Amazon Web Services released an open source decision model inspired by TypeSafe’s Jev, with AI developers increasingly seeking intelligence that is more suited to computer automation than frontier LLMs.
Amazon’s Strands Decider 2B, released the same week OpenAI announced a similar offering, is a high-speed, low-cost way to sort between pre-decided options and deliver a measure of how…
Shopify introduced a new site-building tool Thursday called Canvas that lets merchants set up their Shopify store by chatting with AI. While Shopify already offered a fairly capable no-code builder before Canvas, it involved editing a selected theme by rearranging modular…
With all the talk about how AI might one day kill us all, it’s easy to forget that AI has already been life-threatening to some, not through bioweapons, but psychologically.
For example, Character.AI settled several wrongful death lawsuits earlier this year brought by…
Airbnb rolled out its new AI-powered search this week as part of its fall update, a significant step for a company that has been slow and deliberate about AI. Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has said in the past that a chatbot-only interface is not fit for travel discovery. With more AI on the way to the Airbnb app, I caught up with Chesky over Zoom to talk about how the company is approaching it…
Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.
October 2, 2026
The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter – yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and…
Satlyt, founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, raises $8M to run AI on satellites
October 2, 2026
The way Rama Afullo tells it, he saw orbital data centers coming.
The Kenyan American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business before a brief stint at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network in 2024. His experiences convinced him that…
The buzzy AI startup Instinct has just revealed a new potential revenue stream: product recommendations. Unfortunately for the company, the rollout is already rubbing some users the wrong way.
Overnight, the AI agent began pushing product suggestions to users as part of a new feature called Instinct Selections, an effort to curate personalized lists for users in areas like dining, travel, and…
When Stephan Ewen co-founded Restate in 2022 to provide durable workflow infrastructure, he couldn’t have anticipated how valuable such an offering would become for managing AI agent processes.
The Berlin-based startup had set out to build an execution engine that made…
Airbnb adds AI search, more social features
October 1, 2026
Airbnb is evolving in two directions: On the ground, it wants to compete with hotels by providing myriad services; online, it is using AI and people in its Airbnb network to aid travel discovery.
As part of its fall product update, the company is adding services to the app…
OpenAI on Monday apologized to the Australian government for not immediately notifying the country’s administration that its agents had breached some public services websites. The company also detailed how some of those breaches happened and outlined additional measures it is taking to assess the impact of the events.
“In June, during internal training and evaluation our models…
