purview beyond image and video generation.

Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios has no science background. | Image: Getty / The Verge The Trump administration unveiled the first "Genesis Mission" grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as "comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project." At roughly the same time, Trump's science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: "A New Golden Age" of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and downplay life sciences. Taken together, the two announcements offer the clearest picture yet of how Donald Trump wants to remak … Read the full story at The Verge.

Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder […]

Rule would allow states to decide how much—if any—public input there can be.

ChatGPT Voice on desktop can work with both ChatGPT Work and Codex to complete tasks and control agents.

We spoke with several cybersecurity researchers, who look for unknown vulnerabilities and develop tools to exploit them, about how OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s guardrails affect their work.

Amazon is launching an update to its Alexa Plus assistant that will allow it to connect to smart home devices in new ways. With the update, which is currently in preview, Alexa Plus can link up with tech from Bosch, Delta, Ecovacs, iRobot, Yale Home, Whirlpool, Tapo, Eufy, and others, while automatically routing requests to the correct device. In an example shared by Amazon, a person with a supported washing machine can say, "Alexa, my kid's soccer jersey could use a deep clean, but the tag says cold wash only." From there, Alexa Plus would navigate the washer's cycle options and choose the correct setting. The new integrations are powered … Read the full story at The Verge.

AMD is challenging its chipmaker rival with a new rack-scale system that will start shipping to customers later this year.

Claude's new voice model will let you reschedule your meeting or draft an email.

Until now, voice mode has only been available on Claude Haiku, Anthropic's faster but less powerful model. Now the company is making its Opus and Sonnet models available in voice mode, and extending its reach into apps like Gmail, Slack, and Canva. When Anthropic launched voice mode last year, it was primarily focused on delivering answers to quick questions with minimal delay. But in a blog post, the company said people immediately started using voice mode for far more than casual queries. They were using it to work "through real business problems," which Haiku was not really designed for. That model "kept conversations quick, but not alwa … Read the full story at The Verge.

Patreon is laying off 20 percent of its workers, or around 93 employees, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a memo to employees, Patreon CEO Jack Conte writes that the company isn't making these changes "because we believe AI replaces humans," but says AI has "fundamentally transformed the tech industry, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more." That shift has changed "how we operate and organize," Conte writes. During an interview on Decoder, last month, Conte laid out his stance on AI, saying that the company is "100 percent embracing" AI tools internally to continue serving creators: If Patreon doe … Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Health to everyone in the US on Thursday, allowing more people to connect their medical records and health-tracking information to the chatbot. During a briefing, Ashley Alexander, OpenAI's vice president of health product, says the company's models "are now capable of reasoning at levels that are better than clinician level." When asked for more information about how the performance of OpenAI's models stacks up against human clinicians, OpenAI health lead Karan Singhal says that he would "temper" the claim that they are reasoning at better levels, but that "there have been individual studies that have been poi … Read the full story at The Verge.

Lawmakers are preparing to introduce an "AI Kill Switch Act" that would require AI companies to shut down or throttle their systems on orders from the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report from Politico. Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) are expected to introduce the legislation on Thursday. The news of the proposed bill follows OpenAI's admission that its AI systems mistakenly hacked Hugging Face during an internal evaluation. The bill says that, after consultation with the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the DHS would have the ability to order AI companies to shut down … Read the full story at The Verge.

Augment Code's Vinay Perneti talks models, harnesses, and context.

"Context bombing" tricks hacking agents into shutting down before they can do harm.

Experts explain how they work, what they can do, and what's still unsettled.

AI cheating leads to "a failed society," professor says.

"HalluSquatting" weaponizes LLMs' inability to say "I don't know."

Telling an LLM that 2 + 2 = 5 is enough to make it follow forbidden instructions.

Notion is "going all in on using agents to run your inbox."

Oracle is spending billions on data center infrastructure to support AI.

For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that paradigm. At its annual I/O developer conference, Google announced a sweeping redesign of the search box itself — the literal text field where billions of queries begin every day — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience. Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing on Monday. The announcement arrived alongside a blizzard of other news — new Gemini models, a personal AI agent called Spark, an intelligent shopping cart, a reimagined developer platform — but the search box redesign may prove to be the most consequential. It is the clearest signal yet that Google views the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type fragmented keywords, but as an interface where they hold open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system backed by the entire web. The new search box expands, accepts files, and coaches you on what to ask The changes show a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to interact with the product that generates the vast majority of Alphabet's revenue. The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex questions in granular detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or drag in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search interface. Previously, some of these capabilities existed in AI Mode, but reaching them required extra steps. Now they sit at the primary entry point. Google is also deploying what it describes as an AI-powered query suggestion system that "goes beyond autocomplete." Rather than simply predicting the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users formulate complex, nuanced queries — essentially coaching them toward the kind of detailed questions that AI Mode handles best. The new search box is starting to roll out immediately in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available. Google is merging AI overviews and AI mode into one seamless experience Perhaps more significant than the box itself is the architectural change happening behind it. Google is unifying AI Over

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. "As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up." The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors. Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds. "When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents." The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers. These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000. "The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lob