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Android Auto rolls out Gemini Personal Intelligence, but it is not yet available in the EU and other regions

Google has launched Gemini Personal Intelligence for Android Auto, which can draw on data from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Maps, YouTube and Search, for example to look up a flight's boarding gate or set navigation to a location shown in a photo. The feature is rolling out in all regions except the EU, Switzerland, the UK and Nigeria, and it is not yet clear when users in Germany will be able to use it. Personal Intelligence is off by default and requires authorization in the Gemini app before it can access these Google services.

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Simon Willison built Battle Drones, an audio-networked RTS game, with Claude Code

Simon Willison released Battle Drones, a real-time strategy game developed entirely through vibe coding with Claude Code. It went through 12 major versions and 321 commits and runs in mobile and desktop browsers. The game includes 9 building types, 7 ground vehicles, 6 air vehicles and 3 infantry units, and supports fog of war, random map generation, AI versus AI, and an Agent battle mode in which two LLMs fight each other. He also implemented a multiplayer method in which two devices synchronize game state via microphone audio, and because the audio caused headaches, he added online multiplayer based on a WebSockets relay server.

IRONSCALES Report: AI Agents Are Becoming the New Target of Phishing

The "From Deepfakes to Double Agents" report, published by IRONSCALES after commissioning Censuswide to survey 501 U.S. IT and security practitioners, shows that 77% of respondents said their organization's AI agents or tools had processed malicious, misleading, or unauthorized content in the past year, and 57% reported at least one confirmed incident. 96% of surveyed organizations already use AI tools that can perform actions on their behalf, of which 67% allow them to access ticketing or help desk systems and 49% allow access to email and messaging systems, while 78% of such tools are approved under the leadership of IT departments, with only 6% led by security departments.

Microsoft unveils a range of new cloud sovereignty tools at the Paris Frontier Tour

At the Paris Frontier Tour, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and cloud business head Douglas Phillips unveiled a modular cloud sovereignty solution that lets enterprises decide for themselves the degree of control, transparency, and local execution for each computing task. A new Sovereign Control Panel aggregates Azure sovereignty signals, and a data guard and a Production Touch Ledger that records remote operations by Microsoft engineers are being rolled out gradually. Azure Managed HSM external key management is now generally available, and on the Azure Local side, DocumentDB, Blob Storage, GitHub Enterprise Local, and Foundry Local have been added. The German Informatics Society (GI) and others criticize such solutions as merely surface-level add-on controls, with the underlying software stack still controlled by US vendors.

Google and Meta jointly launch TorchTPU, enabling PyTorch to run natively on TPUs

Google and Meta's PyTorch teams have collaborated to launch the open-source project TorchTPU, providing a native PyTorch backend for Google TPUs; migration only requires changing model.to("cuda") to model.to("tpu"). The project supports both eager and torch.compile modes, adds a new DeferAndFuse eager mode, covers about 450 Aten operators, and has been verified to run out of the box on 4,917 Hugging Face models, with a Tier 1 pass rate of 98% and Tier 2 numerical consistency relative to GPUs of 97%. According to the official announcement, it has already been used in the inference and training production workloads of some major Google Cloud customers, and is integrated with vLLM, SGLang, TorchTitan, Ray, and TorchRec.

How to Transcribe Podcasts with AI: A Step-by-Step Guide

ElevenLabs has released a guide introducing a five-step process for transcribing podcasts with AI: export the audio, choose a method, upload and configure, review the output, and export the file. Its Scribe v2 supports more than 90 languages and up to 32 speakers per file; the web version has a 3GB per-file limit, and standard mode can process recordings up to 10 hours long. SRT and VTT are suited to podcast apps and subtitles, while plain text or HTML is better for websites and blogs.

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iFlytek's non-recurring net loss in the first three quarters was 763 million yuan, with its book profit turned positive by subsidies and equity gains

In the first three quarters, iFlytek's revenue was 18.187 billion yuan, and net profit attributable to shareholders was 21.8872 million yuan, but non-recurring net profit showed a loss of 763 million yuan, more than double the 338 million yuan loss in the same period last year. The book turnaround to positive was mainly due to 471 million yuan in government subsidies, 370 million yuan in equity appreciation of invested companies, and 84 million yuan in asset disposal income, totaling about 785 million yuan. The company's R&D expenses in the first three quarters were 3.850 billion yuan, accounting for more than 21% of revenue, and it attributed the widened non-recurring loss to continued investment in the self-controlled large model route; in public domestic large model tenders in the third quarter, iFlytek ranked first in both the number and amount of bids won.

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OpenAI plans to raise $30 billion, targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation

According to Reuters citing people familiar with the matter, OpenAI is accelerating its fundraising and plans to raise about $30 billion from investors, with its valuation expected to exceed $1.4 trillion, with SoftBank Group and MGX participating. OpenAI is pitching investors on $50 billion in annualized revenue and expects annualized revenue to reach $70 billion by year-end as the GPT-6 Astra model launches. The fundraising process is intended to lock in subscription commitments before Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO; OpenAI's valuation reached $852 billion after raising $122 billion in March this year.

Otter.ai receives $320 million investment from General Catalyst's growth fund for its meeting tool

Meeting transcription tool Otter.ai has received $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF), with the funds to be used for enterprise growth, marketing, international expansion, and product innovation. The company has raised a cumulative $50 million, surpassed $100 million in ARR last year, and to date 40 million users have used its products, up from 25 million last year. Otter is testing features such as pre-meeting briefings and in-meeting Live Assist, seeking to turn meeting transcripts into actionable business insights.

AI startup Vectorial raises $3 million to use AI to simulate human behavior for consumer research

AI startup Vectorial has closed a $3 million seed round co-led by Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures to launch its consumer research platform that simulates human behavior. The platform is based on the behavioral model SAPIENS, whose training data covers more than 2.5 million real consumers; it predicts consumer behavior 30% more accurately than general-purpose models and achieves about 86% accuracy compared with real user research. Customers including GoodRx, Boat, Everkind and Concrete Software run an average of 600 simulations per month, and the company will use the new funding to build SAPIENS 2.0.

SmartBear's BearQ adds Sources to find coverage gaps, Workflows to automate test runs

SmartBear has added two capabilities, Sources and Workflows, to its BearQ agentic quality assurance system: Sources pulls requirements and bug reports from Jira and, combined with existing tests in Reflect and Zephyr, identifies coverage gaps to reduce duplicate testing; Workflows supports chaining tasks under a single trigger, for example automatically creating a test environment and running regression tests once a build enters CI/CD. SmartBear said that in a September 30 survey of 1,436 respondents in the US and UK, 23% cited trust as the top barrier to adopting autonomous testing.