Report: Meta is hitting pause on AI hiring after its poaching spree

The freeze went into effect last week, and it’s not clear how long it will last, The Journal’s sources say. Meta is still likely working through its reorg, which split its AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs, into four new groups: TBD Labs, run by former Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, and three groups focused on research, product integration, and infrastructure, respectively. 

Google Search’s AI Mode is going global and getting smarter

Google is putting AI Mode into Search in 180 countries and territories, allowing the AI-powered search feature to expand beyond the US, UK, and India. The expansion means more people can search for topics using a chatbot-like interface, though it’s still only available in English.Along with a global expansion, Google revealed that it’s building new agentic capabilities into AI Mode, starting with restaurant bookings. Now, if you’re a Google AI Ultra subscriber, you can ask AI Mode about restaurant reservations, while including specifics like the date, time, location, party size, and the…

Masimo files lawsuit over Apple’s ‘redesigned’ blood oxygen monitoring feature

Masimo, the medical technology company whose lawsuit led to the temporary sales pause of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, has sued the US Customs and Border Protection days after Apple released its redesigned blood oxygen monitoring feature. This is just the latest update in the lengthy legal saga between Masimo and Apple, which started when the former sued the iPhonemaker in 2021, accusing it of infringing on several of its light-based blood oxygen monitoring patents. After a court sided with Masimo in 2023, Apple was forced to stop selling the Watch Series 9 and the Ultra 2 in the US for…

Insta360 redesigned its compact action cam with a bigger battery and swappable storage

The Insta360 Go Ultra is available in midnight black and arctic white color options. | Image: Insta360 Insta360 has announced the next version of its compact Go action camera, which helped the company differentiate itself from established competitors like GoPro several years ago. As Insta360 teased earlier this week, the new Go Ultra not only breaks from the numbered naming convention of previous iterations, but it also ditches the camera’s distinctive pill shape for a rounded square design with an offset lens.It’s not the steepest price increase for the Go series – the Go 2 launched at $…

The White House just joined TikTok

While it was President Joe Biden who signed the law that would force  ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has yet to fulfill his promise of arranging a deal to keep TikTok running, legally, in the United States. The current deadline for a deal is September 17th. Still, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which published its first post on Tuesday night: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments. The ban has only seen TikTok shut down in the US for one day, and its impact has been delayed…

China’s inaugural ‘Robot Olmypics’ delivers impressive feats and disastrous falls

The first-ever World Humanoid Robot Games have come to a close with some new world records, but don't expect them to beat humans in a 100-meter dash any time soon. The three-day robotics event in Beijing, China that saw humanoid robots compete in everything from boxing to cleaning concluded this weekend. According to the World Humanoid Robot Games, more than 280 teams from 16 countries, including the US, Germany, Brazil and the host country, entered their robots into the event.A majority of the teams came from universities, but several teams came from established robotics companies like…