AI & Machine Learning

A profile of Microsoft EVP of Copilot Charles Lamanna, a potential Satya Nadella successor; a source says Microsoft is on track to pay Anthropic $2B+ per year (Aaron Holmes/The Information)

Aaron Holmes / The Information: A profile of Microsoft EVP of Copilot Charles Lamanna, a potential Satya Nadella successor; a source says Microsoft is on track to pay Anthropic $2B+ per year — In the summer of 2025, Microsoft was fielding customer complaints that its AI assistant, Copilot, was buggy and not good enough at automating work in Excel or PowerPoint.

Microsoft unveils its third-gen in-house AI chip, the Maia 300, built on TSMC's N2P process node and aimed at serving as its "primary AI inference system" (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Tom Warren / The Verge: Microsoft unveils its third-gen in-house AI chip, the Maia 300, built on TSMC's N2P process node and aimed at serving as its “primary AI inference system” — The new Maia 300 chip will start rolling out to production AI workloads in 2027.

GitLab warns of max severity code execution vulnerability

GitLab warned users today to immediately patch a maximum-severity vulnerability in the CI/CD Regular Expression Compiler that could let remote attackers run arbitrary code on targeted instances.

AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety

Brad Smith adds to calls for tougher rules for AI, including ‘kill switches’ and legal obligation to victims of rogue agents Business live – latest updates Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI. Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.

Speaking in Singapore, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan warn that access to capital and rising borrowing costs could become AI's main bottleneck (Lee Ying Shan/CNBC)

Lee Ying Shan / CNBC: Speaking in Singapore, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan warn that access to capital and rising borrowing costs could become AI's main bottleneck — SINGAPORE — The chief executives of Intel and Broadcom warned that access to capital could emerge as a major constraint …

Intel, Broadcom CEOs warn capital crunch could become AI's biggest bottleneck

The CEOs of Intel and Broadcom warned that access to capital could emerge as a major constraint on the artificial intelligence boom.

UK government mulls compulsory AI safety reporting

Microsoft's president says AI is less regulated than a carton of milk

Milk can't hack companies and governments like AI definitely can, but it's still subject to more regulation.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan Compares Many AI Investors to Casino Gamblers

Hock Tan singled out frontier model investors and enterprise AI token spending, while flagging OpenAI's $50 billion revenue run rate as one of the few verified wins so far amid persistent losses.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan criticizes speculative AI investing, comparing uninformed investors to casino gamblers and questioning the long-term economics of AI labs (Gao Yuan/Bloomberg)

Gao Yuan / Bloomberg: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan criticizes speculative AI investing, comparing uninformed investors to casino gamblers and questioning the long-term economics of AI labs — The AI boom has attracted investors whose strategies resemble those of gamblers, Broadcom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan said …

New AI system accelerates rabies virus detection in cell cultures

Rabies virus detection in cell cultures could soon become faster and more accessible, thanks to a world-first AI system developed by researchers at the University of Surrey's Institute for People-Centred AI (PAI) in collaboration with the Rabies and Viral Zoonoses team at the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA).

Model links course design, psychological safety and guided AI use

University of Phoenix researchers have published a new peer-reviewed study examining how stress, self-regulation, resilience, belonging, psychological safety and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) interact in the experiences of nontraditional online students. The article, "Designing for Persistence in Online Higher Education: A Trauma-Informed, GenAI-Integrated Model for Non-Traditional Learners," was published in Innovative Higher Education.

AI platforms offer promise in limiting the illegal wildlife trade

New University of Kent research has found promising signs that AI platforms have the potential to limit the illegal wildlife trade. The research paper titled "Assessing safeguards against the illegal wildlife trade on AI platforms" is published in Conservation Biology.

I scanned 1,902 local-business websites for AI readiness. One in four already has an llms.txt.

I build a tool that checks whether AI answer engines can read a website. On 12 October I pointed it at 1,902 ordinary local-business sites in the USA and UK: dentists, plumbers, hairdressers, vets, gyms, estate agents and five other trades, in twenty big cities. 1,355 of them could be read and scored. I expected the story to be "small businesses are blocking AI and do not know it". That is not what the data says. Here is what it does say. 338 of the 1,355 sites (24.9%) serve an llms.txt file. That is far more than I expected for businesses that mostly do not know the file exists. The reason is the site builder: Platform Sites with an llms.txt Wix 118 of 121 (97.5%) Shopify 27 of 28 (96.4%) Duda 19 of 19 WordPress 109 of 576 (18.9%) Custom-built 38 of 342 (11.1%) Squarespace 4 of 110 (3.6%) If you are on Wix, you almost certainly have one. If you are on Squarespace, you almost certainly do not. Whether anyone chose that is another matter. Only 9 sites (0.7%) have a robots.txt rule that shuts out an AI answer fetcher such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. 14 (1.0%) shut out a training crawler such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot. I counted a block only when the file names the crawler and disallows the whole site. By that measure, local businesses are not opting out of AI. They have not touched the file. This is the finding that matters most for the businesses themselves. 621 sites (45.8%) have no structured data describing the business at all. No name, address, phone number or hours in a form a machine can read without guessing. 796 (58.7%) do not give their opening hours in structured data. Only 235 (17.3%) state every fact the scan looks for. Custom-built sites are worst: 254 of 342 have none. On Wix it is 26 of 121. An answer engine asked "who is open now near me" has to get that from somewhere. For most of these sites it is not the site. 970 sites (71.6%) had no FAQ page and no question-and-answer content on the pages read. Roofers and plumbers do best. Hairdressers and a

Your AI agent needs a brake pedal: stopping loops and runaway cost at runtime

AI agents fail in boring, expensive ways. They repeat the same step all night. They run up an API bill. They delete something nobody told them to touch. The public incident reports from 2026 are already piling up: a coding agent that edited 48,218 files in 103 seconds, and a production database and its backups gone in 9 seconds. A prompt that says "be careful" does not fix this. The rule has to live in code, outside the model, where the agent cannot talk its way past it. SteerPlane runs next to the agent and enforces limits while it runs: It stops an agent that keeps repeating the same steps. It sets a hard cost ceiling per run. It allows or denies tool calls by rule. from steerplane import guard @guard(max_cost_usd=5, denied_actions=["delete_*"]) def run_agent(task): ... If the agent goes over budget or tries a denied action, the run stops. You can also set a step limit with max_steps. It does not filter content or judge whether an answer is true. It limits what an agent can do and spend. pip install steerplane Repo: https://github.com/vijaym2k6/SteerPlane Site: https://www.steerplane.com SteerPlane is open source. Patent Published. I'm Vijay M, a student founder in Bengaluru. I'd like to hear which failure has hurt you most: runaway cost, loops, or bad actions? The safety layer for the AGI Era.

Mortgage AI needs a standard of trust built on experience

What two decades of mortgage cycles teach lenders and technology providers about adoption, accountability and financial protection