Media

AI News Brief: Google’s ‘Universal Cart’ shopping tool officially launched for US users on Thursday, a feature first unveiled at this year’s Google I/O in May, integrated into Google Search and the Gemini app. The core idea is making online shopping easier to manage: when users spot something they like in Search or Gemini, they can save it straight to their cart, and when they come back later, both the items and their shopping progress are preserved — no need to search again or start over.

AI News Brief: Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt that Rivian’s EVs will eventually be able to run AI agents from other companies, like the ones built by Anthropic, calling it a ‘magical’ step forward. Rivian already has its own AI voice assistant that lets drivers and passengers interact with the car directly through speech, but the company hasn’t announced a timeline for this cross-vendor integration yet…

AI News Brief: Apate.ai is an Australian startup founded in 2024, spun out of research at Macquarie University in Sydney. Its core approach is deploying large numbers of AI agents that pose as scam victims and proactively engage with fraud rings. These AI agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, click phishing links, and even join social media groups to lure scammers in. They can mimic people of different ages, genders, and accents, and converse in multiple languages, all with the goal…

AI News Brief: YouTube Music announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new labeling system to boost transparency around AI-generated songs, making it easy for listeners to identify tracks that got AI help in their creation, including composition and vocals. The label shows up on the playback page, and clicking it reveals the specific role AI played in creating that track — this feature will also extend to the main YouTube app. YouTube says it’s been working with multiple music partners and has deployed its own detection t…

AI News Brief: Every day, massive conversations unfold across social media and websites worldwide, and a single post that looks unremarkable, whether it’s AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a harmful rumor, can quickly snowball into a much bigger public controversy. Gudea, a company that tracks how stories and rumors spread online, calls itself a ‘web storm tracker,’ aiming to help companies and institutions detect and intervene before a social media crisis actually erupts.

AI news brief: startup Ricursive Intelligence has revealed its core tech direction - building an AI system that can design chips autonomously. According to the founder, this AI can ’learn from every iteration,’ meaning after each round of chip design, the system analyzes and adjusts based on how that round performed, then carries those learnings into the next design iteration to keep improving the quality of the chips it produces.

AI News Brief: AI PR startup Honeyjar uses AI to democratize top-tier PR judgment and experience, especially helping founders who have no idea where to start. The company was co-founded by CEO Michelle Masek and CCO Nadia Jamshidi, who both bring decades of PR experience spanning in-house comms and agency work, with Masek most recently serving as SVP of marketing and communications at Ev Williams’ VC firm Obvious Ventures.

AI News Brief: Microsoft President Brad Smith publicly called for AI regulation to happen now in a recent BBC podcast, pointing out that even consumer products like milk and washing machines face more oversight than the companies building AI. He described AI as both a ‘weapon and a tool’ that’s putting global cybersecurity at risk, saying ’the time has come’ to establish global safety rules. Smith specifically named the UK, rather than the US or EU, as best positioned to lead on global AI safety rules.

AI News Flash: WindBorne Systems has signed a new contract with the US Air Force worth up to $49 million, under which the Air Force will purchase data collected by the company’s fleet of autonomous weather balloons. WindBorne currently operates around 700 weather balloons worldwide, continuously gathering atmospheric sensor data that it both sells to customers and feeds directly into its own AI weather forecasting models.

AI news brief: Voice AI is pulling in massive investment, but industry executives say the category hasn’t had its ChatGPT moment yet. PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen said at HumanX that even though full-duplex models (which can listen and speak at the same time) now exist, voice AI still hasn’t hit a real breakthrough point. He thinks the next key challenge is making model inference dramatically faster.