TLDR 2026-10-01

Modulate raised $25M, led by Future Ventures, to build the understanding layer for voice AI.

Transcripts drop the fraud, frustration, and abuse hiding in conversations. Velma, Modulate's audio-native model, catches them by orchestrating 100+ voice-specialized submodels running on raw audio.

✅ Stop fraud→ catch deepfakes with the #1-ranked detection model on Hugging Face✅ Catch AI agent failures→ flag hallucinations and compliance violations in real time✅ Keep customers→ spot churn and dissatisfaction signals✅ Protect human and AI agents→ flag risk and abuse✅ Build your foundation with it→self-serve APIs; top ranked Hugging Face Leaderboard STT API

The funding brings more models, deployment options, and broadens the APIs for teams building with voice.

Start building with Modulate's API

Apple is preparing to launch several smart home devices on October 13. The company plans to ship a smart-home hub, an updated HomePod mini, and a new TV set-top box. The company is developing a broader smart-home ecosystem that expands on HomeKit software and supports new categories of connected products. It is also working with third-party manufacturers on devices designed for the Siri AI home platform.

Google's Gemini 4 Argon model offers industry-leading performance in coding, knowledge work, and cybersecurity. Google's engineers are already using the model extensively, and Argon-powered agents have been working to migrate C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google. The model supports an output limit of 1 million tokens. It will be priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens for a limited time. The model is still in limited testing, and there is no timeline for when it will be available to enterprise and consumer customers.

The DeepMind team at Google has developed a technique that can create watermarks on protein sequences without compromising the protein's function. The watermark is impossible to remove and can survive basic exporting, resizing, and other editing. The system could be used to give DNA synthesizers greater confidence in their sources.

Late-stage clinical trial data on the obesity drug retatrutide showed an average loss of 25% of body weight after 90 weeks. More than a third of the participants taking the drug in the trial lost 30% or more of their weight. The drug also helped reduce knee pain and sleep apnea events, and it improved cardiometabolic measurements across the board. At the start of the trial, more than a third of trial participants had prediabetes - the condition had resolved in more than 90% of those participants by the end.

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Developers can now programmatically create, read, and manage comments across Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. The Google Docs API also supports suggested edits. Organizations can now connect internal review tools, automated content pipelines, and project tracking systems directly into Google Workspace editors. Programmatic comment support is available to all Google Workspace customers and users with personal Google accounts.

Writing a commit description can help you reflect on the changes that AI made. It also serves as a way to check if everything is as intended. Being able to explain why you are shipping something will help you explain or fix it if it breaks later. AI can do the work - writing why is where you find out whether you understand what you are shipping.

AI chief executives gathered with Trump at the White House on Tuesday to discuss a statement of principles to keep AI models safe. Behind the scenes, the executives questioned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about his warnings about the dangers of AI, asking why he was being so extreme in public about the capabilities of AI models and the risks they pose. Amodei told them it was important to be honest with the public about model capabilities and not play down risks. He believes that safety is possible if the industry and administration work together.

AI assistants are becoming a router between people and every business. They decide who gets the work, which moves where money can be made. The router absorbs capability and decision-making. The margin goes to whoever holds what the router cannot take and whoever signs for what the router cannot sign.

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300+ events worldwide to learn about open-source AI and open-weight models. Free Arduinos and T-shirts at select events. Find a Fest near you.

The new tool, which lets users send prompts like 'order my usual' to get their regular Friday night order, is available to users in the US through a waitlist.

The amount of borrowed money in the stock market has never been larger, or grown faster.

What you do matters less and less as fewer people know of you and more people know you.

RSS support on Reddit will cease on November 13 as the company says it has become a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.

Tech contributed around 76% of the SP500's total earnings growth in 2026.

There are several techniques for letting people compute something together without sharing the underlying information.