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Broad artificial intelligence coverage.

AIOct 23, 2026The Verge

Block’s Dessa learned to talk by listening, and it sounds like it

Block’s Dessa is a speech-to-speech model trained from scratch only on human conversation, with no text in the loop, and it runs locally on high-end MacBooks. Its demos are awkward in a human way. Block frames emotion-aware voice as a safety feature; the same ability is a lever for persuasion.

AIOct 23, 2026OpenAI

Inside ChatGPT’s storage: OpenAI’s round trip on Cosmos DB tenancy

OpenAI’s second Habitat post covers the Azure Cosmos DB layer behind ChatGPT: a move from one shared container to many and back, read latency cut from about 120 ms to about 10 ms, and outages that showed managed services become less managed at its scale. It is also building its own storage system.

AIOct 23, 2026The Verge

Connect Gmail to Google’s AI, and your ads may change too

Since October 16, Google’s privacy policy carves an exception into its old promise not to use Drive, Gmail or Photos content for ads: data users make available to services that support personalized ads. People who linked those apps to Personal Intelligence may now see ads shaped by them. The safeguards are real; the bundled consent is the problem.

AIOct 22, 2026TechCrunch

inDrive plans winter robotaxi tests in Astana with Pony.ai and Nvidia

inDrive signed an MoU with Pony.ai and Nvidia to explore robotaxi testing in Kazakhstan, starting in Astana in the first half of 2027 with safety operators. It is a capital-light bet on cheap markets and snow, and inDrive’s earlier Riyadh pilot shows MoUs don’t always become rides.

AIOct 22, 2026NVIDIA Blog

Kazakhstan bets on exporting intelligence, with 45,000 Nvidia GPUs licensed

Jensen Huang’s Astana visit came with commitments: Firebird says it holds a US export license for 45,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs, Kazakhtelecom is expanding clusters, and Nvidia is investing in Higgsfield AI. Sovereign AI for Kazakh is a sound goal; power, governance and US-policy dependence are the open questions.