We're exactly one week out from Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2025 -- and we expect the event to bring major changes to the iPhone's iOS software. So far, we have more rumors than facts about the updates to iOS, but these rumors are all but confirmed. Last week, we learned that Apple would be leaping from iOS 18.5 to iOS 26, switching to a new year-based naming convention for iOS (and macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS), as first reported by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who has a rock-solid history of major Apple scoops. What changes can we expect from iOS 26 and WWDC 2025? Apple is teasing the June 9 event with a banner and "Sleek peek" tagline but is otherwise quiet.

SAVE 20: The Amazon Echo Spot is on sale for just 59.99, down from 79.99 as of June 2. That's the lowest price its seen all year. Not to mention, it comes with a free WiZ smart bulb. One of the newest additions to the Amazon Echo family, the Echo Spot serves as a fancy alarm clock to help you wake up and wind down each day with smart features. If your morning routine could use a boost, now's a great time to grab one, as it's down to its lowest price this year.

Lanyard-clad attendees with branded tote bags and pink-shirted volunteers flowed through London's Brick Lane on Monday, marking the launch of the inaugural SXSW London festival. Taking place over multiple stages and venues in Shoreditch and Hoxton, SXSW London has officially kicked off its first full day of panels, keynotes, demonstrations, movie premieres, and music gigs. And luckily, Londoners are no strangers to a queue, with SXSW's penchant for long lines outside Austin venues replicated in the UK capital. Playing to the strengths of fellow conferences, the biggest topics of SXSW London are the impact of AI on essentially anything you could think of, the creator economy and online communities, and self-driving tech -- I spied a Wayve autonomous vehicle carefully navigating the pedestrian-filled Brick Lane (with a human driver behind the wheel, just in case). London mayor Sadiq Khan officially launched the festival with a speech Monday morning, championing London as "a global centre for AI investment and innovation," emphasising a focus on ethical and accessible AI development, and playing to the audience with a ChatGPT anecdote.

How many people visit AIs like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google Gemini each month? Whether you're just curious about such stats or need them for your own business or research, you can now turn to Comscore for the answers. On Thursday, the analytics firm announced that it has officially added AI usage information to its regular analysis. Comscore clients will be able to find out the number of monthly visits for 117 different AI tools across nine categories, covering both PC and mobile use. Also: How much energy does AI really use?

"I recently made a commitment that my wealth will be given away over the next 20 years. The majority of that funding will be spent on helping you address challenges here in Africa," he said in an address at the African Union (AU) headquarters. Mozambique's former First Lady Graça Machel welcomed his announcement, saying it came in a "moment of crisis". "We are counting on Mr Gates' steadfast commitment to continue walking this path of transformation alongside us," she said. The US government has cut aid to Africa, including programmes to treat patients with HIV/Aids, as part of US President Donald Trump's "America First" policy, raising concerns about the future of healthcare on the continent.

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has hit 3 billion in annualized revenue, marking a 200% increase in just five months, according to a Friday report from Reuters. Anthropic's annualized revenue -- or its total projected earnings over the course of the year, assuming its current rate of income continues -- was close to 1 billion in December, according to the Reuters report, which cited anonymous sources close to the matter. It crossed the 2 billion threshold in late March and reached 3 billion last month. Also: Anthropic's free Claude 4 Sonnet aced my coding tests - but its paid Opus model somehow didn't Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both former OpenAI employees, Anthropic has built its business model around its Claude family of generative AI chatbots. The company has also positioned itself as a leader in the responsible deployment of powerful AI tools.

We live in uncertain times. From geopolitical tension, macroeconomic instability, and digital transformation, business leaders must develop strategies that help their organizations survive and thrive in a complex world. Five business leaders give us their top tips. Gabriela Vogel, vice president analyst in Gartner's Executive Leadership of Digital Business practice, said her company's research stresses the importance of developing tech-enabled flexibility. "You must be able to adapt your organization to all of the crazy changes happening around the world. And part of that approach is achieved with technology," she said.

Decoding non-invasive brain recordings is pivotal for advancing our understanding of human cognition but faces challenges due to individual differences and complex neural signal representations. Traditional methods often require customized models and extensive trials, lacking interpretability in visual reconstruction tasks.

We address the problem of aggregating an ensemble of predictors with known loss bounds in a semi-supervised binary classification setting, to minimize prediction loss incurred on the unlabeled data. We find the minimax optimal predictions for a very general class of loss functions including all convex and many non-convex losses, extending a recent analysis of the problem for misclassification error. The result is a family of semi-supervised ensemble aggregation algorithms which are as efficient as linear learning by convex optimization, but are minimax optimal without any relaxations. Their decision rules take a form familiar in decision theory -- applying sigmoid functions to a notion of ensemble margin -- without the assumptions typically made in margin-based learning.

The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the traditional economic models, it is assumed that the bidders' valuations are drawn from an underlying distribution and that the auction designer has perfect knowledge of this distribution. Despite this strong and oftentimes unrealistic assumption, it is remarkable that the revenue-maximizing combinatorial auction remains unknown. In recent years, automated mechanism design has emerged as one of the most practical and promising approaches to designing high-revenue combinatorial auctions. The most scalable automated mechanism design algorithms take as input samples from the bidders' valuation distribution and then search for a high-revenue auction in a rich auction class.