How AI Assistants Are Driving Sales for 6 Big Retailers
Kroger, Walmart, Albertsons and Amazon are betting on AI-driven shopping, with more ad opportunities on the way.Read More
Kroger, Walmart, Albertsons and Amazon are betting on AI-driven shopping, with more ad opportunities on the way.Read More

Microsoft has brought its fourth Indian cloud region online in Hyderabad, declaring general availability of India South Central on August 6. The three-availability-zone build is the largest hyperscale region Microsoft operates in the country and, by the company’s count, gives it the biggest hyperscale cloud footprint of any provider in India. The region joins existing […]
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SpaceXAI shipped Grok Imagine Image 2.0 on Thursday, making editing a first-class capability rather than an afterthought. The update adds a magic wand tool that changes only the region a user points at, segmentation for selecting precise areas to modify, and background removal that exports subjects with transparency. Multi-reference editing accepts up to five input […]
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Keith Jarrett on improvisation.
When the artist is creating in real time, in conjunction with the witnesses in the room, “performance” goes away.
It’s creation.
Improvisation is a privilege, a chance to create without a guarantee.

Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region’s largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister Zhaslan Madiyev and David Allen, the US chargé d’affaires in Armenia. That guest list is the story. A US company opened a facility in a […]
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Hong Kong educators and a lawmaker are urging the city to ban children under 16 from social media, calling addiction “the biggest problem facing education.” At a panel discussion this week, Lilian Chan Lui Ling-yee, honorary president of the Yan Oi Association of Principals, said legislation was needed to protect the next generation. A survey […]
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Job recruiters are meeting an uncanny new kind of candidate: the AI avatar. These digital humans mirror an applicant’s voice and likeness while being something else entirely, and they are turning up in first-round interviews. Lana Kersanava, a Sydney-based recruiter, told Semafor she has encountered them over the past six months. “At the beginning, it’s like […]
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Hwatsing Technology, China’s leading producer of chemical mechanical polishing equipment, announced a metrology system for six-inch wafers on Thursday that can be built directly into the polishing workflow. The company describes it as China’s first six-inch metrology system paired with CMP equipment. The integration is the substantive part. Rather than measuring wafers separately after processing, the system […]
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There’s a village in Luxembourg that’s right outside the main metropolis. A farmer often ties up a donkey to the little bridge leading to town.
The juxtaposition of international digital trading and donkeys is a reminder that as fast as the future arrives, the past also sticks around. We can measure the distance not just in years, but in miles. “How many miles is it to the nearest donkey?” is an interesting metric.
There’s probably a version of the donkey in your office or your town.
A court date has been set in 2027 for the cases seeking to block the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. Discovery mergerRead More