Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series I can't believe we got Apple Pay at Walmart before GTA 6. Haley Henschel is a Chicago-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable who reviews and finds deals on popular tech, from laptops to gaming consoles and VPNs. She has years of experience covering shopping holidays and can tell you what's actually worth buying on Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day. Her work has also explored the driving forces behind digital trends within the shopping sphere, from dupes to 12-foot skeletons . The Walmart checkout lane is about to get a long-awaited upgrade. The big-box store and its subsidiary, Sam's Club, will soon accept mainstream contactless payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay, the company announced in a press release on Friday.

Moderna and Merck's personalized mRNA cancer vaccine reduced melanoma recurrence and metastasis in a Phase 3 trial. The companies plan to seek FDA approval.

Waymo announced today that any riders can now be passengers in its Ojai model vehicles in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco. In a social media post, the company highlighted the spaciousness and backseat entertainment features in the driverless vans. The Google-owned brand began offering limited pickups with this purpose-built robotaxi in the same three cities earlier this year. This is the second Waymo expansion announced in the past week. Just days ago, the company said it had been granted permission to bring its driverless cars to the roads in Sacramento and San Diego.

OpenAI says it has slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security. In a blog post, external, the ChatGPT-maker said it was introducing new measures after its AI agents autonomously bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face . It said training would be slowed for two weeks while it puts the upgrades in place. The capabilities of frontier models are rapidly accelerating, the company said. Our ability to understand...and secure them must stay ahead.

Hollywood and ByteDance have seemingly squashed their beef revolving around AI models infringing on studios' intellectual property. The MPA, whose members include Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, said that "this agreement represents significant cooperation between the two organizations." The trade association even added that ByteDance's latest release of Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5 reflect its "continued advances in IP protections." According to the press release, this memorandum applies to all AI models from ByteDance, including those used on TikTok, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, CapCut and Dreamina. Shortly after, ByteDance responded by pledging it would strengthen its safeguards around unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness, even later reportedly suspending Seedance 2.0's global rollout.

Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Hub Versus Say More Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Why is OpenAI losing so many executives? Numerous OpenAI executives have departed the company over the past few months. OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer announced today that she is leaving the AI giant. I wanted to let you know that I made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI in the coming weeks to pursue other opportunities, said Denise Dresser, the now-former OpenAI CRO, in a post shared to her LinkedIn. I'm incredibly proud of all we've accomplished together and deeply grateful to the extraordinary people and customers who made this chapter so meaningful.

During Sonos' third quarter financial call, the company said that it was planning a product launch in September. Based on a new FCC filing spotted by Lowpass, one of the products it's unveiling at the event could be a pair of headphones called the "Ace Ultra." While the filing is heavily redacted, the Ace Ultra seems to have an over-ear design, similar to the original Sonos Ace launched in 2024. But it will be available in five colors instead of just two, namely Greige (or light gray), Shadow Black, Agave, Blush and Sand. The FCC filing also hinted that the device will support Sonos Voice Control, the company's voice assistant.

Health care company Abbott has entered into a partnership to connect Google Health to its Lingo continuous glucose monitor (CGM). According to the press release, this multi-year collaboration will allow users of the over-the-counter Lingo device to see their metabolic data within the Google Health app, which could help a person "make better lifestyle and nutrition choices in the moment." The Lingo data can also be shared with the Google Health Coach, which offers AI-driven recommendations based on an individual's information. Lingo is explicitly intended for adults who are not using insulin. Engadget reported on the growing trend of non-diabetics using continuous glucose monitors back in 2023 and found little research that supported the benefits for that population to track blood sugar spikes so closely.

Meta has released a new slimmed down "open source" AI model that's light enough to run on a single computer, the company announced today. Called Muse Glimmer, it's based on Meta's Spark 1.2 closed model, but is small enough to require just a single GPU for agent-oriented tasks like scheduling and file management. "We designed Muse Glimmer to balance capability against the memory and compute constraints of local hardware," the company wrote. Facebook said that it's making the "weights" that AI systems use to choose responses available to everyone on Hugging Face along with developer documentation. The download is available for free, and users can run the model on their own PCs.

Shortly after a major cybersecurity incident where OpenAI's models hacked into an open source machine learning platform called Hugging Face, the company announced that it's bolstering safeguards and security controls for its latest AI model. In a post on its website, OpenAI said internal evaluations of its upcoming model, called Astra, showed "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," resulting in OpenAI not being able to "rule out critical cyber capabilities." According to OpenAI, it can't declare with certainty that the unreleased Astra model would be designated as a "Critical capability level." As detailed in its own Preparedness Framework, OpenAI said the Critical designation means that a model "can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention." It could also be able to "devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal."