Some of the new features are powered by Google's Gemini AI assistant, which reflects the the tech giant's broader push to integrate Gemini across its products while also better positioning Waze to compete with rival services such as Apple Maps.

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The LAPD, one of Flock's biggest government customers, is ending its contract with the company citing civil liberties concerns.

Welcome to the AI-generated poster hall of shame.

Tokenmaxxing revealed a key issue: enterprises waste AI budgets on rebuilding, not creating value.

My PhD models tried to explain why people engage. My industry models predict who will. The statistics barely changed. Everything around them did. The post Building Models in Two Worlds: From Latent Constructs to Behavioral Signals appeared first on Towards Data Science.

The move came after criticism by Instagram users, privacy advocates and a union.

Apple’s failed car project reportedly shaped its Neural Engine, future M7 chips, and plans for more powerful AI server infrastructure. The post Apple’s Failed Car Project Reportedly Shapes M7 AI Chips appeared first on TechRepublic.

Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg: Apple's stock is up 16% since June 25, adding ~$650B in market value and pushing shares back to record territory, as investors flee an AI stock selloff to Apple  —  Investors are flocking back to Apple Inc. as nervousness about artificial intelligence spending weighs on the stocks of chipmakers and cloud-computing giants.

Maggie Eastland / Bloomberg: Sources: the US estimates unauthorized distillation costs US AI labs up to $6B/year; Silicon Valley told the White House it could become an existential threat  —  Anthropic and OpenAI's warnings about “adversarial distillation” are reinvigorating one of the oldest debates in Silicon Valley.

And how you can build your own version. Plus 15+ examples of other new internal AI tools from companies like Pinterest, Airbnb and more.

An open source, AI-driven system adopts victim personas to engage with phishing attackers, allowing organizations and law enforcement to gather relevant data on cybercriminal operations.

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is among the big-name signatories of the letter. Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images More than 200 top economists, execs, and researchers warned about AI's potential impact on jobs. An 88-word letter published on Monday calls for stronger guardrails as AI becomes more powerful. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark are among the signatories. More than 200 top economists, executives, and researchers — including over a dozen Nobel Prize winners — have signed a letter warning about AI's potential threat to jobs. The 88-word-long letter, titled "We Must Act Now," says that AI could become "radically more powerful" in the coming decade, and argues that policymakers worldwide need to do more to build guardrails for the technology or risk "large-scale job displacement." Signatories include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemoglu, and Simon Johnson. Google AI lead Jeff Dean, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, and OpenAI finance boss Sarah Friar also signed. Read the full text of the letter, organized by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and subtitled "A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy," here: AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society. Read the original article on Business Insider

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Source: OpenAI still believes it is on track to unveil its first device in 2026 and release it in 2027; Apple's lawsuit may complicate hiring and supply chains  —  Apple Inc.'s lawsuit accusing OpenAI of systematically stealing its intellectual property threatens to disrupt …

Robert Scammell / Business Insider: Anthropic hires Tom Blomfield, a Monzo co-founder and one of the biggest names in UK tech, to join its compute team; he is taking a leave of absence from YC  —  The AI talent wars aren't letting up — and neither is Anthropic's big-name hiring spree.  —  The AI startup has hired Tom Blomfield …

Google and AIM launched ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered AI tool empowering Indian educators in robotics labs.

Washington, D.C. has become a battleground for Uber and Waymo's competing views.

A new study suggests the brain begins making decisions much earlier than scientists previously thought. Researchers found that even primary sensory regions are influenced by higher brain areas through rapid feedback loops, rather than simply passing information forward. This more dynamic view of brain function could help engineers design future AI systems that think more like biological brains while using far less power.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Sperm donors need limits, says a European fertility group Ties van der Meer doesn’t know how many siblings he has. The 47-year-old was conceived at a private fertility clinic using sperm…

