Google’s Gemini chatbot reaches 750 million monthly users

Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has reached 750 million monthly active users, marking significant growth in the competitive AI assistant market. The milestone was announced during Alphabet’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings report. Lauren Forristal reports for TechCrunch that this represents a jump of 100 million users from the previous quarter, when Gemini had 650 million monthly active …

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Mistral releases Voxtral Transcribe 2: transcribe on your phone for pennies

Mistral AI has released Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models designed for both batch processing and real-time transcription. The company positions the technology as more accurate and significantly cheaper than competing services while enabling on-device processing for sensitive data. The release includes two models. Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 handles pre-recorded audio files at …

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Major news publishers block Internet Archive over AI scraping fears

Major news publishers are restricting the Internet Archive’s access to their content, worried that AI companies might use the nonprofit’s digital library as a backdoor to scrape their articles for training data. Andrew Deck reports for Nieman Lab that outlets including The Guardian and The New York Times have taken steps to limit how the …

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OpenAI and Anthropic race to be first major AI startup to go public

OpenAI is holding informal discussions with Wall Street banks about a potential initial public offering, positioning itself in a race against rival Anthropic to become the first major generative AI company to tap public markets. The ChatGPT maker has expanded its finance team with key hires including chief accounting officer Ajmere Dale and corporate business …

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Music industry strikes cautious AI deals despite artist concerns

The music industry faces an existential dilemma as AI-generated songs infiltrate streaming platforms, prompting major labels to sign licensing deals while artists and platforms struggle to define acceptable boundaries. Anna Nicolaou and Cristina Criddle report for the Financial Times. A recent incident in Sweden illustrates the tension. A folk-pop song by “Jacub” topped Spotify charts …

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Wiki Education finds two-thirds of AI-generated Wikipedia articles fail verification checks

Wiki Education has concluded that editors should never copy and paste content from AI chatbots like ChatGPT directly into Wikipedia articles, following an extensive investigation into AI-generated content on the platform. LiAnna Davis, representing Wiki Education, reports in a detailed blog post that the organization discovered a troubling pattern after analyzing thousands of articles created …

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AI job displacement threatens 6.1 million US workers with limited adaptation capacity

New research from the Brookings Institution reveals a critical gap in how policymakers assess artificial intelligence’s impact on the workforce. While 37.1 million American workers face high AI exposure, 6.1 million lack the resources to adapt if job loss occurs. Sam Manning and Tomás Aguirre report for the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers …

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OpenAI shifts focus to ChatGPT as senior researchers depart

OpenAI is redirecting resources away from experimental research to focus on improving ChatGPT, prompting several senior staff members to leave the company. The shift reflects mounting competitive pressure from Google and Anthropic as the $500 billion company evolves from research lab into commercial enterprise. Cristina Criddle reports for the Financial Times that vice-president of research …

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ChatGPT’s market share drops as Google and Grok gain ground

ChatGPT’s commanding lead in the chatbot market is shrinking as competitors gain momentum. OpenAI’s flagship product saw its market share among daily U.S. mobile app users fall from 69.1% to 45.3% between January 2025 and January 2026. Alex Kantrowitz reports for Big Technology, citing data from mobile insights firm Apptopia. During the same period, Google’s …

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Microsoft and Mozilla scale back AI features after user backlash

Two major tech companies are pulling back on AI features in their software following negative user feedback. Microsoft is reconsidering its aggressive integration of Copilot across Windows 11, while Mozilla is introducing controls to disable all AI features in Firefox. Microsoft faces criticism for adding Copilot buttons throughout Windows 11 applications, including File Explorer and …

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