Airbnb rolls out AI-powered search and customer support features, with its chatbot now handling one-third of customer issues independently while the company plans voice call support, multilingual capabilities, and sponsored listings integration.
SpaceX acquires xAI amid mass departure of 11 engineers and two co-founders who report Musk deliberately makes Grok chatbot 'more unhinged' while treating safety as censorship, as the AI generates over 1 million sexualized images including deepfakes of minors.
Chinese AI models like DeepSeek R1 and Alibaba's Qwen capture 30% market share by offering near-frontier capabilities at one-seventh the cost of Western competitors, with open-source releases challenging established industry leaders and reshaping global AI innovation standards.
Chinese AI models like Alibaba's Qwen now surpass Western competitors in downloads and performance while Google's Gemini 3 achieves superhuman research capabilities by catching errors in peer-reviewed mathematics papers that human reviewers missed, as OpenAI pivots toward multi-agent systems.
Voicebox Studio launches as a free, open-source voice cloning platform that runs locally on users' computers, delivering speech synthesis 5x faster than competitors on Apple Silicon while challenging cloud-based services like ElevenLabs with professional editing tools and developer APIs.
Chrome launches WebMCP technology in early preview, introducing new APIs that allow AI agents to directly interact with websites for tasks like customer support, shopping assistance, and travel booking with enhanced speed and reliability.
Flapping Airplanes secures $180 million in seed funding to develop revolutionary AI systems inspired by human brain algorithms that require 1000 times less training data than current OpenAI and DeepMind models, potentially unlocking breakthrough applications in robotics and scientific discovery.
US productivity surges 2.7% in 2025, nearly doubling the past decade's average, as artificial intelligence drives economic growth while employers cut 403,000 jobs from payrolls despite maintaining robust 3.7% GDP growth.
Agentic AI systems surge into mainstream production with 50% of projects now live despite requiring human oversight for 69% of decisions, as autonomous operations rapidly expand from IT into customer-facing applications across enterprises.
Alibaba launches Zvec, a revolutionary open-source vector database that can search through billions of vectors in milliseconds, requiring minimal setup while supporting both dense and sparse vectors with hybrid search capabilities for Python and Node.js applications.