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Google’s hardware division didn’t have a particularly strong 2025, releasing new phones that didn’t really stand out as particularly innovative. That’s not the best strategy in any market, but it’s particularly damaging in those outside the US where more makers are present. And, sure, Google isn’t primarily a hardware company, but it makes phones, earbuds, and smartwatches every year and fails to make a meaningful market impact against the likes of Samsung and Apple, its main rivals. Still, Google’s phones are getting better and better even if not always at an impressive pace. There are some winners, so let’s look…

Before you get too excited, nothing is confirmed as of yet. We only recently learned about the Samsung Exynos 2600 chip – the first to be made on a 2nm process. Said chip is rumored to power the upcoming Galaxy Z Flip8 and potentially the S26 family in at least one country. Back when the Exynos 2600 was unveiled, Samsung was suspiciously silent about its modem. Now details have started coming in about an Exynos Modem 5410, which could be a part of the Exynos 2600 package. The Exynos Modem 5410 integrates LTE DTC, NB IoT NTN, and NR NTN…

On a drizzly and windswept afternoon this summer, I visited the headquarters of Rokid, a startup developing smart glasses in Hangzhou, China. As I chatted with engineers, their words were swiftly translated from Mandarin to English, and then transcribed onto a tiny translucent screen just above my right eye using one of the company’s new prototype devices.Rokid’s high-tech spectacles use Qwen, an open-weight large language model developed by the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba.Qwen—full name 通义千问 or Tōngyì Qiānwèn in Chinese—is not the best AI model around. OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google’s Gemini 3, and Anthropic’s Claude often score higher on benchmarks designed…

“It was inevitable,” said Jake Ostrovskis, head of OTC trading at Wintermute, referring to the sell-off in digital asset treasury stocks. “It got to the point where there’s too many of them.” Several companies have begun selling their crypto stockpiles in an effort to fund share buybacks and shore up their stock prices, in effect putting the crypto treasury model into reverse. North Carolina-based ether holder FG Nexus sold about $41.5 million of its tokens recently to fund its share buyback program. Its market cap is $104 million, while the crypto it holds is worth $116 million. Florida-based life sciences…

HP Inc. said that it will lay off 4,000 to 6,000 employees in favor of AI deployments, claiming it will help save $1 billion in annualized gross run rate by the end of its fiscal 2028. HP expects to complete the layoffs by the end of that fiscal year. The reductions will largely hit product development, internal operations, and customer support, HP CEO Enrique Lores said during an earnings call on Tuesday. Using AI, HP will “accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction, and boost productivity,” Lores said. In its fiscal 2025 earnings report released yesterday, HP said: Structural cost savings…

Nothing has released the stable version of the Android 16-based Nothing OS 4.0 for the CMF Phone 1. The company says Nothing OS 4.0 “brings a more refined and personal experience, with visual refreshes, deeper customisation across the system, and improvements designed to make everyday use smoother and more comfortable.” You can head over here to learn more about what’s new in Nothing OS 4.0. The Nothing OS 4.0 update is rolling out in phases for the CMF Phone 1. The CMF Phone 2 Pro will get the update “in the coming weeks,” while the Nothing Phone (3a) Lite will…

Researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, and Meta recently released a paper suggesting that large language models (LLMs) similar to those that power ChatGPT may sometimes prioritize sentence structure over meaning when answering questions. The findings reveal a weakness in how these models process instructions that may shed light on why some prompt injection or jailbreaking approaches work, though the researchers caution their analysis of some production models remains speculative since training data details of prominent commercial AI models are not publicly available. The team, led by Chantal Shaib and Vinith M. Suriyakumar, tested this by asking models questions with preserved…

In addition to buzz about Gemini on social media, Google is quickly catching up to ChatGPT in user numbers. ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly users, according to OpenAI, while Google’s Gemini app has grown from 450 million monthly active users in July to 650 million in October, according to Business Insider. Financial stakes run high Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of…

A sprawling infrastructure that has been bilking unsuspecting people through fraudulent gambling websites for 14 years is likely a dual operation run by a nation-state-sponsored group that is targeting government and private-industry organizations in the US and Europe, researchers said Wednesday. Researchers have previously tracked smaller pieces of the enormous infrastructure. Last month, security firm Sucuri reported that the operation seeks out and compromises poorly configured websites running the WordPress CMS. Imperva in January said the attackers also scan for and exploit web apps built with the PHP programming language that have existing webshells or vulnerabilities. Once the weaknesses are…

All of your favorite social media apps will now be forced to display warnings about their algorithms in New York. Source link