While there are benefits to personalized tutoring, the evidence isn't clear that having AI tutors helps students learn better or faster. CreativaImages/iStock/Getty Images Plus Over the past decade, the AI-focused, for-profit Alpha School has grown from one campus in Austin, Texas, to a growing list of more than 15 schools across the country, including in major cities like New York and San Francisco. Alpha School joins other AI-centric K-12 private schools, like Unbound Academy and the Khan Lab School, that parents can now choose for their children, paying anywhere from US$40,000 to $75,000 in some cases each year. Some advocates of AI-driven education use slogans like “School is broken, and we’re here to fix it.” MacKenzie Price, one of Alpha School’s co-founders, has described her frustration with the “one-size-fits-all” model of schooling, in which all students study the same material, but often learn at different speeds. Sal Khan, the founder of the online educational platform Khan Academy, has also argued that artificial intelligence could give every student an individual tutor that is responsive to their specific needs. And Bill Gates is among the tech thought leaders who have speculated that AI will replace many teachers within the next decade. The argument for more personalized education may be a good one in some cases. But it also risks creating a false dichotomy where all AI programs are seen as responsive and motivating, and all classroom teaching is rote lecturing. As a scholar of education policy who does research on AI and teachers, I recognize that reality is far more complicated. The promise of AI tutoring Alpha School replaces traditional, in-person instruction for K-12 students with personalized AI tutoring that condenses reading, math and other subjects into a two-hour study period. The two-hour AI tutoring block is supplemented with in-person workshops and what the school calls “coaches” or “guides,” who are not necessarily licensed teachers. These sessions can focus on nonacademic life skills, like public speaking and entrepreneurship, as well as art and physical education. When it comes to the AI portion of this education, it is clear that there are benefits to personalized tutoring. A major review published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2020, for example, showed that many different kinds of tutoring provided by humans produced consistent learning gains across subjects and age ranges. A 2026 study by the Brookings Institution showed that AI improves computer-assisted tutoring by allowing students to interact in everyday language with the program. Generative AI can also modify the tutoring session, based on a student’s progress and challenges with the material. So far, though, there is no clear evidence that AI or other kinds of computer-based tutors are superior to human tutors, though in many cases they might be cheaper. Instead of trying to replace teachers with AI, I think that a more promising strategy is to support teachers in using AI to become better educators. Good tutoring supports classroom learning One-to-one tutoring with a human teacher, parent or paraprofessional has been shown to be very effective in raising student test scores and to overall improve student learning. “High-impact” tutoring that involves regular, long-term sessions in small groups held within schools has been shown to be particularly effective. As Isabelle Hau, the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, writes, young students need to develop strong social skills, what she calls “relational intelligence” to flourish in social settings. To be effective, human tutoring needs to meet certain criteria. For example, tutors and their students should meet consistently, the tutors should be skilled and make sure that what they are teaching is fully integrated with the student’s curriculum. Relationship-building between tutors and students is also critical for getting students to stay more motivated and focused on their work at hand. Can AI tutors replace human ones? Computer-assisted instruction and intelligent tutoring systems have been around since the 1970s. These systems are designed to provide instruction that adapts to learners as they progress through a series of exercises, problems or questions. They have been shown to increase student achievement when used as a supplement to classroom learning. However, extensive analysis of different studies found that while these systems increased student achievement, when compared with classroom instruction or students who rely on textbooks or workbooks to study, there was no significant difference in learning between computer tutors and human tutors. More recently, a 2025 study found significant positive effects of AI tutoring on student achievement, across subjects and different grade levels. In another widely cited study on AI tutors, researchers in 2025 compared the effect of active learning in class with a specially designed AI tutor they had built for an introductory class in physics at Harvard. Students who used the AI tutor said they learned the material faster and felt more motivated to learn, compared with students who received specialized in-class instruction. In this study, not only were the students already highly motivated and had good study skills, but the AI tutor was built by the same professors who taught the course. AI-supported instruction Claims that AI tutoring is superior to classroom instruction are only looking at part of the evidence. But AI tutors could indeed be useful in some cases, if they are used to support human teachers in their work. One 2024 study showed student improvement in middle schools in low-income areas when human tutors had access to AI tutoring support. And a 2026 study showed that when teachers use AI for lesson plans, experienced teachers tend to critically revise content to better link it to the overall curriculum. Instead of considering a future where AI tutors replace human teachers, I believe that we need to think about what kind of support and professional development can help teachers make the most of these new and complicated tools. Gerald K. LeTendre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.