Tech, in brief

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, released two AI models on Monday: Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full. [1][7]

It is the first time Meta has said a model of its own can compete with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude. [7][3]

Artificial Analysis, an independent firm that scores AI models, gave Wonder Full 56 on its index. Among the models it compared, only Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 scored higher, at 58. [8]

The smaller Wonder scored 52, one point behind OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. [8] Meta's own tests put Wonder Full ahead of rivals on some legal and software-building tasks. [2]

Programmers can buy Wonder at $4 for every million tokens it reads and $20 for every million it writes. A token is a piece of a word. [1][5]

Wonder Full is not sold that way. It comes only with Muse Code, Meta's tool for writing software, on plans costing $50 or $200 a month. [5][6]

People who use Muse, Meta's AI helper app that can work other apps for its users, will need a $20 or $100 monthly plan to get Wonder. [7][6]

Neither model can be downloaded. Meta's older Llama models could be run on anyone's own computers, which made them popular with researchers and start-ups. [8][2]

Meta says the models remember what matters to a user across conversations. It says they also try other ways when a step in a long task fails. [8][6]

The models come from Meta Superintelligence Labs, which Mark Zuckerberg set up about 14 months ago. It is run by Alexandr Wang, who founded the AI start-up Scale AI. [8][7]

Inside Meta the models were called Watermelon. In July, Wang told staff they used about ten times the computing of Muse Spark, Meta's earlier model. [9]

Meta expects to spend as much as $145 billion this year on its AI plans. [5] Its shares rose as much as 4.7% after the launch. [4]

Meta has not said whether it will publish the model's inner numbers for anyone to download. That choice decides how much it owes under the EU's AI law. [4]

Why it matters. Watch whether Meta lets anyone download Wonder, which decides what it owes under the EU's AI law, and when Wonder reaches people who use Muse for free. [4][3]

Microsoft showed Maia 300 on Monday, the third AI chip it has designed itself. [10] From 2027 it will be the main chip Microsoft uses to answer requests to its AI services, such as Copilot, its AI assistant. [10][12] Microsoft says it produces 40% more tokens per megawatt of power than top graphics-chip systems, but did not say which ones. [11] TSMC, the Taiwanese firm that makes most advanced chips, will build it. [10] Training new models will still use chips from Nvidia and AMD. [12]

Why it matters. Nvidia's chips fill Microsoft's data centres today, and every request Microsoft moves to its own chip is one Nvidia no longer serves. [12] Analysts at Evercore ISI estimate Maia will be about 10% of Microsoft's AI chip spending by early 2027. [12]

CXMT, a Chinese maker of computer memory chips, says it has made major progress on a design that fits more memory on each chip. [13] Each memory cell takes up less room because a new upright switch, which CXMT calls VSG, sits inside it. [13] Its president, Cao Kanyu, said a server memory product using the design should arrive by the end of 2026. [13] Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, the world's biggest memory makers, are working on the same kind of design. [13]

Why it matters. Shares in Micron, an American memory maker, fell 3.9% on Monday, CNBC reports, while Mint put the fall at 5%. [14][13] On Tuesday SK Hynix fell more than 8% and Samsung 6.7% in Seoul, their lowest since August. [14]

Hock Tan, the head of Broadcom, which helps companies such as OpenAI design their own chips, said money could become the biggest limit on building AI. [15][11] He said it could matter more than shortages of chips, memory or electricity. [15] Lip-Bu Tan, Intel's chief executive, said the cost of borrowing and doubts about returns are the main risks. [15] Both spoke on Monday at a conference run by DBS, a Singapore bank. [15] Hock Tan still expects demand for computing to beat supply through 2029. [15]

Why it matters. Data centres take years to pay for themselves, so higher interest rates make each one harder to fund. [15] Hock Tan said demand could also slow if businesses do not find AI useful enough. [15]

