Technology & AI
Australia bans card surcharges from October 1
From October 1, Australian businesses can no longer add card surcharges, forcing 16% of merchants to absorb or reprice the cost of accepting payments.
Technology & AI
Daily AI and technology coverage — models, chips, agents and research, and what each development actually means for you and your business.
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Technology & AI
Adobe-Cornell: clean-data prediction improves diffusion generation
Predicting clean data instead of noise improves text-to-image generation, Adobe and Cornell researchers report in a September 23 preprint.
Technology & AI
AI agent rare-event estimation 800× more efficient
Columbia researchers built a method to estimate one-in-a-billion AI agent failures 800× more cheaply than brute-force simulation.
Technology & AI
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3.8 TTS clones a voice from 30 seconds
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS bring voice cloning from a 30-second sample to 100-plus languages.
Technology & AI
GPT-6 Astra halves Parallel's research time and cost, OpenAI says
Parallel halved its AI research time and cost using GPT-6 Astra, according to an OpenAI case study that discloses no methodology or absolute figures.
Technology & AI
Qualcomm says new chip runs 30B AI model on a phone
Qualcomm launched two mobile chips on September 22, claiming on-device AI that runs 30B models without the cloud, unverified by any lab.
Technology & AI
New LLM backdoor hides attacks in logical reasoning
An arXiv preprint shows language models up to 119 billion parameters can disguise backdoors as legitimate reasoning and evade safety checks.
Technology & AI
Climate models get memory from simple equations, not neural nets
A preprint shows a forced linear ODE recovers most of a neural autoencoder's value for simulating convection in 100-kilometre climate grids.
Technology & AI
OpenAI Academy adds role-based learning paths for five audiences
OpenAI's September 21 expansion of its free Academy adds learning paths for employees, developers, leaders, educators, and students.
Technology & AI
SimLife benchmark: AI agents watch 15 hours, can't learn your habits
SimLife tracks 106 episodes of simulated daily life and finds frontier AI models guess habits by frequency, not reasoning.
Technology & AI
Needle: 8 MB AI model runs on phones and microcontrollers
An open-source 8-29 MB model claims to beat 10x larger models on tool calls, targeting phones, wearables and microcontrollers.
Technology & AI
OpenAI launches Australian Youth Safety Blueprint for teens
OpenAI's six-pillar Australian Youth Safety Blueprint targets safer ChatGPT use for teens, though pillar details remain undisclosed.