Meta plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems, the company announced today. Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta. The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes.

OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI's application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI's most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. GPT-4.1 scored 55 percent on SWE-Bench, a widely used benchmark for gauging the prowess of coding models.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased that he was dropping a new feature. Paired with reports and spottings of new model art, many speculated it was the long-awaited release of the GPT-4.1 model. It turned out to be a massive ChatGPT update that introduced new memory capabilities -- but now, OpenAI's new family of models has finally arrived. On Monday via a livestream, OpenAI unveiled a new family of models: GPT-4.1, According to OpenAI, the family of models offers improvements in coding, instruction-following, and long-context understanding, and outperforms GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini "across the board."

SAVE 35: As of April 14, get the Amazon Echo for just 64.99. We always have our eyes on Echo devices, the ultra popular smart home device that answer to your beck and call. Plus, with the recently rolled out Alexa, Echo devices are more capable than ever, able to execute tasks like making a dinner reservation or holding a conversation. As of April 14, the Amazon Echo is seeing its first discount of 2025. Now down to 64.99, that saves you 35 off its usual 99.99.

Age: Founded in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. How futuristic – and they've been working on this since 2009? Actually, it goes back to 2004 and a prototype autonomous car built by Stanford University. The Google project became known as Waymo in 2016. Any idea how many more years until we see the first self-driving taxis? They already have them in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, among other places.

I have to admit, heading out to London for 2025 KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe, I thought I might see the beginning of the downward trend for the event about building, deploying, and managing next-generation cloud applications and infrastructures. After all, the show turned 10 last year, and, in my experience, that's when conferences start to show their age. Plus, there has been lots of news around the effect of AI on application development, and while KubeCon isn't directly about dev, much of its focus is on applications and services. But boy, was I wrong. In fact, KubeCon 2025 in London was packed, with over 12,000 attendees.

Do our spirits live on after death? For most people, the question doesn't seem to require much soul-searching. A colossal 83 per cent of adults in the US believe that human souls exist, according to a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Centre. Many religions believe that, when we die, our immortal souls survive or are reincarnated. While there has never been a scientific consensus, the debate is ongoing.

Have you ever wanted to build your own custom application but didn't want to take the time to do any of the pesky learning that software development requires? If so, a new experimental project from GitHub might just make your dreams come true. GitHub Spark lets you build what the company calls "micro apps" or "sparks." These are very limited custom applications that perform one or two basic tasks. You create them through a chatbot interface, and when you're done, you get a spark you can (someday) share with all your friends.

On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI has dramatically minimized its safety testing timeline. Also: The top 20 AI tools of 2025 - and the No. 1 thing to remember when you use them Eight people who are either staff at the company or third-party testers told FT that they had "just days" to complete evaluations on new models -- a process they say they would normally be given "several months" for. Evaluations are what can surface model risks and other harms, such as whether a user could jailbreak a model to provide instructions for creating a bioweapon. For comparison, sources told FT that OpenAI gave them six months to review GPT-4 before it was released -- and that they only found concerning capabilities after two months. Sources added that OpenAI's tests are not as thorough as they used to be and lack the necessary time and resources to properly catch and mitigate risks.

Nowadays, you can find lots of great daily driver laptops that pack more than enough power to floor you at surprisingly affordable prices--like this Acer Swift 16 AI, now available for 800 at Best Buy (was 1,250). That's a hefty 450 discount for a laptop we recently gave a positive review. Running on an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, this sleek and sturdy Intel Lunar Lake laptop is AI-ready and supports all the Copilot AI features that are coming and part of Windows 11. The 1TB SSD offers plenty of storage for work, photos, apps, and even running local LLMs directly on the laptop. In our review of the Acer Swift 16 AI, we praised the laptop's sharp 16-inch OLED screen and great battery life.