Google Vids adds personal AI avatars and Gemini Omni video tools

Google Vids is expanding from an AI assisted presentation tool into a broader video creation service. The new features let eligible users create a digital avatar based on their own appearance and voice. Sarah Perez reports for TechCrunch that Google Vids creates these personal avatars from an uploaded selfie and voice recording. Users can then …

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AI book mills are flooding Amazon with biographies no one asked for

AI-generated books are rapidly expanding Amazon’s catalogue, often with little disclosure to customers and limited evidence of human authorship. Kashmir Hill reports in The New York Times that an AI generated biography of her appeared on Amazon without her knowledge or participation. The 90 page book, titled “The Biography of Kashmir Hill,” mixed public facts …

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How Claude Code can be a productivity system for people who never touch code

Anthropic’s coding assistant Claude Code is finding an unexpected audience: people who never write a single line of code. Nolen Jonker writes for XDA Developers that the tool has become their most-used productivity app this year, simply by pointing it at a messy folder of files instead of a codebase. The idea is simple. Jonker …

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PrismML brings a 27B-parameter AI model to smartphones

PrismML introduces Bonsai 27B, a compressed version of Qwen3.6 27B that the company describes as the first model of its size to run entirely on a smartphone. PrismML announces in an official blog post that the new model shrinks a 27 billion parameter system down to a few gigabytes without abandoning its reasoning, tool use, …

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China’s Kimi K3 rivals the world’s biggest AI models and it’s open source

Moonshot AI, the Beijing based startup backed by Alibaba, has released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model the company calls in an official blog post the world’s first open 3T-class model. The system combines two new architectural components, Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with a 1 million token context window and native vision …

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NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook and it has new capabilities

Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, expanding its research assistant across the company’s AI ecosystem. Josh Woodward announces the change in an official Google blog post, noting that more than 30 million people and over 600,000 organizations already use the tool to summarize documents, prepare onboarding materials or turn notes into audio and video content. …

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Thinking Machines shows Inkling, an open source multimodal AI model

Thinking Machines, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, has released its first major language model under an open source license. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that the model, called Inkling, targets enterprises that want to run AI on their own servers while keeping costs low and avoiding ideological filtering. …

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New York’s data center moratorium sparks fears of a nationwide trend

New York has become the first state to halt new data center construction, and the tech industry worries it will not be the last. Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order on Tuesday pausing permits for hyperscale data centers larger than 50 megawatts, giving regulators up to a year to draft rules on energy prices …

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