Today at its pre-filmed Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple was finally prepared to fully introduce the long-delayed "Apple Intelligence" update for its Siri voice assistant. The new "Siri AI"—now being promised for OS updates rolling out "this fall"—will come alongside a new Google-powered update to Apple's on-device Foundation Models, as well as tighter integration of all these AI capabilities across Apple's many operating systems.

Unlike other companies that "appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, with little regard for the people... it's meant to serve," Apple's SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said, "we believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs."

Just a friendly chat with your AI assistant

The company highlighted this kind of focus in a series of scripted conversational demos with Siri AI, complete with seemingly unedited, multi-second pauses between each spoken prompt and Siri's response. In these demos, Apple executives showed Siri AI bouncing between different usage modes and app-based tasks as needed in an effort to highlight how Apple Intelligence can now be used "well beyond one-shot tasks" for a "brand new conversational experience" with the virtual assistant.

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Google's NotebookLM was one of the company's first forays into generative AI technology, and in un-Googley fashion, it hasn't been shut down yet. In fact, NotebookLM is getting one of its biggest updates, ever, today, moving to the latest Gemini 3.5 model, support for more file types, and streamlined web source integration. Google also says NotebookLM will be able to do more with all those queries thanks to embedded support for Antigravity.

Gemini 3.5 Flash debuted at Google I/O this year, promising much faster and more efficient processing. Google has claimed that companies worried about token costs can save big by moving their projects to the new Flash model while also getting outputs that are of similar or better quality. Those improvements are now filtering down to other Google products. NotebookLM, which launched in 2023 at the very beginning of the AI boom, lets you analyze specific sources like documents and webpages with Google's latest AI models.

The upgraded NotebookLM beats the old version in all of Google's "core evaluation dimensions." Credit: Google

Google conducted side-by-side evaluations of NotebookLM on the old Gemini 3.1 branch and with the updated 3.5. The company is being somewhat vague about the nature of the tests, breaking things up into "top five core evaluation dimensions," which are Accuracy and Quality, Multilingual Support, Large Document Analysis, Document Creation, and Advanced Research. In these tests, Google says NotebookLM averaged a 65 percent win rate versus the older model.

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Dozens of cryptographically verified open source packages from Microsoft were compromised late last week to add advanced credential-stealing code that was triggered when developers opened them in AI coding agents.

In all, multiple researchers said, 73 packages were flagged as malicious when automated systems on GitHub blocked them on the platform. Rather than noting they are malicious—and that developers who used AI agents to work with them should assume their systems are compromised—the Microsoft-owned GitHub said it disabled the packages “due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service.” The text went on to encourage the package owner to contact GitHub.

Devs: Assume compromise and proceed accordingly

It wasn’t until Monday that Microsoft even raised the possibility the packages were infected. In an email, the company stated: “We have temporarily removed some repositories as we investigate potential malicious content.”

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OpenAI is preparing the biggest overhaul of ChatGPT since its launch kicked off the AI boom, as the $850 billion group hunts for new engines of growth ahead of a planned listing this year.

The company intends to transform the chatbot into a “superapp” that combines coding tools and AI agents, adding products that executives believe will generate more revenue.

The changes are part of a broader reorganization at OpenAI as the San Francisco-based company shifts resources into trying to win lucrative business customers and compete more fiercely with rival Anthropic, according to more than a dozen current and former employees.

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It feels like there's no escaping AI right now, whether you’re trying to type a sentence without being interrupted by a digital “assistant” or struggling to find a new refrigerator that doesn’t require a Wi-Fi connection for some reason. You’d be forgiven for wondering if we’re in the midst of a quantum leap in tech or whether people are just hyping up a heap of slop.

So what should we make of the growing use of AI in weather and climate modeling?

The conversation didn't get off to a great start earlier this year when a National Weather Service office posted a forecast map featuring nonexistent cities in Idaho with names like “Whata Bod” and “Orangeotild.” Thankfully, that was just an AI-generated image produced for social media, not the actual forecast model. Meteorologists and climate scientists are not yet being replaced by large language model prompt engineers.

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