August 17, 2026

AI Products and Services

SpaceXAI Unveils Grok Bot To Work Like A Team Of AI Agents www.ndtv.com
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SpaceXAI is rolling out new artificial intelligence software that’s designed to act like a team of AI agents fielding assignments throughout the day, marking the latest bid by Elon Musk’s company to keep pace with Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

The new product, called Grok Bot, is designed to seamlessly handle a wide range of professional work. The tool can sign into various apps and websites, retain information from prior tasks and enable bots to share details and context with each other, the company said Tuesday.

The product is part of Musk’s broader push to catch up in the AI race after slipping behind in the fast-growing market for AI agents. SpaceXAI, as Musk’s AI outfit is now known, released its first coding agent in May to compete with Anthropic’s offerings, followed by the new Grok 4.5 built with Cursor.

SpaceX reached a $60 billion agreement in June to acquire Cursor, an AI coding startup. Cursor emerged as a key player in tech’s so-called vibe coding era, as demand surged for tools that can write and debug software programming.

DeepMind Says Its AI Can Predict Hurricanes Earlier Than Everyone Else www.wired.com
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In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter. Five days before landfall, it predicted with 80 percent confidence that the storm system would hit Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane.

Hurricane Melissa was catastrophic, causing flooding and landslides across Jamaica. But the AI model helped forecasters give an earlier warning to communities in its path, so they could better prepare.

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. On the ground, that extra day can mean a lot.

“Even a few hours can make a difference,” says Mike Brennan, director of the US National Hurricane Center. Organizing evacuations, staging supplies, and moving resources to respond to a hurricane risk are all time-sensitive tasks—and making the wrong decision can have big consequences. “Time is really golden when it comes to those types of decisions, so the ability to push forecast accuracy out as much as a day beyond what we’ve previously been able to do is really valuable,” he says.

Historically, bringing forecasts forward by a day would take a decade of work, the researchers say.

Google abruptly cancels its unreleased AI Studio mobile app www.androidauthority.com
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TL;DR

  • Google has already canceled the standalone AI Studio mobile app before it ever launched.
  • The company says it will now bring AI-powered app creation directly into the Gemini app.
  • Meanwhile, the AI Studio web experience will continue to grow and evolve.

In a post on X, the official Google AI Studio account said the company has decided to cancel the standalone mobile app, despite around 800,000 users pre-ordering it across Android and iOS.

The company said that, instead of asking users to install “yet another app,” it will bring AI Studio’s core capabilities directly into the Gemini app.

Google says it’s partnering with the Gemini app team to make this vision a reality across both mobile and desktop.

New chapter in reading: AI companion tools let readers chat with books timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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Mid-listen, you can tap a button, ask your question, hear the answer, and then pick up the story right where you left off

NEW YORK: Imagine a world where you could ask a book a question as you read it. That’s the pitch from a wave of new AI tools letting readers do exactly that. “You are dealing with a book as if it is a living object – it’s totally different,” says Ahmed Kamel, CEO of Sinai.ai, a platform now in testing.With these tools, users get access to an e-book or audiobook alongside an AI chatbot. Confused about a character’s motives or the historical setting? Just ask. Readers can dig into a character’s psychology, historical context, or a philosophical concept — no separate research required.French startup My Smart Book launched something similar in mid-April. Like Sinai, its chatbot draws only on the actual text of the book – no outside information.

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When it comes to making fair calls, the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) deploys robots. The nation’s professional league added a fleet of so-called robot umpires to the field during its 2024 season, hoping to even out the playing field. Called the Automatic Ball-Strike system (ABS), it utilizes pitch-tracking sensors and camera arrays to quickly analyze when a pitch crosses the strike zone—not uncanny machines wearing catcher’s gear. The ABS data is then presented to the human home plate umpire, who announces their call based on the additional analysis.

ABS is designed to offer more accurate decisions while reducing overall bias in games, but did it deliver? Two years later, researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) say effects are already clear—although not necessarily what some baseball fans (or players) anticipated.

According to a study published in the journal European Sport Management Quarterly, famous top-ranking hitters performed worse during the 2024 KBO season compared to previous year for statistics involving strike-zone judgment. Meanwhile, the high status players walked less, struck out more, and reached bases less often when ABS entered the equation.

“This suggests that there may have been an existing bias in favor of prominent batters before ABS,” Jimin Song, a UM kinesiologist and study co-author, said in a statement. “Before ABS, when a big-name batter was at bat, umpires may have given more favorable calls on borderline pitches.”

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The AI industry’s most fascinating stories often come from unlikely alliances, and this is certainly one of them. Getty Images, a company that has spent years raising concerns about how AI models are trained and how creative work is used, is now officially partnering with OpenAI.

The new agreement will allow Getty Images’ licensed content to appear across ChatGPT’s search and discovery experiences. That means users may begin seeing Getty’s professionally licensed photos and visual assets integrated into ChatGPT responses, adding more visual context to searches and AI-generated answers. Getty says the goal is to make AI-powered search more useful and trustworthy by relying on high-quality, licensed content rather than the murky sourcing practices that have sparked countless debates across the AI industry.

