Google Cloud announced the Gemini agent on October 8, 2026, at its Gemini at Work 2026 event, describing it as a single, universal agent for work that handles knowledge work, question answering, content creation, and coding from one prompt box. In the announcement on The Keyword, Google said the agent holds an organization’s business context,…
A new poll of 945 CIOs and CTOs points to aging infrastructure, bubble fears, and government uncertainty as brakes on corporate AI. Legacy systems and old applications are forcing large companies to abandon AI projects at a striking rate, according to a new survey from GFT Technologies, a firm that specializes in infrastructure modernization. Eighty-four…
XPENG on October 8, 2026 officially named its Robotaxi business “XPENG YOYO” and opened autonomous-driving online registration to the public in China, according to the company’s announcement. Registration is being handled through invitation codes, and a dedicated page carrying the YOYO name is live on XPENG’s official website. The naming moves the robotaxi program out…
The global building boom of power-hungry data centers is straining electrical grids, causing greater reliance on energy from polluting fossil fuels. Christina Delimitrou, a newly tenured associate professor at MIT, is fighting this environmental threat by rethinking how the computer servers and networking equipment inside those data centers operate. She and her group apply machine…
Mecka, a company building data infrastructure for robot learning, announced on October 7, 2026, that it has raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital. New investors in the round include NVIDIA, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, the company said, with continued support from Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo. Angel…
Nuix on October 7, 2026 announced the Nuix Neo Generative AI (Gen AI) Framework, a governed orchestration layer for putting generative AI to work on organizations’ structured and unstructured data. Nuix said the framework addresses the governance, confidence and auditability concerns that have limited the use of large language models (LLMs) and Gen AI in…
Duke Energy’s two North Carolina utilities, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress, reached a settlement with the North Carolina Public Staff — joined by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other parties — that would expand requirements intended to keep the costs of serving data centers and other large-load customers off existing customers, the company…
Sierra launched fleming-1 on October 7, 2026, a model designed to detect when the caller on a phone call is another AI agent. The company described the release as an update to the constellation of models behind agents built on its platform. Sierra said the question companies face when the phone rings has shifted from…
Artificial intelligence has become part of the zeitgeist. And while it’s a polarizing topic, Linda Rabieh has a unique take on AI: “It’s good for business. Our business, of humanistic thinking.” As senior lecturer in the Concourse program, one of MIT’s first-year learning communities, Rabieh has been introducing students to the “business” since 2010. “What…
Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box on October 7, 2026, pricing the compact NVIDIA-powered developer PC at $5,999 MSRP and selling it exclusively through Microsoft.com in the United States, with shipments to customers beginning in November. Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Surface, announced the preorder opening in a post…