AI-Newsdesk

Duke Energy’s two North Carolina utilities, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress, reached a settlement with the North Carolina Public Staff — joined by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other parties — that would expand requirements intended to keep the costs of serving data centers and other large-load customers off existing customers, the company…

Sierra launched fleming-1 on October 7, 2026, a model designed to detect when the caller on a phone call is another AI agent. The company described the release as an update to the constellation of models behind agents built on its platform. Sierra said the question companies face when the phone rings has shifted from…

Artificial intelligence has become part of the zeitgeist. And while it’s a polarizing topic, Linda Rabieh has a unique take on AI: “It’s good for business. Our business, of humanistic thinking.” As senior lecturer in the Concourse program, one of MIT’s first-year learning communities, Rabieh has been introducing students to the “business” since 2010.  “What…

Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box on October 7, 2026, pricing the compact NVIDIA-powered developer PC at $5,999 MSRP and selling it exclusively through Microsoft.com in the United States, with shipments to customers beginning in November. Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Surface, announced the preorder opening in a post…

NVIDIA opened preorders for RTX Spark laptops and Microsoft announced general availability of Microsoft Execution Containers, OS-level infrastructure for running AI agents on Windows, at Microsoft’s Windows AI and Surface event in San Francisco on October 7, 2026, according to NVIDIA’s recap of the event. The event, held at Dogpatch Studios, featured a fireside chat…

Anthropic on October 7, 2026, lowered the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 by 50%, from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens, effective immediately. The company also introduced a monthly Claude Platform API credit for Max and Team subscribers: $100 per month for Max 5x, $200 per month for Max 20x, and up…

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, the newest model in its small-model class, available immediately on the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure at lower prices than Haiku 4.5. Anthropic said the model costs around 75% less to run on average than its predecessor. Anthropic describes Haiku 5.5…

OpenAI on October 7, 2026 began rolling out GPT-6 across ChatGPT, introducing a capability called Intelligent UI that lets the chatbot answer questions with fully interactive user interfaces rather than text alone. The rollout starts with paid tiers and reaches the Free and Go tiers on October 8, 2026. In its announcement, OpenAI described Intelligent…

Microsoft on October 7, 2026 announced that Copilot on Copilot+ PCs will gain local context from a user’s files and recent activity, the ability to take actions across Windows, and access to AI models running on the device, in a Windows Experience Blog post laying out what the company calls hybrid intelligence. The announcement, from…

ShengShu Technology launched Vidu Q4 Preview on October 7, 2026, the first public preview of its next-generation flagship model for expressive audio and video. Launch pricing starts at $0.014 per second, and the preview is available through Vidu’s web product and API platform. The model supports up to 15 image references and up to three…