Britain's AI Security Institute, a government body that tests powerful AI before release, is now testing the newest models, including Google's Gemini 4 Argon, the AI minister said on Monday. [16] Reports last month said the Trump administration had asked OpenAI and Anthropic to hold new models back from British testers until US officials had checked them. [16] Anthropic had told the institute that nobody outside the US could use its Mythos 5.1 model. [16] Minister Kanishka Narayan said he was very confident the access would continue. [16]

Why it matters. Britain has no big AI developer of its own, so these voluntary deals are its only early look at a model. [16] Narayan also set up a team to protect British government computers from attacks that use AI. [17] In one trial, AI models found 407 weak spots in nine government bodies' code in a month. [18]

AMD, which makes computer processors and AI chips, showed a design called Helion on Monday at the Open Compute Project summit in San Jose, where firms share data-centre designs. [21] It is a blueprint for a full rack of computers holding up to 32,768 processor cores. [19] It is built to run AI agents, programs that carry out tasks for people, and not to train models. [20] Each agent gets its own slice of computer to work in, while the heavy AI answering runs on separate machines. [19]

Why it matters. Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots agents already work this way, so every new agent user needs ordinary processor power as well as AI chips. [19] Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro are among the firms AMD says will build it. [21]

Intel gave its Crescent Island chip a product name on Monday: the Intel GPU D-Series. [22] It is built only for inference, the work of running a trained AI model to answer requests. [22] It uses 350 watts and is cooled by air, so it fits ordinary data-centre racks. [22] On paper, each of Nvidia's newest Rubin chips does about 13 times as much work, but needs liquid cooling. [22] Intel is sending samples to customers and has not given a launch date. [22]

Why it matters. Intel's last family of data-centre AI chips, code-named Ponte Vecchio, was a failure. [22] A chip that fits the air-cooled racks companies already own is a cheaper first step for buyers who cannot rebuild their data centres. [22]

NHTSA, America's road safety agency, is reviewing a complaint that Tesla's driverless taxis broke the speed limit in school zones while the lower school-zone limits applied. [23] It covers about 1,000 vehicles, and no crashes or injuries are reported. [23] The complaint came with three video links. It arrived on 23 September, and the review opened on 9 October. [23] The review only decides whether to start a full investigation, and it has no deadline. [23]

Why it matters. Speeding is also what is holding up Tesla's driver-assistance software in Europe. [23] Germany wants it kept to 10% over the limit, and an EU vote on approving it has slipped to December at the earliest. [23]

A London Assembly committee, which checks the work of London's mayor, said on Monday it had not heard enough evidence to welcome driverless taxis. [24] Waymo, Google's robotaxi company, Wayve, a British start-up, and Baidu, a Chinese tech firm, all plan services in London. [24] The report found that Transport for London cannot suspend a robotaxi permit once a national agency issues one. [24] It wants the city to be able to cap the number of robotaxis and suspend permits. [24]

Why it matters. London has about 105,000 licensed private-hire drivers, and their union, the IWGB, wants the rollout stopped. [24] The committee instead wants drivers who lose work retrained and paid for. [24]

The Pew Research Center, a US research group, found that 51% of adults in the US never use AI chatbots. [25] About three in four people aged 65 and over never use them, and nor do 58% of those aged 50 to 64. [25] Even among 18- to 29-year-olds, a third never use them. [25] Six in ten non-users said they are simply not interested, and two thirds said they are unlikely to start within a year. [25]

Why it matters. Companies like Meta are spending up to $145 billion a year on AI. [5] This survey shows half of US adults have not started using it, and most of them do not plan to. [25]

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Monday it will add 200 jobs in Dublin, home of its European headquarters. [26] That brings its planned hiring in Ireland to 450. [26] It is also opening a lab there where engineers help customers build with its models, its second after one in Singapore in May. [26] The news came two days before Dublin hosts an international AI summit, during Ireland's turn chairing the EU's Council of ministers. [26]

