As previously announced, Apple has today released 2026's major annual updates for its operating systems, including iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27.
Siri AI—a large language model-based and context-aware overhaul of the company's Siri voice and text assistant—is the flagship feature across all these releases except one (tvOS).
© Apple
CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro is an iterative update that—as usual—focuses heavily on both performance and new camera features. This time around, many of the new camera features are oriented around giving the user more direct control of the image, rather than depending entirely on Apple's computational photography assumptions.
As usual, the new iPhone has a new chip. It's called A20 Pro, and it's the first 2 nm chip for the iPhone. It has a 6-core CPU, with two super-cores that are up to 20 percent faster, and four efficiency cores. A 7-core GPU offers up to 40 percent improved performance and increased bandwidth.
The A20 Pro also has a new Neural Engine—the machine-learning processor on the system-on-chip—which the company says is basically two Neural Engines on one chip.
© Samuel Axon
Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry.
Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet certain criteria, download and run them, and fine-tune them into different variants that then get uploaded back up to Hugging Face.
© Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images
IBM has rolled out the newest models in its family of open-weight large language models designed to be downloaded and self-hosted. The newly launched Granite 4.2 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B parameter variants.
Like previous versions, IBM is taking a decoder-only approach here. These new releases offer a 128,000-token context window natively. The 8B and 30B variants (not the 3B one) also go through an agentic reinforcement-learning block; they were trained for expanded capabilities like using the terminal, searching the web, or using external tools. The 3B model supports tools too, but without the same level of specialized training.
© Samuel Axon
The Mac mini and Mac Studio occupy two distinct points in Apple's lineup of desktops, but lately, they've had something in common: They're popular for local AI inference and software development thanks to the advantages of their unified memory architecture and the fast CPUs and GPUs on their systems-on-a-chip.
Today, Apple announced new iterations of both desktops, along with two new chips: the M6, the first 2nm chip in Apple's M-series lineup for Macs, and the M5 Ultra, now the most powerful chip in the lineup for most things—especially AI workloads.
© Apple
Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.
Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.
© Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg
This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."
This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.
The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.
© Bethesda
Anthropic is hiring a "custom silicon team" to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed.
Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. (You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager, silicon on Anthropic's job board right now.) A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirmed the plans to both Business Insider and TechCrunch.
© Chesnot via Getty Images
Like any company, Reddit reports quarterly earnings, and its CEO, Steve Huffman, addresses investors during those reports. It's not always about just sharing numbers, though: This quarter, Huffman took the opportunity to voice concerns and criticisms about Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically summarizes search results on most user queries.
First, there was a letter to investors, wherein Huffman spun his narrative about Reddit's value proposition and general strategic direction amid the proliferation of AI tools.
© David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Apple saw an excellent and better-than-anticipated Q3 2026 in terms of iPhone sales, but its revenue for services—like Apple TV, Apple Music, AppleCare, or iCloud—slipped downward, disappointing experts who were hoping for more. Further, fears about memory prices and supply constraints slightly soured reception to what could have otherwise been a slightly positive but business-as-usual quarter.
That's the key takeaway from the company's Q3 2026 earnings call today.
© Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This week, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP's protocol core is now stateless, so requests are no longer dependent on a session tied to an individual server instance. This change has the potential to address long-standing barriers to scalability.
The blog post announcing the specification, written by lead maintainers David Soria Parra and Den Delimarsky (who both work at Anthropic), says:
© Model Context Protocol
Apple has released iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS 26.6. Apart from potential security hotfixes, these are likely the last updates before the arrival of iOS 27, macOS 27, and so on.
All of today's releases include minor bug fixes, and there are numerous security updates: more than 150 for macOS 26.6. Apple also rolled out macOS 14.8.8 and macOS 15.7.8 for older devices, also focused on security fixes.
In terms of new features, you won't find many in these releases, as they mainly pave the way for the next major OS update, likely to hit sometime in September. Most notably, the release notes for iOS and iPadOS 26.6 say the update "optimizes the Spotlight index to prepare for iOS 27." This update will kick off some indexing work that will then be leveraged in an ostensibly much more robust Spotlight search feature when iOS 27 launches next month.
© Samuel Axon
Today, Anthropic rolled out Opus 5, the newest update for the model that has recently become a popular choice for coding and other software development tasks, among other things.
While this is a noteworthy bump for Opus, it doesn't seem to be an Opus 4.5-level breakthrough in agentic coding performance.
© Anthropic
There are a lot of AI coding applications out there, and as impressive as large language models and the agents they enable have become, many of the most recent developments in AI-assisted development have been in the software that manages those models, not just the models themselves.
Earlier this summer, I spoke with the head of product for Claude Code, Anthropic's Cat Wu, about that company's approach to building that software.
© Augment Code
Jurassic Park, while beloved as a film, has been the subject of snarky memes for the infamous line in which one of the characters declares, "This is a Unix system, I know this!" while using a computer with an unusual 3D file manager interface.
Despite the memes, the film's production team was meticulous in accurately sourcing the right PCs (and adjacent details) for the sets—not too much of a surprise, given writer Michael Crichton's background with computing and his obsessive attention to detail in the book the film is based on.
© Universal Pictures
Over the past few years, many of us have gotten a crash course in what we now call artificial intelligence—but really, it has mostly been a crash course in large language models. Increasingly, however, LLMs are no longer the only category of AI drawing high expectations, massive funding rounds, and significant research and product development.
Over the past year, we've seen a plethora of new announcements in a category labeled "world models," and you'll likely see more movement there in the coming months and years.
Instead of or in addition to working with language, world models aim to lay the groundwork for AI systems that are capable of simulating the physical world, or at least a useful approximation of it.
© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
DeepSeek, the Chinese startup developing large language models that are competitive with those from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is planning to enter the silicon business, according to Reuters.
Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters writes that DeepSeek has been working on a move into silicon for about a year. It has been meeting with potential partners in the hardware and silicon space and has been hiring engineers for the project.
© Getty Images
Login