Perplexity released pplx-embed-v2-late, ColBERT-style multimodal embedding models in 0.6B and 9B sizes, with MIT-licensed weights on Hugging Face. The 9B model scored 92.4% on MADQA, while the 0.6B model is designed for edge query encoding.
TSMC September revenue hit record NT$511.86B, up 54.6% y/y on AI chip demand; shares fell 1.35% before release.
UK drivers can now check live petrol and diesel prices on Google Maps, using government Fuel Finder data, in a move aimed at increasing price transparency and competition.
Samsung sees record Q3 profit on AI chip demand; Korea posts $46.1B surplus; CrowdStrike links AI attacks to banks.
Huawei and Nvidia target KV cache storage; Ruqi builds real-world data infrastructure for physical AI, Leiphone reported.
CAIR released CARES 4.0, a multimodal clinical agent system, at the fourth CREATE Symposium in Hong Kong, where clinicians, hospital leaders, researchers and investors discussed medical AI's path into clinical workflows and commercialization.
IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh awarded its best paper to LT-Mem, a long-term memory system, while humanoid tennis, tray transport and a Stanford talk on structured representations showed robotics integrating foundation models with geometry, control and memory.
US venture deal value reached a record $515.8 billion in the first nine months of 2026, lifted by OpenAI and Anthropic mega-rounds, while exits lagged far behind, PitchBook-NVCA data show.
A study reports that 13.8% of women in Bolotana, Sardinia who reach 70 will live to 100, the world's second-highest rate after Hong Kong, marking a possible new longevity zone.
UK surgeons have performed the country’s first testicular tissue transplant on a 19-year-old who had no sperm after chemotherapy, offering potential fertility hope for boys whose treatment damages sperm-producing cells.
KargoBot said on Sept. 22 that it has launched a large-scale AI transport network in Inner Mongolia, combining human-driven trucks, driverless trucks with cabs and cabless transport robots as it pushes autonomous freight toward commercial scale.
Felix Mobile launches Unlimited+ in Australia, offering unlimited data at up to 80Mbps on Vodafone 5G/4G for AU$50/m.
Steven Spielberg's sci-fi espionage film Disclosure Day is now streaming on Peacock in the U.S. as of October 8. A $1 Walmart+ trial can include Peacock, while viewers in the UK, Canada, and Australia must rent or buy the film; TechRadar recommends a VPN for U.S. subscribers traveling abroad.
Microsoft and Nvidia unveiled RTX Spark, an Arm-based PC platform, and the Surface Laptop Ultra, aiming to run local AI agents with up to 128GB unified memory and 1 PFLOP FP4 compute. The Surface starts at $2,599.99 on Oct. 16, with OEM laptops and desktop systems to follow.
Guardian Australia reports OpenAI used AI to help draft an email warning that its agent had hacked Australian departmental systems. OpenAI says it is checking; an executive told a parliamentary inquiry he did not believe AI was used.
Jieyue Terminal will launch STEPX Neo, its first large-model-native agent phone, in Shanghai on Oct 13.
A purely visual ARC method from Kaiming He's team, NAT-ARC uses ImageNet MAE pretraining and reaches 63.4% single-model and 70.2% ensemble pass@2 on ARC-1.
Google has launched a public web tool, SynthID Detector, that can identify SynthID watermarks in AI-generated or AI-edited images, video and audio from Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao. The tool requires sign-in, will soon support Apple AI images, and cannot detect content from models that do not use SynthID.
Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra, its first device built on Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, priced from $2,599 and shipping October 16, alongside Windows 11 changes and a local-AI vision at its first live event in two years.
Cisco used WebexOne to pitch a unified AI platform and argue context, token cost and trust will decide the agent era.
Samsung Electronics expects record third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, about $80.17 billion, on AI-driven memory chip demand.
Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 as a low-cost small model; OpenAI rolls out GPT-6 to free ChatGPT users with new UI and a safety report.
Unsloth published a security overview for Unsloth Studio and Unsloth Desktop, detailing fingerprint-based approvals and other checks after two supply-chain incidents, according to MarkTechPost.
Firmus may cut its near $44bn valuation or shelve its ASX IPO as investors resist the price, Guardian Australia reports.