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Bottom line: The math behind AI subscriptions is starting to look uncomfortable. Flat monthly pricing helped fuel the rapid adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but new analysis suggests those fees may not come close to covering the actual cost of heavy use. As users push these systems harder and more demanding AI workflows take hold, the gap between revenue and compute costs is becoming difficult to ignore.

SemiAnalysis has calculated how big that gap really is. After testing subscription tiers from both OpenAI and Anthropic – running long-horizon coding and agentic tasks until weekly limits were exhausted – the firm found that the cost of theoretical maximum usage of these plans if priced at standard API rates far exceeds what users actually pay.

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Football managers spend countless hours analyzing corners, free kicks, and player positioning in search of tiny competitive advantages. Google DeepMind believes artificial intelligence can make that process significantly faster, and its latest project, TacticAI, is designed to do exactly that. TacticAI is a football-specific AI assistant capable of modeling player movement, forecasting future play dynamics, and even recommending tactical adjustments for corner kicks. One of its standout abilities is predicting player trajectories up to eight seconds into the future using only broadcast-style visual data.

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What began with GPUs has expanded into full-stack AI factories comprising accelerated compute, high-speed interconnects, liquid-cooled systems, inference software, autonomous agents, reference architectures and the ecosystem needed to build and operate them at scale. 

Full-stack AI factories are part of the broader ecosystem that NVIDIA is helping define and build. NVIDIA closely collaborates with global system partners such as Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro to bring AI infrastructure to enterprise data centers. NVIDIA also relies on a curated ecosystem of AI software partners to build AI solutions for each enterprise’s use cases. This ecosystem supports a choice of models, across proprietary and open options.

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Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) is expanding its presence in the legal software market as it continues to grow its enterprise footprint.

The latest offerings include integration with platforms law firms already use, such as Box (BOX) and Thomson Reuters (TRI), plugins designed for specific tasks and roles such as corporate counsel, regulatory counsel, and law students, and integration with Microsoft (MSFT) 365.

The launch comes just a week after Anthropic debuted its Claude for Financial Services, which includes 10 customizable AI agents for financial users, the ability to use Claude’s financial capabilities across Microsoft 365, and the option to connect Claude to more applications.

It also comes as the software industry continues to deal with the fallout from the initial debut of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, which has hammered software stocks over fears that the AI startup will steal market share from existing enterprise platforms.

Anthropic’s new legal products could further raise concerns about the future of legacy enterprise services.

The company’s latest products feature 20 model context protocol (MCP) connectors, which allow Claude to connect to existing pools of data and tools in apps. That includes the ability to use Claude with programs such as DocuSign (DOCU), Ironclad, Datasite, and other legal software.

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks at the Code with Claude developer conference on May 6, 2026, in San Francisco. (Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic) · ASSOCIATED PRESS

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The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.

Anthropic on Wednesday said it had reached a deal to tap the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, marking a détente with its one-time critic and ‌a boost for both companies in the high-stakes artificial intelligence race.

Under the agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tenn., which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month.

The deal gives the IPO-bound SpaceX a marquee customer as it looks to sell investors on its AI ambitions, while helping Anthropic ​ease capacity constraints following a surge in demand for products such as its AI coding ​tool, Claude Code.

The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day in San Francisco on Wednesday, where it unveiled a new Claude AI feature called “dreaming,” meant to help its AI systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns and updating ​files that store user preferences and other context.

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BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Alibaba said Friday that its Qwen artificial intelligence model will be integrated into vehicles from automakers including BYD and a local joint venture of Volkswagen, as the industry pushes to add more in-car digital services and compete for buyers in a slowing electric vehicle market.

The model will run on Nvidia‘s automotive chip system and is designed to function even with limited network connectivity.

Alibaba said select models will allow drivers to order food delivery, book hotels, buy tickets to attractions and track packages, among other features, through voice commands.

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OpenAI launched a new image generation AI model on Tuesday, dubbed ChatGPT Images 2.0. This model can generate more than one image from a single prompt, like an entire study booklet, as well as output text, including in non-English languages like Chinese and Hindi. This release is available globally for ChatGPT and Codex users, with a more powerful version available for paying subscribers.

When any major AI company releases a new image model, it can revive interest and boost usage, especially if social media users adopt a meme-able trend, transforming images of themselves. Last year, Google’s launch of the Nano Banana model was a major moment for the company, especially when users started posting hyperrealistic figurines of themselves online. Earlier this year, ChatGPT Images made waves on social media as users shared AI-generated caricatures.

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Two weeks after unfounded rumors said President Donald Trump suffered a health issue, social media users shared a video they said showed proof he was just taken to a hospital.

In the video, two men appear to assist Trump as he walks unsteadily out of a building. A sign on the building reads “Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.”

“BREAKING: There are some reports Trump has been taken to Walter Reed Hospital,” the captions of multiple Facebook posts sharing the video read. The earliest we found was posted April 19 and the latest was posted April 21.

The footage isn’t real. It contains signs that it was made with artificial intelligence.

We contacted the Walter Reed hospital’s communications office, which said that the logo shown in the video is not the hospital’s official logo, and the signage is inconsistent with that at the hospital.