Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Say More Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List All Series American Psychological Association weighs in on classroom screen time: Quality or quantity? The organization doesn't want to ban screens, but still warns of their harm. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Expert child psychologists urge caution around new and flashy educational technology. Classroom technology is the focus of a new report from the American Psychological Association (APA), which argues we should be focusing less on bans and more on the specific harms of flashy new tech.

Look Up Trending Now Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Creator Playbook Say More Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List All Series The newest AI model from OpenAI is the first to reach the company's highest threat level. Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men's grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he's also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.

A little under two months after releasing its last major model family to the public, GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna, OpenAI is back with an entirely new one: GPT-6 Astra, what it claims is "the most intelligent and aligned model in the world." Following the company's decision to slow frontier model development in August after one of its models hacked AI platform Hugging Face, it may also be the last major AI model it releases for a while. A flashy demo video the company released alongside the launch shows Astra handling everything from 3D modeling to building slideshows, and often taking care of multiple tasks across different domains at the same time (like ordering food while coding a game). Key to Astra's appeal is its ability to handle these multi-step workflows on your computer and in and out of your browser. It's also allegedly able to do those complex tasks with "strong visual judgment," OpenAI says, and without drifting from its original directions or prompt.

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ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all suffered outages at nearly the exact same time for reasons that remain murky. Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI's parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from "an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning." The issues initially appeared to be linked because they coincided--perhaps the result of a shared third-party service provider--but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX, xAI's parent company, did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.

A Memphis data center run by SpaceXAI is apparently the source of the issue that took out Grok for more than three hours Thursday. The company issued a brief apology to Grok users, as well as to unnamed "compute partners" who were also apparently affected by the issues. "We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning," the company wrote. "We'd also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners." We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Slated for wide availability in the coming days, Astra reportedly employs a tough-to-monitor reasoning technique that's raised alarm bells among AI experts. Another day, another major frontier AI release, except this particular OpenAI model is causing more jitters than usual in the AI community. GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI describes as its most advanced model to date, was announced Thursday afternoon, and for now it's available only to members of OpenAI's Daybreak cybersecurity program. The model will be released in the coming days to paid OpenAI and ChatGPT subscribers, including those on Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business accounts, as well as via the OpenAI API.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT originally rated President Donald Trump as a major threat to democracy, according to a new study, but the results differed following an inquiry from Fox News Digital.

Google DeepMind has released the WeatherNext 3, an updated version of its last AI-powered weather model that it claims offers even more detailed forecasts across key variables like temperature, moisture and wind speed. DeepMind notes the new model should be particularly useful to companies working in renewable energy production, because of its ability to forecast "100-meter wind speeds (roughly at turbine-height) for precise wind-energy output, alongside high-resolution cloud cover and sun radiation levels to help solar farms." WeatherNext 3's ability to offer hourly and higher-resolution forecasts (in a 5-kilometer square grid rather than the 25-kilometer square grid of WeatherNext 2) is all due to the new data it's trained on, DeepMind says. Rather than primarily relying on data from numerical weather prediction models, which include a six-hour lag, WeatherNext 3 incorporates live satellite data, which gives the model "a rich, continuously updating view of the atmosphere." The model's ingestion of sparse weather station data means it can also offer more detailed forecasts of variables like humidity, which can usually change dramatically from one kilometer to the next.

Nvidia is competing with OpenAI and Anthropic by acquiring the platforms that threaten its business model. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers a speech during the Computex 2026 exhibition in Taipei, Taiwan on June 1, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. On Thursday, Nvidia, the tech giant that develops chips that power AI tools like ChatGPT, announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion amid an arms race to dominate every level of the industry. Well, specifically, the cost was $12,930,300,000, with 129,303 apparently being the character encoding for the emoji, which the startup Nvidia acquired is named after . Hugging Face is the venture that broke into AI safety discussions when OpenAI's advanced system breached its platform while undergoing a test .