Category: Biz Tech

Dubai’s advertising market has become the launchpad for a new AI-powered creative intelligence system from Omnicom Advertising and Google, marking the first customised deployment of Google’s ABCD AI detector in the Africa, Middle East and Turkey region and setting up a wider rollout across client markets this year. The system combines Google’s framework for evaluating effective YouTube video creatives with Omnicom’s proprietary creative AI, giving advertisers a tool to test campaign work before it goes live. Its first pilot is already

Google has moved to tackle one of enterprise AI’s hardest problems by giving each autonomous software agent its own cryptographic identity, part of a broader Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform unveiled at Cloud Next on 22 April. The idea is straightforward but consequential: every agent action can be tied to a unique, verifiable ID and checked against a defined set of permissions, creating an audit trail designed for corporate compliance, security reviews and risk control. The platform marks a wider push by

Google appears to be edging towards a new chapter in wearables, with leaks pointing to a screen-free fitness band branded as Fitbit Air and a broader push to fold Fitbit more tightly into a wider Google health ecosystem. The device, if launched in the coming weeks as tipped, would mark one of the clearest signals yet that the company sees room for simpler, lower-distraction health hardware alongside full-featured smartwatches. Rather than chasing the crowded smartwatch market head-on, the rumoured product

OmniOps has joined Grafana Labs’ partner programme, a move that gives the Riyadh-based infrastructure company a stronger route into Saudi Arabia’s fast-growing market for cloud monitoring, telemetry and data-sovereign digital operations. The step positions OmniOps to sell and implement Grafana-backed observability services for enterprises that want tighter control over metrics, logs, traces and performance data inside the Kingdom’s regulatory and strategic framework. The partnership matters because observability has shifted from a niche engineering function into a board-level concern as organisations

Parody outlet The Onion has unveiled a fresh attempt to take control of Infowars, recasting a long-running legal and commercial fight over Alex Jones’s media platform into a new phase driven by state-court liquidation rather than the failed bankruptcy auction that stalled the deal in late 2024. The latest proposal, filed in Texas, would give The Onion an exclusive temporary licence over key Infowars intellectual property while court-supervised asset sales continue, with proceeds intended to benefit families owed more than

Nvidia has delivered another blockbuster quarter, posting revenue of $68.1 billion and giving a next-quarter forecast of $78 billion, a result that underlined how aggressively the world’s largest technology groups are still spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Data centre sales reached $62.3 billion, up 75 per cent from a year earlier, showing that demand for high-end chips, networking gear and full AI systems remains strong despite growing questions over costs, competition and power use. The scale of the quarter matters

OVHcloud has added Quandela’s Belenos quantum computer to its cloud platform, giving customers on-demand access to a second physical quantum machine as Europe pushes to turn research strength into commercial computing capacity. The announcement, made on April 17 at the Quantum Defence Summit, expands OVHcloud’s Quantum Platform less than six months after the French cloud group launched it as a European Quantum-as-a-Service offering. Belenos is a 12-qubit photonic system from Quandela, another French technology company, and joins Pasqal’s Orion Beta as

Quantum computing has taken a meaningful step from theory towards application after researchers showed that a hybrid system combining quantum hardware with artificial intelligence can improve predictions of chaotic physical systems, a class of problems that has long frustrated scientists because small errors grow quickly over time. The work, led by University College London and published in Science Advances on April 17, found that the method delivered stronger long-range forecasts while using a fraction of the memory required by standard

StarLink opened its 2026 roadshow in Riyadh on 19 April, pitching a vision of cyber defence in which autonomous systems are used not only to detect threats but to counter AI-enabled attacks at machine speed, as companies across the Middle East weigh how far they can trust software agents with critical security decisions. The event series, branded “The Silent War of AI vs AI”, is scheduled to run from 19 April to 17 June across Riyadh, Jeddah, Muscat, Amman, Cairo,

  eToro has relaunched its AI investing companion Tori with a stronger claim to immediacy, adding real-time market sentiment drawn from X through Grok 4.2, persistent memory across sessions and a new conversational tool for creating and managing AI-driven “Agent Portfolios”. The move, announced on 16 April, places artificial intelligence more squarely at the centre of the platform’s retail investing strategy as brokers compete to turn chat interfaces into portfolio and discovery tools. The company said the overhaul is meant to shift

OpenAI has moved deeper into the scientific market with the launch of GPT-Rosalind, a specialist artificial intelligence model designed for biology, drug discovery and translational medicine, marking the company’s first dedicated push into life sciences as pharmaceutical groups and research institutes race to test whether advanced reasoning systems can shorten the slow and costly path from laboratory insight to new treatments. Announced on April 16, GPT-Rosalind is being presented by OpenAI as a frontier reasoning model tuned for scientific workflows

