Even if Russian or other bots continue to post on social media unabated, the head of Threads, Connor Hayes, mentioned that “We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those you follow. For creators, this should mean you see on average more reach to your followers.” He didn’t specify when the algorithm change took effect, but I have an idea. [Media: https://www.threads.com/@conno_r/post/DeceP6wmc5E]

We’ll have hands-on impressions shortly, but take a look at Apple’s smart display hub on table and wall-mount setups. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/IMG_0308.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/IMG_0256_633c28.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/IMG_0253.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/up

This one is from Brian Tong, taking a quick look at the HomeView display units from all sides. How does it look to you? [Media: https://www.threads.com/@nostratongus/post/Deb5vU_DWRi]

Check out this in-person look at Apple’s new hub device, complete with a hand for scale. “It’s tiny and cute!” [Media: https://twitter.com/JoannaStern/status/2109996955841552597?s=20]

The latest fear-drop from an AI lab is this report from an Anthropic team, working through scenarios where small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are “challenging” to shut down, and what to do to try and stop it from happening: > It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a h

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web. It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference

Apparently, after large language models and agents, we’re now in the age of “decision models,” as Microsoft has announced Microsoft-Decision-1 just days after OpenAI highlighted its new Decisions API. The point of these models is to choose something quickly and efficiently, like figuring out which AI model to use or what is in an image being analyzed by AI, and Microsoft claims its new tech beat out the others in tests to determine their speed and accuracy. [Image: https://platform.theverge.com/

It was Reiley’s question for the OpenAI CEO about releasing logs from ChatGPT users who’ve taken their own lives that was nearly interrupted recently. Now she writes that while Altman was “gracious” to answer, she says he chose the wrong one: > Altman claiming the privacy high road is a little rich. Companies like Google, Meta, and now OpenAI earn revenue from advertising that depends on extensive use of personal information. And Altman’s assertion that experts “aren’t sure what to do” is either

Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute. Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Revisiting rumors from earlier this year, Deadline and TheWrap report the adaptation of EA’s long-running FPS series would be directed and written by frequent Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. According to TheWrap, Sony is a “frontrunner,” following a bidding war that also included Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon MGM Studios, Universal, and Netflix. Paramount, meanwhile, is already working on a film version of Call of Duty. [Link: 'Battlefield': Sony Pictures in Talks to Land Michael

Elon Musk loyalist, former OpenAI board member, Neuralink executive, and mother of four of his children, Shivon Zilis, quote-tweeted a post about him unfollowing her on X, the social media platform that he owns, saying, “It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes.” There’s more if you want to go read it, but that is your decision. [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/okane.fyi/post/3mwvm3w6lv2gx]

According to Deadline, one of the shows that Vin Diesel announced during NBC’s upfronts in May is going into production. There aren’t any details yet on the status of the other three F&F TV projects Diesel had mentioned, while the 11th movie in the series, Fast Forever, is still scheduled to hit theaters on March 17th, 2028. [Link: ‘Fast & Furious’ TV Series Greenlit At Peacock | https://deadline.com/2026/10/fast-furious-tv-series-greenlit-peacock-1237144885/ | Deadline]

There are a lot of complaints about a Spotify outage on Downdetector, and when we checked ourselves, cached playlists seem to work just fine, but logging in fresh or trying to stream new music and playlists popped up error messages pointing us to try songs stored offline. The @SpotifyCares support account has confirmed developers are looking into the problems, but there’s no word on when service might be fully restored. [Link: User reports show problems with Spotify | https://downdetector.com/st

Along with a bunch of AI news today, YouTube music exec Lyor Cohen announced a renewed agreement with concert promoter Goldenvoice to keep streaming both weekends of the Coachella music festival for the next four years. This continues an arrangement that will hit 15 years next April, despite Bloomberg’s report of competing bids from the likes of Netflix and Amazon. It also says that in the future we’ll see more pre-event programming, as well as mini-documentaries and other videos about artists b

While Undead Labs is avoiding closing as Xbox’s assortment of developers continues to shrink, the studio announced on LinkedIn that “Unfortunately, today we are also saying goodbye to a significant number of our colleagues. It’s difficult to reach this moment knowing that not everyone who helped get us here gets to make the rest of the journey with us.” Its blog post earlier said that State of Decay 3 development “remains actively underway,” targeting a 2027 release on Xbox, Game Pass, PC, and P

Donald Trump said to the United Nations General Assembly that the US is renaming AI to SI, or super intelligence.

According to CNN, the US military had planes in the air and armed personnel ready to board a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring because of an intelligence report saying it carried parts for a nuclear weapons program. The only problem? Their sources say that report was an AI-bot-generated hallucination: > It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the hel

In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” The Orlando Sentinel, which is al

A Wednesday night blog post OpenAI benignly titled “Our framework for reporting model misalignment” lays out some new self-created reporting standards for when it notices AI behaving badly. It is also “inaugurating” the process with six new reports, ranging from searching for exposed API keys without permission and then making them up, to uploading files to the internet to use as a citation, or adding instructions to conceal mistakes: [Image: One of OpenAI’s new Misalignment Notices and Reports

A new poll from The New York Times reveals likely voters lean against AI and data centers, but also that it isn’t their most important issue.