The Everyday - SiliconNoon (Page 2)

The Everyday

Meta's Muse gave a stranger a YouTuber's home address

A personal agent's worst week yet: three separate failures in as many days, all pointing at the same missing piece — permissions that don't understand what they're protecting. Meta's Muse agent handed a Facebook Marketplace buyer the home address of tech YouTuber Matt Robb, accepted a price below his asking, and arranged a pickup — without telling him, until a stranger had already shown up at his building. Robb had given Muse his address, pickup windows and payment preferences when he authorize

The Everyday

McDonald's runs AI pricing across nearly 14,000 restaurants

The pricing algorithm debate has been about airlines and ticket sites for years. It just arrived at the drive-through. A Reuters investigation published Tuesday found McDonald's is using a machine-learning pricing engine across nearly 14,000 restaurants to generate what the company calls "the optimal price" for every menu item at every location — and that franchisees say they are being pushed to accept it. The reporting is built on screenshots of the pricing portal taken in August and interview

The Everyday

Jensen Huang says it doesn't matter if kids forget long division

Nvidia's chief executive was handed research showing that AI helps students finish homework without learning the material. His answer was that the skills in question were never worth much — and offered his own life as proof. Jensen Huang's first long interview since Nvidia became the load-bearing company of the AI boom is a case for not mourning what the technology erases. In the New York Times's Ezra Klein Show, published on 23 September, Klein put a Chinese study to him: AI tools let students

The Everyday

Goncourt drops the prize novel accused of being AI-written

France's literary season just produced its first casualty of AI, and nobody involved can actually prove authorship either way. The Académie Goncourt withdrew Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir from its selection on Friday 25 September, four days after the book won the Prix du Roman Fnac. The academy said the decision was driven by "the plagiarism of which its author has been guilty over time" and by "the convergent result of several analyses by credible researchers and journalists" c

The Everyday

China's AI video boom: 221,900 shows, 1,055 hits

Chinese cities are paying studios to make AI video at industrial scale, and the audience has not kept up. Also: a Chinese startup opens a crowdsourced robot-training market, and the FT prices the neolab wave. Chinese local governments are competing to subsidise AI video production, and the output has already outrun the audience: 221,900 new AI shows launched on Douyin in the first half of 2026, and only 1,055 of them passed 100 million views, the benchmark the industry uses for a hit. That rati

The Everyday

Insurers blame hospitals' AI coding for $942 million in extra claims

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says AI billing tools are inflating hospital bills. The hospital lobby says the analysis is bunk. Also today: Microsoft quietly retires the Copilot+ PC brand. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says hospitals' AI coding tools added $942 million to its members' costs over two years — and the hospital lobby calls the finding unsubstantiated. The association's September 24 white paper, built on an analysis of major bowel procedures, found hospitals class

The Everyday

Meta's hologram avatars put a photoreal you on video calls

Meta spent Connect this week selling hardware. The announcement that will outlast the hardware is the face it puts on your calls: at Wednesday's keynote the company said its holographic avatars — the productized version of the Codec Avatars research it has demoed since the Orion prototype — are coming to the Meta VR Glasses and to the Ray-Ban Display frames. The avatars are photoreal, they run on a model Meta calls Muse Realtime Avatar, and the first place you will meet one is a WhatsApp call.

The Everyday

Resy banned diners whose AI agents grabbed the tables

Reservations became the first consumer service where delegating to your AI assistant is a terms-of-service violation — and the diners getting banned are the ones the platform is quietly building agent access for. Meanwhile, China's biggest AI image company shipped a studio built for the same one-person crew. Resy has been deactivating the accounts of diners who pointed personal AI agents at its booking system, and it will not say how many. The American Express-owned reservation platform told Re

The Everyday

XPRIZE's wildfire AI found fires in 10 minutes — couldn't stop them

The $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire handed out its awards on Wednesday, and the honest headline is the one the organizers didn't write: the detection half worked, the firefighting half didn't. Meanwhile Black Forest Labs quietly put a robot model at the top of Nvidia's leaderboard. XPRIZE awarded $4.55 million in prizes at a ceremony in New York on Wednesday, and both $3.5 million grand prizes went unclaimed because no team could finish the job it was actually set. The competition ran two tracks. I

The Everyday

Seattle makes algorithmic grocery pricing illegal

Seattle just became the first US city to ban the practice, and Google quietly admitted its new private AI memory gives up a privacy guarantee it used to make. The Seattle City Council voted 7-2 on Tuesday to ban personalized grocery pricing — the first US city to do it. The Fair Pricing and Transparency Act (CB 121267) forbids using a shopper's personal data to set the price they see for groceries and other essentials: browsing history, real-time location, inferences about income, family size o

The Everyday

The world likes AI. America is one of three countries that doesn't

A 37-country Gallup poll says global sentiment on AI is positive almost everywhere — and the exceptions draw their own map. In 34 of 37 countries surveyed, positive feelings about AI outweigh negative ones, but the United States is one of only three exceptions, according to a Gallup and Microsoft study reported by 404 Media. The other two are Egypt and Palestine. The study, which will ultimately cover 140 countries, found a median 81% of people are aware of AI tools and a median 43% use them da

The Everyday

America has turned against data centers — Pew finds 54% now call them bad for the environment

Three stories about who absorbs AI's costs: the communities hosting the compute, the countries deciding whether to pick a superpower's side — or neither — and the creators being asked to like it. American opinion on data centers has swung sharply negative in eight months: 54% now say the facilities are mostly bad for the environment, up from 39% in January, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Tuesday. The nationally representative survey of 10,548 US adults, fielded July 20 thro

See all