Commercial artificial intelligence models are advancing quickly in vulnerability research and exploit development, sharpening concern across the cybersecurity industry that tools built for productivity and defence could also lower the barrier for offensive misuse. A study by Forescout’s Vedere Labs found that commercial systems now outperform open-source and underground alternatives in identifying software flaws, while more than half of the models tested were able to generate exploits with varying degrees of autonomy or user guidance. That marks a notable shift

Netflix is set to roll out a redesigned mobile app by the end of April, adding a vertical video discovery feed that mirrors the swipe-driven format popularised by short-form platforms as the streaming group pushes to make browsing faster and more intuitive on phones. The company disclosed the change in its April 16 shareholder letter, saying the updated mobile experience follows a period of testing and is meant to reflect a broader entertainment offering while making it easier for members

Google has extended its Personal Intelligence system to the Gemini app’s built-in image generation tools, allowing users to create tailored visuals shaped by data from their own Google services, including Google Photos, rather than relying only on long text prompts or manual uploads. The update ties a more personal layer of context to Nano Banana 2, Google’s latest image model, as the company pushes harder to make AI assistants more useful in everyday consumer tasks. The move builds on Personal

Anthropic has rolled out Claude Opus 4.7, an upgraded version of its top broadly available artificial intelligence model, pitching it as a stronger tool for advanced software engineering just days after keeping its more powerful Mythos Preview behind tight access controls because of cyber-risk concerns. The move gives developers a more capable coding model while signalling that Anthropic is trying to balance commercial momentum with a more cautious approach to frontier releases. The company said Opus 4.7 improves on Opus

Alibaba Group Holding has unveiled a new artificial intelligence model aimed at building 3D environments and interactive video, widening its challenge to Tencent in one of the most commercially sensitive corners of China’s technology market: games, cloud services and creator tools. The model, called Happy Oyster, was introduced on Thursday as a “world model”, a system designed to generate explorable digital scenes rather than only short clips, according to Bloomberg’s report on the launch. The move matters because it shifts

Comcast customers notified about the company’s 2023 Xfinity data breach are being offered cash payments, reimbursement for documented losses and identity-protection services under a proposed $117.5 million class-action settlement, opening what could become one of the largest consumer redress exercises tied to a telecom cyber incident in the United States. The settlement applies to people in the United States and its territories who were sent individual notice of the breach around December 18, 2023, with claims due by August 14,

YouTube is changing how advertising appears during livestreams, pulling back commercial interruptions at moments when audience activity is surging or when viewers are paying to support creators. The move marks a notable adjustment in how the platform balances revenue with viewer experience, and it signals a wider push towards automated ad placement shaped by what is happening on screen and in chat in real time. Under the update, YouTube says viewers who buy Super Chats, Super Stickers or gifts will

OpenAI has launched GPT-5.4-Cyber, a new version of its frontier model tailored for defensive cybersecurity work, moving quickly to answer growing concern that ever more capable AI systems could help both defenders and attackers in a widening digital arms race. The release came a week after Anthropic disclosed Claude Mythos Preview under its tightly controlled Project Glasswing programme, setting up a new contest over who can best position advanced AI as a shield rather than a threat. OpenAI said the

Amazon has struck an $11.57 billion deal to buy Globalstar, a move that would give the technology group a sharper edge in satellite communications, deepen its rivalry with SpaceX’s Starlink and place it at the centre of the next phase of smartphone connectivity, including services tied to future iPhone and Apple Watch models. The proposed acquisition, announced on April 14, would fold Globalstar’s satellites, spectrum assets and operational capabilities into Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit network, now branded Amazon Leo. The transaction matters

SoftBank Group’s push to raise broader backing for a $40 billion loan tied to its investment in OpenAI is drawing fresh attention to how far global lenders are willing to support Masayoshi Son’s debt-heavy bet on artificial intelligence. More banks are being approached to join the financing, extending a syndication effort that began after SoftBank secured the bridge facility in March, in what has become a major test of confidence in both the Japanese group’s balance sheet and the commercial

A new study by Pearson and Amazon Web Services has sharpened concerns over whether universities are keeping pace with the demands of an AI-driven labour market, finding that 53% of employers say their main difficulty is hiring graduates with the right AI skills. The report, released on April 13, surveyed 2,711 learners, higher-education leaders and employers across the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Vietnam, pointing to a widening gap between academic confidence and workplace expectations.

