• Mistral says "Le Chonk" can challenge the best AI models
• Google rolls out improved SynthID AI content detector, now available globally
• AI/ML is becoming a performance factor in motorsport
• Review: Fine, let's talk about Digger
• If you're looking, here's a "good deal" for NASA and the European Space Agency
• Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says
• OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU
• HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service”
• It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane
• Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services
• Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
• Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return
• Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input
• Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize
• Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch
• Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants?
• All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow
• Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial
• OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic
• Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey
| • Parallel Systems, which builds autonomous freight trains, raised a $100M Series C led by AVP, taking its total funding to $200M+ (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)
• Elon Musk says Grok Bot will use the "best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, MidJourney, Suno" (Grace Kay/The Information)
• Amazon's Ring unveils the $249 Ring Smart Lock, which uses a physical dial to recharge the battery when turned, set for a Q1 2027 launch, and five new cameras (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)
• Google launches SynthID Detector, a website that lets users detect AI-generated image, video, and audio media across dozens of common file formats (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
• Nous Research, which makes the open-source Hermes AI agent that has hit 22M+ downloads since February, raised $90M at a $1.2B valuation to expand to enterprises (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
• North American startup funding hit $92B in Q3, down 35% QoQ but up 50% YoY, with $61B to AI startups; there were 11 $1B+ acquisitions and IPOs remained quiet (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)
• Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs invest $300M and the US invests $500M+ in Zuckerberg-backed Biohub to build open biology datasets for AI training (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
• Stuut, which uses AI agents to automate enterprise order-to-cash cycles and serves 150+ clients, raised a $52.5M Series B led by Insight, for $93M total funding (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
• Xreal's Aura and Meta's VR Glasses hands-on: both have a compute puck and are light, but Aura's arrive in 2026 and have passthrough lenses suitable for walking (Boone Ashworth/Wired)
• Google launches Playground, a browser-based, no-code AI game creation platform available to US users aged 18+, powered by Gemini, Nano Banana, and Lyria (Jay Peters/The Verge)
• Xreal opens preorders for its Android XR-powered Aura glasses with a compute puck, starting at $1,279 for 12GB/256GB, in the US, Canada, Japan, and South Korea (Mariella Moon/Engadget)
• Sources: Dallas-based Disruptive is targeting up to $10B for a late-stage fund and has secured $7.5B; founded in 2012, it has backed Groq and Reflection AI (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
• A Taiwan union representing Micron workers says it has secured member authorization to strike over the company's bonus scheme; the details are under discussion (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)
• Elon Musk says his business empire will build and operate the Texas-based Terafab chipmaking project, quashing speculation about TSMC having an operational role (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
• PS5 modders using AI tools have rapidly installed emulators, as jailbreaks spread across social media; recent games requiring newer firmware are inaccessible (Sammy Barker/Push Square)
| • Cisco is bringing a new agentic framework to its Webex enterprise platform
• Ring's smart lock has a hand crank so it works even if the power's out
• Google's AI detection website is now available
• OpenAI just posted hundreds more results on major math problems
• The Social Reckoning is a timely reminder that we shouldn't trust Meta
• Xreal's Aura Android XR smartglasses will cost you at least $1,279
• Google's experimental Playground platform uses AI to create games for you
• Microsoft Windows and Surface event 2026: Live updates as Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang take the stage
• Ultrahuman now offers on-demand heart rhythm scans
• How to watch the Microsoft Windows and Surface event
• Jaguar's controversial Type 01 EV looks like a '40s gangster car built for the modern electric era
• Apple TV's F1 coverage will now support Dolby Atmos
• How long have wireless gaming controllers been around for?
• How to help stop spam calls on iPhone and Android
• Why do some PCs have two Ethernet ports?
• Apple reportedly worked with LG on gadgets for its upcoming smart home push
• Kindle Click vs Kobo Remote: How much of a difference is there?
• Remember MapQuest? You can now use it with Android Auto
• Doom on the Vectrex turns the classic shooter into Tron-like vector art
• Skydance will combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming service
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