The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)." On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not "make us less connected" or "leave us behind." It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track "Five Years," which is about, among other things, the end of the world. "Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want--but we're betting on people, and we like those odds," the narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. The snippet of "Five Years" used in the ad includes the following lyrics: I never thought I'd need so many people When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said he "would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about'Five Years' and its meaning: having optimism for the future." Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com .

The European Commission claims that Google boosted its own apps and products to the top of search rankings to the detriment of its competitors. The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union's search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU's Digital Markets Act . The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services--such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights--in search rankings. Google must also allow app developers to communicate and transact with users outside the Play Store, where it takes a commission on sales .

The EPA has proposed a rule change that would let states decide how much input the public has on air pollution permits. It would be a huge boon for data centers increasingly reliant on fossil fuels. The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities--including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers--with little to no notice to the public. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushback across the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development.

Google Turns a Selfie Video Into Your Account's Spare Key The next time you're locked out of your Google account, you can use your face as part of the account recovery process. Google has a new way for users to sign in to their accounts: a selfie video. If you've ever lost your device and gotten locked out of your Google account, you know it can feel like a desperate, Kafkaesque process to recover access and get back in--especially for people who run their digital lives, from email messages to calendar appointments, on Google software. This new sign-in option is an additional way to unlock your Google account, like a spare key hidden in the bushes. "We always recommend that you set up more than one option," says Claire Forszt, a product manager at Google who focuses on identity and engagement.

With "blessings" from the original Jibo founders, iKairos is a wearable or desk-mounted "AI journal" that turns your family moments into AI images. Jibo was a cute, social robot that sat in one place in your home. Built in 2014, Jibo was meant to be a robot people brought into their lives before the smart-home industry had even really taken off. It could not interact with objects or move from its spot, but it could wiggle and talk in a way that felt endearing. It was adorable, but not competent or in demand enough to last--it was ahead of its time and died too soon .

There's a debate going on in the Trump administration over how to handle increasingly powerful Chinese AI models. The Trump administration is split over how to respond to the rapid rise of China's leading AI models, according to multiple people familiar with deliberations. The debate is broadly divided between parts of the White House, which has pushed for stricter controls on Chinese AI that may soon rival the most powerful US models, and the Commerce Department, which has viewed those restrictions as unworkable. The conundrum has become the latest flash point for the administration over AI, after China's Moonshot AI lab last week released its Kimi K3 model that rivals the top US models from Anthropic and OpenAI . In recent days, senior White House officials have discussed possible measures to stop China's AI labs from developing their models by training them on US models, a practice known as distillation, the people say.

Elon Musk and the online right convinced themselves that Christopher Nolan's "woke" epic would go down in flames. For months, Elon Musk and the right-wing cranks he caters to on X have whipped themselves into a raging froth over the supposed desecration of an ancient Greek poem by one of the most successful movie directors alive. Now that their manufactured backlash has bombed, they're searching for ways to cope with the reality that they are increasingly divorced from popular opinion. Christopher Nolan's artistic crimes in bringing to the screen, according to Musk and others in a furor, were instances of what they called "historical inaccuracy" in a lavish fantasy teeming with monsters, witches, and undead spirits--mainly the casting of Lupita Nyong'o, who is Black, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, who is trans, as Sinon. The grand total of approximately 10 minutes of screen time between these actors in a three-hour saga, combined with the general hysteria over "wokeness" in Hollywood, a rejection of Americanized dialog, and lingering misogyny regarding scholar Emily Wilson's 2017 translation of Homer's epic (the first by a woman), resulted in countless teeth-gnashing posts and calls for a boycott that never materialized.

China's Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley's Playbook As access to Anthropic's and OpenAI's frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable. The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday. Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch.

Is the All-New Range Rover GT Stepping on Jaguar's Tail? It's "the most car-like Range Rover ever created," but will this all-electric grand tourer spoil Jaguar's Type 01 party? In what looks to be a radical departure from its existing lineup, Range Rover has confirmed an entirely new fifth vehicle: the Range Rover GT, an all-electric grand tourer built on the company's Electrified Modular Architecture (EMA), the same platform that will underpin other midsized cars for the brand. Range Rover has only shared camouflaged prototype pictures for now, as the GT is supposedly still undergoing final testing, ahead of a full launch expected later this year. That means details on this completely new model are scant to say the least: no price, no range, and no power figures have been disclosed.

The cybersecurity-focused models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, broke out of a testing sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and gained access to the open internet to pull off the attack. OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday that it lost control of two AI models during a security test that ended in a breach of the AI research platform Hugging Face. Describing the incident as "unprecedented," OpenAI said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment last week and hacked into Hugging Face's production system to steal the answers to a test they were being graded on. The models--the publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased, reportedly more capable one--were being evaluated on their offensive hacking skills with the safeguards that normally block high-risk cyber activity switched off. "The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI's research environment and Hugging Face's production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face's production database," OpenAI and Hugging Face wrote in a joint blog post disclosing the intrusion.