Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand. Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, maintains that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. It was the Friday before Labor Day, a lowering sun, when James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling, spilled off a train and turned to work. He had reached the end of the track in New Jersey. His destination, the Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, was three miles in from the shore. In the normal course of things, Daunt, who is tall and English and who often has the look of someone trying and failing to be invisible, would weave across the final stretch by bicycle--he has a folding Brompton--but the afternoon was muggy, and the traffic unkind, so he crammed into a rideshare car. On the map, Eatontown looked minuscule, but on the approach it unfurled: shopping mall ...

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus Trending Now Look Up In My Bag Mashable @Home Top creators, ranked Creator Playbook AI at School All Series Finally, your avatar can wear HUNTR/X outfits while listening to Golden on loop. Soumya is a deals writer who covers consumer tech, shopping deals, and the products people use every day. With experience writing about everything from AI tools and software to smartphones and home gadgets, she enjoys breaking down product research into clear, useful recommendations. When she's not tracking deals, she's usually comparing products, digging through reviews, and figuring out what actually makes a purchase worth it. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Google's Deepmind "AlphaGo" AI is famous for winning at Go, but the company's latest Gemini AI just mastered a far more complex game. Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft's final "Ender Dragon" foe with no human intervention by working individually while sharing tips, threats and mistakes, Google researchers revealed in a new paper. The experiment shows how general agentic AI models can now beat complex games, a feat that used to required custom AI software. To tackle Minecraft, the Gemini 4 team set four AI agents into a sandboxed, randomized Minecraft survival world with a goal to defeat the Ender Dragon. No roles, strategies or game-specific tools were assigned.

What do AI agents do if you don't tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies or . The agents--copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko--were able to write instructions that moved their virtual avatars around the simulated island, which was loosely based on the video game Roblox.

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Artificial intelligence is just a tool, not a doomsday threat. An industry veteran explains why AI fearmongering ignores its benefits for healthcare, finance and manufacturing.

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Disney Asked Character.AI to Go Bankrupt for a Get-Out-of-Lawsuits Card The entertainment giant hopes to get trust and safety tech, among other IP, from a startup whose chatbots dozens of states allege encouraged minors to self-harm and kill their parents. This week, Character.AI declared bankruptcy. While some saw the fall of a chatbot platform as a harbinger for the industry, court filings indicate that the decision was actually a key part of a deal that has let Disney hire most of Character.AI's staff--including its now former CEO Karandeep Anand --potentially acquire most of Character.AI's technology, and avoid the beleaguered startup's many legal liabilities and obligations. In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI's newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a "consensual resolution" with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company's assets for shareholders.

How far can we push computing? Nowadays big advances are made by scaling up--think more chips packed into ever-bigger data centers. But as we near the ceiling of what we can build, there's still plenty of room below, at the fundamental physical limits of computing. Richard Feynman speaks at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1965. On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck--or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom. Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws of physics. We simply had not built the tools yet.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus Trending Now Look Up In My Bag Mashable @Home Top creators, ranked Creator Playbook AI at School All Series Did Ukraine's data center strikes affect Russia's bot army? We now have better evidence. New data suggests Yandex strikes created an 84 percent decline in pro-Russian accounts on Facebook and Telegram. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father.