The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
OpenAI began serving ads inside ChatGPT across 31 European countries today, six months after the US launch. Ads appear only for Free and Go users and are selected from the current conversation topic, approximate location, device and time of day rather than a personal profile, and advertisers never receive user conversations. Buying is through OpenAI's ads team and agency partners for now, with self-serve access through Ads Manager to follow.
Read moreNational cabinet meets Wednesday to settle rules requiring large AI data centres to buy their electricity from new renewable projects rather than existing coal and gas. Queensland and the Northern Territory have refused to sign, so the federal government plans to legislate over them. Data centre energy demand is forecast to triple within four years, against more than $100 billion in proposed Australian investment.
Read moreA University of Pittsburgh study found roughly 90% of executives say AI has not yet lifted productivity at their company, drawing on millions of Glassdoor reviews and five years of AI investment and layoff announcements from US public companies. Firms that paired AI investment with job cuts fared worst, because employee sentiment toward AI tracked closely with real productivity gains. Markets were unconvinced too: more than half of those layoff announcements drew a negative or flat share price reaction.
Read moreAlibaba sold 710 million shares at HK$112.70 to raise HK$80 billion, the largest primary follow-on ever from a Hong Kong-listed company. All proceeds go to what it calls full-stack AI: semiconductors, compute infrastructure, and model development. It follows a quarter in which capital spending of about $9.5 billion cut net profit by 75%, which is the trade Chinese platforms are now openly making.
Read moreDeepSeek released V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal version of its 284-billion-parameter Flash model that activates 13 billion parameters per prompt. It scored 35.0 on ZeroBench against Claude Opus 4.8's 34.0, though the figures come from DeepSeek's own internal harness and have not been independently verified. Images bill at up to 384 tokens each, putting basic multimodal work well under frontier pricing.
Read moreSalesforce launched Slack Code, which turns a tagged coding agent into a dedicated project channel where its diffs and a working preview sit in front of the whole team. Launch partners include Anthropic's Claude, Cognition's Devin, GitHub Copilot and Vercel's agent, and it works on every Slack plan provided you bring your own agent access. The point is to move agent work out of one developer's terminal so product, design and review can see what is being built.
Read moreHugging Face has brought in a bank to sound out buyers at a valuation of $13 billion or more, according to Business Insider. That is nearly triple the $4.5 billion it fetched in its 2023 round backed by Salesforce, Nvidia, Google, Amazon and IBM. Talks are early and no bidder has been named, but the Hub is where most open model distribution actually happens, so who owns it matters to anyone building on open weights.
Read moreX-Humanoid's Tiangong Ultra ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, under Bolt's 9.58, then lost stability and veered off the track near the finish. Honor's Lightning robot also went under the mark at 9.47. The games drew 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 51 events, which says more about the pace of Chinese hardware iteration than it does about robot athletics.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.