Google keeps cranking out Flash models: the company on Wednesday announced two versions of a new 3.8 Flash.  The variants include a standard Flash, a “workhorse” model for agentic tasks, software development, and multi-step reasoning, and Flash Cyber optimized for vulnerability detection and mitigation. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said... Read more

Players are barking about the Connections puzzle, for good reason. Oscar Wong/Getty Images Long ago, the New York Times Connections puzzle replaced Wordle as my favorite online puzzle. But the Connections puzzle for Wednesday is a real dog fight to solve. Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t played Connections... Read more

If you’ve been shopping for an Amazon Kindle or smart speaker in the past week, you might’ve noticed some brand-new prices. That’s right: Amazon has hiked prices by $20 to $100 on its popular devices like the Echo, Eero, and Fire Stick. It’s not alone in this move. We’ve... Read more

Meta is entering the increasingly competitive real-time speech-to-text market with Muse Voice Transcribe, a new audio perception model that combines streaming transcription, endpoint detection and speaker diarization for more than 20 speakers — at a public API price of just $0.18 per hour of processed audio. Developed by Meta... Read more

Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver’s license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web. An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of... Read more

FanDuel has voided wagers placed on behalf of Bill Simmons and taken action against his account after the sports media personality admitted using his daughter’s boyfriend to make bets for him in Massachusetts. The sportsbook said it also reported the matter to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC), which is... Read more

At the G20 Innovation Ministerial summit on Wednesday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, on stage with Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown, made a controversial argument: If the world wants to grow AI, we need data centers. On the surface, this is logical. Data centers are a... Read more

Though AI has seeped into every step of the job hunt for both applicants and recruiters, it has taken time to catch on in interviews. Voice AI is infamously tricky to pull off, as agents get tripped up by accents or “ums.” Behavior that would be second nature to... Read more

Presented by Zeta Every forward-deployed engineering (FDE) pitch sounds identical for the first ten minutes: an engineer embedded on-site, a workflow encoded within weeks, a demo that finally works on the customer’s real data. What differs is what happens in the following months, and most vendors will not tell... Read more

Hackers carried out a supply chain attack that installed malware on networks using an unusual technique: hijacking a chunk of Internet space where cloud management software used by hosting providers, data centers, and other large infrastructure companies is updated. In a well-coordinated operation, the unknown attackers exploited weaknesses in... Read more