OpenAI has told users of its Mac software to update their applications after a third-party supply-chain incident touched the company’s app-signing workflow, prompting a wider effort to replace security certificates and tighten the process that proves its desktop software is authentic. The company said there is no evidence that user data was accessed, that passwords or API keys were exposed, or that its systems, intellectual property or software were altered. The issue centres on Axios, a widely used JavaScript library

Booking.com has confirmed that hackers accessed customer booking information, exposing names, email addresses, phone numbers and reservation details in a security incident that has triggered fresh concern over how much personal travel data is concentrated on large online platforms. The company said it moved to contain the issue, reset reservation PINs for affected bookings and contacted impacted guests directly. It has not disclosed how many customers were affected or when the intrusion began, leaving regulators, travellers and accommodation partners with

Microsoft has lifted prices across its Surface hardware range, making its premium laptops and tablets significantly more expensive as a global memory shortage ripples through the personal-computer market and forces manufacturers to pass higher component costs on to buyers. The move places Microsoft alongside other device makers that have warned of steeper bills for DRAM and NAND components, with the pressure tied largely to booming demand from artificial-intelligence infrastructure and tighter supply for consumer electronics. Several of the increases are

Cisco is closing in on a deal to buy Astrix Security for as much as $350 million, according to multiple reports, in a sign that one of the world’s largest networking and security groups is moving faster to secure the fast-growing risks created by AI agents and other non-human identities inside large organisations. The talks, first reported on April 10, value the Israeli startup at roughly three to four times the capital it has raised so far, though neither company

Apple’s higher-memory Mac mini and Mac Studio models are becoming harder to buy in several markets, as pressure on the global memory supply chain collides with strong demand for AI hardware and growing industry talk of fresh desktop upgrades later this year. Apple continues to sell both desktop lines, but availability has tightened most visibly around customised configurations with larger memory allocations rather than entry-level machines. That shift matters because Apple’s desktop buyers often choose those machines precisely for heavier

OpenAI has accused Elon Musk of staging a last-minute legal manoeuvre ahead of a jury trial due to begin on 27 April in Oakland, California, deepening a dispute that has grown from a fight over the company’s founding ideals into one of the most consequential courtroom battles in artificial intelligence. The latest exchange came after Musk amended his claims against OpenAI and Microsoft, widening the remedies he wants and prompting OpenAI to argue that he is trying to disrupt the

Elon Musk’s X is preparing to launch XChat as a standalone messaging app for iPhone and iPad on 17 April, turning what had been a feature inside the social platform into a separate product aimed at users seeking private, app-first communication. Apple’s App Store listing identifies X Corp. as the developer, describes the service as fully end-to-end encrypted, and says it is built as a focused space for conversation without adverts or tracking. That move matters beyond a product release.

Google has removed Doki Doki Literature Club from the Play Store, setting off a dispute over how major app platforms police games that deal with suicide, depression and psychological distress. The takedown affects the Android version of the cult visual novel, which had only reached mobile devices in December, and comes despite the game carrying a mature rating on Google Play and longstanding content warnings in its official listings. The move has drawn a sharp response from creator Dan Salvato and

Samsung Electronics is weighing a semiconductor packaging and testing project in Vietnam that could be valued at about $4 billion, a move that would deepen the country’s role in the global chip supply chain and expand Samsung’s manufacturing base in one of its most important overseas hubs. Reporting over the past two days has shown that the company is discussing a semiconductor project with Vietnamese authorities, while separate reporting has put the likely investment at roughly $4 billion, with Thai

Metso has launched a new line of flip-flow screens aimed at one of the harder jobs in minerals processing and aggregates production: separating fine, dry and often moisture-laden material without pushing operators towards water-intensive screening. The Finland-based group said its new GFF Series is designed to improve classification accuracy, lower circulating loads and support more energy-efficient plant performance in both mining and sand manufacturing. The launch, announced on April 10, adds another layer to Metso’s screening portfolio at a time

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has sued Colorado in federal court, opening a fresh front in the widening US battle over how far states can go in policing the use of advanced algorithms in decisions affecting jobs, housing, education, healthcare and finance. The complaint, filed on April 9, seeks to block enforcement of Colorado’s Senate Bill 24-205 before it takes effect on June 30, arguing that the law violates constitutional protections for speech, is too vague to enforce fairly

Meta Platforms has unveiled Muse Spark, its first new flagship artificial intelligence model in about a year, marking a pivotal moment in Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to restore the company’s standing against OpenAI, Google and Anthropic after a period of criticism around its earlier Llama releases. Muse Spark began rolling out on 8 April through the Meta AI app and the meta. ai website in the United States, with integration into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Meta’s AI glasses due in