A swath of US technology firms announced deals in the Middle East as Donald Trump trumpeted 600bn in commitments from Saudi Arabia to American artificial intelligence companies during a tour of Gulf states. Among the biggest deals was a set signed by Nvidia. The company will sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips in Saudi Arabia, with a first tranche of 18,000 of its newest "Blackwell" chips going to Humain, Saudi Arabia's sovereign-wealth-fund-owned AI startup, Reuters reported. Cisco on Tuesday said it had signed a deal with G42, the AI firm based in the United Arab Emirates, to help the company develop that country's AI sector. Trump plans to visit the UAE on Thursday.

Apple has been sprinkling AI features into its devices via Apple Intelligence and iOS updates. These features have mainly been fun, nice-to-have additive tools, such as Genmoji, Clean Up in Photos, and Natural Language Search in Photos. However, Apple's latest feature, which is still under wraps, targets a major pain point for users -- their phone battery. On Monday, Bloomberg correspondent and Apple watcher Mark Gurman reported that Apple is working on a new Apple Intelligence feature to help users' device batteries last longer. According to sources close to the matter, the feature is expected to be released with Apple's iOS 19 update, slated for September. NEW: Apple prepares a new Apple Intelligence feature for iOS 19 coming this fall -- an AI-powered battery optimization mode to extend battery life.

Would you trust a chatbot to answer your medical questions? If so, how would you respond to its advice? The latest research by OpenAI suggests that new releases of bots are improving in the ability to generate responses to text-based prompts about medical situations, including emergencies. It's not clear, however, how relevant all that is, since it occurs entirely as a simulated exercise, rather than real-world testing in the clinic or in an actual emergency. The key question left unanswered may be, How would you as a person respond to an automated chat response in a medical emergency?

Ahead of next week's Google I/O developer conference, where AI is expected to be the star of the show, Google on Tuesday unveiled a massive Gemini update, further expanding the AI assistant's availability across the Google ecosystem of devices. For starters, Google announced that Gemini will be coming to WearOS smartwatches later this year. This will allow users to take advantage of Gemini's conversational capabilities and talk to their watches naturally. The biggest advantage is that users can take advantage of hands-free assistance without the help of their phones. Some examples Google offers include setting reminders, getting assistance when your hands are covered in flour while cooking, or in the middle of a workout.

Apple is working on a way for people with physical disabilities to control devices with their thoughts. On Tuesday, the tech giant announced a partnership with brain-computer interface (BCI) company Synchron that's developing an implantable device with electrodes that read brain signals. This technology enables Apple to translate these signals into actions like selecting icons on the screens of iPhones, iPads, and Apple Vision Pro "without the need for physical movement or voice commands," according to the press release. Pittsburgh resident Mark Jackson who has ALS has the Synchron brain implant called Stentrode, which is a "a stent-like device that is implanted in a vein atop the brain's motor cortex." The device "effectively translates brain waves, allowing a user to navigate around a screen and select an icon," the Journal wrote.

Digital scammers have never been so successful. Last year Americans lost 16.6 billion to online crimes, with almost 200,000 people reporting scams like phishing and spoofing to the FBI. More than 470 million was stolen in scams that started with a text message last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. And as the biggest mobile operating system maker in the world, Google has been scrambling to do something, building out tools to warn consumers about potential scams. Ahead of Google's Android 16 launch next week, the company said on Tuesday that it is expanding its recently launched AI flagging feature for the Google Messages app, known as Scam Detection, to provide alerts on potentially nefarious messages like possible crypto scams, financial impersonation, gift card and prize scams, technical support scams, and more.

After publishing my third book in early April, I kept encountering headlines that made me feel like the protagonist of some Black Mirror episode. "Vauhini Vara consulted ChatGPT to help craft her new book'Searches,'" one of them read. "To tell her own story, this acclaimed novelist turned to ChatGPT," said another. "Vauhini Vara examines selfhood with assistance from ChatGPT," went a third. The publications describing Searches this way were reputable and fact-based.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI pulled off one of the greatest corporate promotions in recent memory. Whereas the initial launch of ChatGPT, back in 2022, was "one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen," CEO Sam Altman wrote on social media, the response to a new upgrade was, in his words, "biblical": 1 million users supposedly signed up to use the chatbot in just one hour, Altman reported, thanks to a new, more permissive image-generating capability that could imitate the styles of various art and design studios. Altman called it "a new high-water mark for us in allowing creative freedom." Almost immediately, images began to flood the internet. The most popular style, by a long shot, was that of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and widely beloved for films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A pink flamingo is typically associated with a laid back lifestyle, but the way that these leggy birds with big personalities feed is anything but chill. When they dip their curved necks into the water, the birds use their feet, heads, and beaks to create swirling water tornadoes to efficiently group their prey together and slurp up them up. The findings are detailed in a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water, and the problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed," Victor Ortega Jiménez, a study co-author and biologist specializing in biomechanics at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

That saves you 35 for 35% off. Amazon's voice assistant -- Alexa -- is more powerful than ever. In 2025, Alexa got upgraded to Alexa, which can do a lot more than play music on command. Now Alexa can do multi-step tasks including planning date night and reading a bedtime story to kids. With all of Alexa's new features, it's a pretty good time to invest in an Echo device, and luckily Amazon's flagship is now on sale.