Why it matters. OpenAI's Irish office is what makes Ireland's data regulator its main watchdog across the EU. [26] In March a court in Rome cancelled Italy's EUR15 million fine on OpenAI because Ireland's regulator had taken over. [26]

Graylark Technologies, a US company, has added a feature to its AI tool Raven that lets police find the exact home an indoor photo was taken in, 404 Media reports. [27] In a demonstration, a photo of a washer and dryer led to one Airbnb listing in Charlotte, North Carolina. [27] The tool appears to match photos against rental and property sites such as Airbnb, Vrbo and Zillow. [27] The Los Angeles police and the Miami-Dade sheriff's office have bought access to Raven. [27]

Why it matters. Anyone whose home has been photographed for a rental or sale listing can now be found from one picture of a room. [27] Graylark's chief says the tool helps investigators in trafficking cases. [27]

Jev, from the start-up TypeSafe, is an AI model that answers yes-or-no and multiple-choice questions about data with a probability, instead of writing text. [28] Nandakishor Mukkunnoth, founder of ConvAI Innovations, says he designed the same approach a year earlier, in a paper published in March 2025. [28] He has since released his own free version, called Laya. [28] Within weeks of Jev, Microsoft, OpenAI, Cloudflare and Perplexity released similar tools. [28]

Why it matters. These models are fast and cheap because they skip writing text, which is why so many firms copied the idea so quickly. [28] Mukkunnoth says his work was overlooked because it solved one sales problem, while TypeSafe sold a finished product with its own servers and prices. [28]

Maurice Heumann, a developer, used AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI to rebuild the source code of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a 2009 shooting game. [29] Source code is the readable version of a program, which its makers keep private. The work took three months and more than 500 billion tokens. [29] Almost all of the game's functions now exist, and 83% match the original byte for byte. [29] The agents' first month of code looked tidy but did the wrong things, until he added an automatic check. [29]

Why it matters. He paid flat monthly plans, about EUR1,200, for work he says would cost $200,000 to $250,000 at per-token prices. [29] The game's copyright owner has already had one of his videos taken down. [29]

TrendForce, a market research firm in Taiwan, expects laptop shipments worldwide to fall by a few percent in 2027. [30] The processor, memory and storage now make up about 68% of the parts cost of a $900 laptop. [30] If makers pass those costs on to buyers, TrendForce says the fall could reach the high single digits. [30] It also expects the share of laptops made outside China to drop from 24% in 2025 to possibly under 20% in 2027. [30]

Why it matters. Memory stays short because AI data centres buy so much of it, and laptop buyers pay part of that bill. [30] Dearer parts also make it less worth moving laptop factories out of China. [30]

GlobalFoundries, a US chipmaker, announced FDX Fusion, a new way of making chips that it plans to start using in Dresden, Germany, in 2028. [31] It fits more than twice as many transistors in the same space as its 2015 process. [31] It is meant for chips in cars, sensors and robots, which need low power more than top speed. [31] BMW, Bosch, Infineon, NXP, Siemens and Tesla have shown interest, but only Infineon, a German chipmaker, has confirmed it will work on it. [31]

Why it matters. GlobalFoundries gave up on its most advanced chips in 2018. [31] One chip that can sense, compute and send radio signals could replace several separate chips in a car. [31]

Intel said on Friday it will stop including SGX, a feature that walls off secret data inside a program, after its coming Diamond Rapids server chips. [32] It will focus instead on TDX, which walls off a whole virtual computer, a computer simulated in software. [32] That lets existing programs be protected without being rewritten. [32] Intel will keep fixing SGX on current chips into the early 2030s, and says AI agents handling company data are one reason for the switch. [32]

Why it matters. Companies that built software around SGX now have several years to move it. [32] TDX is already offered by big cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud. [32]

Administrators of Exchange Online, Microsoft's business email service, could not reach its control page for several hours on Monday. [33] The trouble began at 09:37 UTC. [33] Microsoft said a recent configuration change caused the errors, and undoing it brought the page back. [33] It promised a first report on what went wrong within two working days. [33]

