Author: admin
Alphabet investors have very publicly worried that the company’s massive AI spending isn’t worth the money. With the company’s latest earnings report, those investors should be able to relax a little. The takeaway: Google’s cloud business — driven largely by enterprise AI adoption — is booming. The search giant saw Google Cloud revenue spike 82% from where it was this time last year, climbing to $24.8 billion. That’s well above last quarter’s generous year-over-year growth, which showed a revenue jump of 63% to $20 billion — and it handily beats what Wall Street analysts expected for this quarter’s growth (the…
Salad is usually synonymous with healthy eating. Except now, as the US grapples with an expanding outbreak of cyclosporiasis that’s sickened more than 7,100 people in Michigan alone, likely caused by iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms.In fact, leafy greens are frequently implicated in instances of foodborne illness. There was a 2022 multistate E. coli outbreak tied to romaine served on Wendy’s sandwiches and 173 cases of norovirus linked to Illinois eatery D.C. Cobb’s. In 2021, BrightFarms recalled packaged salad greens sold in several states after 31 people got salmonella. And in 2019, a total of 167 people were infected…
Armed with data about how people shop in stores, deodorant brand Curie is overhauling its brand.Seven-year-old Curie makes natural deodorant products formulated for active lifestyles. The brand’s refresh includes its packaging, direct-to-consumer website, logo, and messaging. While Curie began as a DTC brand, the rebrand is heavily based on insights from 4,300 Walmart stores, where Curie began selling its products in 2023, founder and CEO Sarah Moret told ADWEEK.Curie worked with branding agency Gander on the rebrand. Until now, Curie’s branding had been handled by Moret herself and freelance designers, she said. Curie was also featured on an episode of…
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on his warnings to Chinese AI companies on Wednesday, saying that sanctions remain on the table after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one. While this process can infringe on intellectual property rights, it’s also widely used as a legitimate optimization method. “Open source is not open season on American IP,” Bessent posted on X. “When [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line…
The Trump administration is split over how to respond to the rapid rise of China’s leading AI models, according to multiple people familiar with deliberations.The debate is broadly divided between parts of the White House, which has pushed for stricter controls on Chinese AI that may soon rival the most powerful US models, and the Commerce Department, which has viewed those restrictions as unworkable.The conundrum has become the latest flash point for the administration over AI, after China’s Moonshot AI lab last week released its Kimi K3 model that rivals the top US models from Anthropic and OpenAI.In recent days,…
Brand consultancy Redscout has a new CEO for the first time in seven years in Michael Keany—and the self-proclaimed “moderate overachiever” is ready to make work that will make people cry. That’s his test for the mettle of a design firm, he said. The Stagwell agency passes his benchmark, but he’s ready to build on its first 25 years of operation.Keany joins Redscout as former CEO Ivan Kayser departs to launch a new venture, according to a press release. Keany and Kayser worked together at Code and Theory in 2011, where Keany was CEO from 2009-2012. Over the years, Redscout was…
SoundCloud announced Wednesday that it has acquired Nina Protocol, a decentralized music platform that enabled independent artists to sell music directly to fans while keeping 100% of their revenue. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. It’s also unclear whether any members of Nina’s team will join SoundCloud. The company has not yet responded to a request for comment. The deal is SoundCloud’s first acquisition since its 2022 purchase of AI music company Musiio to help improve music discovery. The deal signals that SoundCloud is continuing to expand beyond music hosting into a broader platform for independent artists. As…
For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive.Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they’re searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion.Christopher Nolan’s artistic crimes in bringing The Odyssey to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called “historical inaccuracy” in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits—mainly the casting…
The 2026 World Cup was, by all commercial metrics, a resounding success. FIFA recently announced it exceeded $15 billion in revenue, significantly above the $11 billion it projected in April. And Fox, which paid $485 million for the English-language rights, proclaimed it had a record 38.9 million average viewers for the Final between Argentina and Spain.“I had a chat with some of our partners, and they are extremely happy about the numbers, about the engagement, about the TV ratings,” FIFA chief business officer Romy Gai told ADWEEK. Controversies around the high match ticket prices, the hydration breaks, and President Donald Trump’s influence…
On Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that one of its models went rogue during a test and hacked the systems of AI dataset platform Hugging Face in a fully AI-enabled attack, a dramatic example of the dangers posed by advanced AI models. But, according to some cybersecurity experts, at the heart of this unprecedented AI-powered breach there was a very human mistake: OpenAI failed to properly configure what it called a “highly isolated environment,” allowing a testing sandbox that should have been completely secluded from the internet to actually connect to the internet. Dan Guido, the founder of cybersecurity research startup Trail…
The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday.Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch. David Sacks, a venture capitalist and AI adviser to President Donald Trump, called the performance of Moonshot’s model “concerning.” Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary…
Science Corporation, a start-up developing novel brain-computer interfaces (BCI), won approval from Europe’s medical device regulator to begin selling a device that restores vision lost from age-related macular degeneration. The company said the device, called PRIMA, also received a designation from the US Food and Drug Administration that is the first step toward an expedited regulatory review, which could see the device used to treat two rare kinds of blindness. Millions of people around the world suffer from age-related macular degeneration, which destroys the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eyes, making it difficult to read and recognize faces.…
It’ll also be compatible with Dyson’s new docking station, the Auto-empty Dok, hopefully out later this year. Only the V10 Konical and the V16 Piston Animal ($980) are currently slated to work with it.Comparison GamePhotograph: Nena FarrellWhat made me like the Dyson V10 Konical so much was how well it did in my testing rounds. I tested it with sand and cereal on rugs, followed by litter on hardwood, and then carpeted stairs and bedrooms. It did better than many Dysons in its overall score, beating the V15 Detect, V16 Piston Animal, and V8 Cyclone with its score.My scoring criteria…
Google announced on Wednesday a new migration experience built directly into Android 17 that should ease the switch from iPhone to Android. The feature lets users wirelessly transfer more data types from an iPhone without needing to download a separate app, Google says. By simplifying the onboarding process and supporting more data types, the tech giant is looking to lower the barriers to switching smartphone ecosystems as it aims to attract more iPhone users. With this new method, users can transfer photos, videos, contacts, messages, calendars, and newly supported data types, including their Google Account, passwords, Wi-Fi credentials, and even…
As Chinese open-weight AI models grow in capability and popularity, arguments about what should be done about them have once again reached a fever pitch. There’s talk that the Trump administration might try to ban them (though it hasn’t yet acted on the idea). Meanwhile, proprietary model makers, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, appear increasingly concerned about them. Open-weight models such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 or Alibaba’s Qwen offer inference at a fraction of the token cost of closed-source models from these large U.S. labs. The fear is that they also pose some sort of threat. Certainly, they threaten the…
The browser wars have entered a new phase this year: The fight isn’t just over search results anymore — it’s over which company’s AI gets to act on your behalf inside the browser. Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari still dominate the market overall, with Chrome’s edge coming largely from how aggressively it has woven generative AI into search. But 2026 has brought a wave of new entrants — from well-funded startups to Big Tech — all betting that the browser is about to become less like a window onto the web and more like an assistant that gets things done…