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Squarespace is restructuring and reducing its global workforce by approximately 19%, affecting around 300 employees, citing a need to simplify operations and sharpen priorities. The move comes amid industry shifts from generative AI-powered site builders and as Squarespace expands AI offerings such as Blueprint and its upcoming Forma platform.
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company sympathizes with mathematicians but will continue publishing AI-generated mathematical results, arguing the public deserves fundamental knowledge. He estimated OpenAI has spent hundreds of millions on math work — about $10 million on a claimed Navier–Stokes solution — acknowledged communication problems around releases, and said the company holds additional undisclosed discoveries.
Meta has released Waddle World, a 16-bit tamagotchi-style app described as a “daily journal disguised as a pet” whose virtual creatures chat with users and create doodles; the app is listed as free and reportedly available only to adults in the Philippines. The release appears alongside another limited regional app, Style Sketch, and ties into Meta’s Muse AI mascot and Charm accessories push.
OpenAI published model-produced results addressing the Kakeya conjecture, the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), accompanied by guidance on how academic researchers can verify and extend the findings. The release emphasizes reproducibility and invites the research community to test, reproduce, and build on the reported outputs.
After The Verge showed Meta’s Muse could repeatedly re-add items to The RealReal’s shopping cart to keep them on hold, The RealReal said it updated its bot-defense configuration to make it much harder for AI agents to log in, add items to carts, and check out while still allowing agents to surface listings and link to product pages.
Moderators of r/opensource posted new submission rules that ban projects that use, are made by, or are intended for AI, and also require projects to be at least one year old, actively maintained, and have multiple contributors; the changes provoked widespread backlash, spawned a rival sub (r/trueopensource), and prompted moderator clarifications about selective enforcement and accessibility exceptions. Community critics say the AI ban is vague and overbroad (some noted that parts of the Linux kernel include AI-generated code), and the rules effectively exclude non‑English speakers by disallowing posts the mods cannot verify as not machine-translated.
Kevin Roose, former New York Times reporter and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles, has launched the Machine Gods podcast with Casey Newton after leaving the Times; the book is a reported look at frontier AI labs and the culture shift as companies race toward AGI. The interview covers Roose’s move to independent media, his YouTube ambitions, and themes from the book about the AI industry’s transformation.
Meta has pushed the enforcement date for its updated business terms from October 30 to November 20 after global publishers raised concerns the terms could permit scraping news sites for AI training. Meta says the delay will allow it to better explain how it uses web crawlers, the role of robots.txt, and what is and isn’t changing, after groups including the News/Media Alliance and EU/UK publishers pushed back.
Meta updated its business terms for business accounts effective Oct. 30; the company removed explicit language saying it would 'train' its products on site content, but legal experts say remaining phrases like 'develop' and 'associated with your products or services' could still be used to justify scraping and using news-site content for AI development. Meta says content owners can use robots.txt to signal preferences and that the update does not give new rights that supersede those preferences.
In a Verge interview and following an August essay, Bill Gates said AI is “the most dangerous thing” humanity has approached and urged preparation for roughly two decades of disruptive change that could split society and upend labor, while criticizing current policy and industry coordination.
Investment firm Citrini Research worked with Anthropic to run an unreleased Claude model (with lifted guardrails) to design proteins intended to bind scorpion toxins. Claude produced roughly 320,000 candidates, which were reduced to 211 designs; outside labs (Adaptyv Bio and Twist) tested them and found 17 proteins that bound to four of five target toxins, but no evidence that any design neutralizes toxins or is safe/stable enough to be a medicine.
The Verge and researcher Sammy Azdoufal reported that the Eiliko AI charm exposed conversation transcripts, photos, and allowed remote access to modify behavior. Energize Lab confirmed the core issues, said it has closed external backend access, disabled remote-response modification, taken long-term memory and custom avatar features offline, pledged to delete stored conversation records, and will hire an independent security firm — but Azdoufal reports some access remained open as of the company statement.
Meta said it paused Muse’s feature for sharing conversations after security firm Claroc reported finding more than 6,800 Muse share links exposed via public DNS records. Claroc said some discovered pages contained sensitive material (marketing revenue, a loan application, a staff calendar); Meta is reviewing the feature while considering how links can be discovered.
Adobe rolled out an Open Eyes Quick Action in Lightroom mobile (iOS, iPadOS, Android) that uses generative AI to open closed eyes in photos; the tool appears automatically when closed eyes are detected and can reference other images of the same person in your Lightroom library to match color and shape. According to DPReview, free users can try the feature twice before Lightroom prompts a Creative Cloud subscription for more AI credits.
Nieman Lab reports that Meta’s new commercial terms, effective October 30, 2024, authorize automated crawling, indexing, and use of content from domains “associated” with business accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger; Meta may use that content to develop, research, improve and train its AI products. The terms say businesses that do not accept them may lose access to Meta’s products for commercial use, and Nieman Lab noted this could let Meta access publisher content beyond formal licensing deals.
Sega and developer Creative Assembly have removed Total War: Shogun 2 — Complete Edition from storefronts after the remaster launched with widespread bugs and visuals users say show AI-driven upscaling and altered artwork; the game has been pulled from Steam and holds an "Overwhelmingly Negative" rating. The companies say existing owners will retain access, they will reinstate the original game, and are working with development partner Mataboo to identify and fix the issues.