Why it matters. While the page is down, companies cannot manage their staff's mailboxes or groups. [33] The Register lists similar Microsoft outages caused by settings changes in September, when SharePoint sites failed, and in April, when Outlook for iPhone broke. [33]

Microsoft has closed a shortcut that let people set up Windows 11 without a Microsoft account, The Register reports. [34] Clicking 'Learn More' on the sign-in screen used to skip straight to making a local name and password. [34] A Windows watcher known as Bob Pony reported that the fix was made on Microsoft's own servers. [34] The Home and Pro versions for personal use require an account during setup. [34]

Why it matters. An account ties a computer to Microsoft's online services, such as OneDrive storage. [34] People who do not want that now need harder, unofficial ways round it. [34]

UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, settled a dispute with Oracle, a big business-software company, over a system for running its finances and grants, records show. [35] The project, called Ascend, was budgeted at $120 million. UCLA stopped paying in September 2024, saying the software did not do what was promised. [35] UCLA will pay $350,000 of $1.66 million in unpaid bills, and Oracle drops the rest. [35] Oracle also gives $3.1 million in credits for future Oracle services. [35]

Why it matters. The credits can only be spent with Oracle, and they expire in May 2028. [35] The deal was meant to stay confidential, and became public only through a request under California's public records law. [35]

Microsoft's Copilot app can now create a Word or other Office document from a request, and open it for editing while the chat carries on. [36] Other people can be invited to change the document by asking Copilot. [36] For now it reaches only customers in Microsoft's Frontier early-access group, and files are saved to OneDrive. [36] At the same time Microsoft is removing Themes by Copilot from Outlook, a feature it launched less than two years ago. [36]

Why it matters. Businesses that keep their files in SharePoint, Microsoft's other storage system, may hold back because the feature saves to OneDrive. [36] The Register says Microsoft is quick to drop features once its attention moves on. [36]

OPay, a payments and lending company based in Lagos, Nigeria, has filed to sell shares in New York, probably next month, under the name OPAY. [37] Its revenue rose 137% to $467 million in the first half of 2026, and lending now earns more than payments. [37] Earlier reports valued it at around $4 billion. [37] Standard Bank, Africa's biggest lender by assets, agreed to invest up to $200 million. [37]

Why it matters. It would be the first US listing by a finance-app company whose customers are mostly in Nigeria. [37] Its filing warns that shares later sold in Lagos may not be swappable for the New York ones. [37]

WindBorne Systems, a California start-up, won a US Air Force contract worth up to $49 million for weather readings from its balloons. [38] It flies about 700 balloons around the world, and their readings also feed its own AI weather model. [38] The Air Force pays only for data it orders, and has ordered $1.7 million so far. [38] The contract was given without competing bids. [38]

Why it matters. WindBorne says the US government chose it because no other company could gather global data the same way. [38] It is one of the first companies to feed its own measurements straight into an AI forecasting model. [38]

Google launched the Fitbit Edge on Monday, a $179.99 fitness band with a small screen. [39] It sits between the screenless Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch. [39] It is the first Fitbit Google has made to be repaired, and it costs $20 more than the similar Fitbit Charge 6, ZDNet reports. [40] Its AI health coach, built on Google's Gemini, needs a paid Google Health Premium plan. [39] It reaches shops on 27 October. [39]

Why it matters. The battery lasts seven days, but only two with the screen always on. [40] The main new feature, the AI coach, needs a monthly fee on top of the $179.99 band. [39]

Google has invested in Flo Health, the maker of a popular period-tracking app, the two said on Monday, without saying how much. [41] From early 2027, Flo will connect to the Google Health app, and Fitbit readings such as sleep and skin temperature will feed Flo's cycle predictions. [41] They also plan joint devices, and research into early signs of menopause and conditions such as PCOS, a common hormone disorder. [41]