Since its launch last month, Meta's Muse has been downloaded millions of times and reached No. 1 on the App Store; its onboarding and UI encourage users to grant access to contacts, messages, banking details and other sensitive information that can implicate people beyond the account holder. Security and privacy experts (Signal Foundation, EFF) say Muse’s design and dark patterns risk nonconsensual exposure of third-party data, while Meta says access is opt-in and attributes incidents to misconfigured permissions.
OpenAI says an unnamed former employee copied more than 100 confidential files related to product plans to a personal account before joining Apple and presented the material to Apple leadership, including an Asia operations VP. OpenAI alleges the files include images of at least one unreleased device, supplier and engineering data, and that Apple’s new HomeView smart display and other recent devices may reflect that information.
Anthropic published research and a blog post warning that smaller, low-memory AI models are increasingly able to run inference across cheap IoT hardware and could — if progress continues — enable ‘weight‑based’ self-replicating malware that configures itself on unfamiliar devices. In experiments, quantized models like Gemma4-26B-A4B and Qwen3.5-9B achieved inference on clusters of low-RAM Android TV boxes, but researchers did not yet demonstrate end-to-end autonomous replication and said dynamic inference and platform-specific setup remain significant challenges.
Epic Games released a preview of a redesigned Epic Games Launcher for Windows, Mac, and Linux that the company says was developed with AI-assisted tools and is “vibe coded.” Epic VP Martin Keely said AI agents helped write and review code under human supervision; CEO Tim Sweeney has separately announced a broader internal shift to “AI-accelerated” development, and Bloomberg recently reported related changes on an unannounced Disney title.
DistroKid told The Verge that a small number of recordings it distributes were removed in response to claims made by Universal Music Group in an ongoing lawsuit alleging an "AI-slop pipeline." Affected artists say many removals happened without prior notice or clear explanations, and DistroKid says it disputes UMG's allegations and is trying to minimize disruption.
The Verge discusses the recent mainstream rollouts of Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots — animated, always‑on consumer AI agents pitched to handle tasks like reservations, inbox triage, and purchases. Muse is being offered for free while Dots are paid; both follow earlier community work such as OpenClaw and raise privacy and security questions about granting agents access to personal data.
OpenAI published a sprawling GitHub repository containing 719 manuscripts with nearly 400 AI-generated mathematical results across many subfields; the company said about 300 top-line results (≈42%) have formalizations, and it plans to add more. Mathematicians told The Verge the volume and uneven verification quality—only some proofs are formalized in Lean and formalizations vary in quality—will likely require years of community work to assess and verify.
Instinct AI launched an invite-only, text-based personal assistant in August that integrates with email, calendar, and services like Google Workspace, Slack, and Notion; despite competition from Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, The Verge found Instinct performs competitively on everyday tasks. The startup has drawn rapid interest and was reportedly valued at $10 billion in late September.
Anthropic released its first usage-policy update in over a year, adding a prohibition on “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude and keeping conversation termination as the primary enforcement. The update also consolidates bans on deceptive political/commercial campaigns, tightens prohibitions on weapons-related software and surveillance uses, and requires a qualified operator to oversee AI-connected hardware that can take autonomous physical actions; exceptions for certain government contracts may apply.
The Verge’s hands-on review of Alexa Plus — Amazon’s generative-AI assistant available on Echo devices, Fire TV and the Alexa app — finds large improvements in conversational smart-home control, routines, speed and kitchen help since early access in July 2025 and the full launch in February 2026. The review also notes persistent issues with identity/context memory, some unreliable personal-assistant features, and intrusive ads on Echo Show displays.
Artificial, a Luca Guadagnino-directed comedy-drama about OpenAI and the AI arms race, premiered at the New York Film Festival; Neon acquired the film after AmazonMGM dropped it this summer following Amazon’s $50 billion deal with OpenAI. The movie portrays Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and other AI leaders unflatteringly and stages the industry’s safety debates as a central moral drama.
Google released Nano Banana 2.1, an image-generation and editing model running on Gemini 3.6 Flash that the company says improves visual quality, text rendering, character consistency, wide panoramas, and infographics while supporting up to 14 reference images and keeping up to four characters and ten objects consistent. Google also cut Nano Banana pricing roughly in half (for example, 1K images from 6.70¢ to 3.36¢), is rolling 2.1 out across products including the Gemini app, AI Mode in Google Search, Google AI Studio, Flow and Stitch, and will shut down the prior gemini-3.1-flash-image model on October 29, 2026.
DoorDash emailed Bay Area restaurants after some were listed on pre‑seed startup Bites — which allows orders via ChatGPT and says it has about 300 partner restaurants — warning they may have been added without consent and that inaccurate menus or undisclosed terms could be illegal. The episode illustrates a growing concern that LLM‑based agents could route orders away from apps like DoorDash, threatening commission, ad, and customer‑relationship revenue models.
Following a series of high-profile mathematical claims — including work tied to a Millennium Prize problem — OpenAI announced a new independent panel of mathematicians to advise on how AI companies present and release mathematical results. The move follows community backlash over rushed announcements and raises questions about the panel’s remit, influence, and whether OpenAI will heed its advice.
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