Launch: Latest AI News

Home Depot Puts Magic Apron in All U.S. Stores, Adding Project Help to Store Maps

The retailer is turning a location-aware shopping tool into an in-aisle assistant for product decisions and repair planning, while presenting staff as the core source of store expertise.

Aug 29, 2026Infrastructure

OpenRelay Routes AI Inference Across GPUs, TPUs and Trainium Through One API

The early-access network aims to let developers buy performance rather than a particular accelerator, but its cost-savings claims and ability to deliver consistent service across mixed infrastructure remain unproven.

Aug 29, 2026Products

Meta Offers Free AI Glasses and Training to More Than 130,000 Blind Veterans

The donation puts an AI wearable in the hands of a large, specific population. Its practical value will rest on whether local training helps recipients use the device for everyday tasks.

Aug 29, 2026Infrastructure

Nvidia Rolls Out Vera Rubin as AI Competition Shifts to Data Traffic

The architecture packages compute with storage and networking hardware, betting that efficiently moving data through large AI systems is becoming its own competitive layer.

Aug 29, 2026Infrastructure

CME Targets Oct. 5 Nvidia GPU Futures Launch as CFTC Tests the Benchmark

The proposed contracts would turn changing GPU rental rates into a financial price, not a claim on scarce hardware. Their value will hinge on a benchmark that reflects a fragmented market and draws real participation.

Aug 29, 2026Products

Apple’s iOS 27 Nears September Release With Siri AI, but EU Access Is Limited

The coming update would move Apple’s AI from isolated features into search, automation and editing workflows—while a regulatory dispute leaves some of its headline tools unavailable in the European Union.

Aug 28, 2026Infrastructure

SageMaker Feature Store Adds 25-Record Batch Writes and a Record-Discovery API

The new APIs replace one-record write loops and an identifier-discovery blind spot, while leaving teams to handle partial failures and non-snapshot pagination themselves.

Aug 28, 2026Tools

Launch Tools

Perplexity’s GitHub-Slack Agent Uses One API Call and a One-Reply Guardrail

The useful shift is not autonomous code changes: it is a constrained investigation loop that can authenticate to one repository, trace a fix, and report back without widening its Slack or GitHub scope.

Amap Releases ABot-Recon, a 12-Frame 3D Mapper for 10,000-Frame Video Runs

The model’s fixed local context could reduce the memory burden of long reconstruction jobs, but its headline speed is a data-center benchmark and its weights are not cleared for commercial deployment.

Midjourney Opens V8.2 Image-Editing Tests With Up to Four References

The test brings instruction-led edits, canvas expansion, and multi-image generation into one workflow, while Midjourney asks users to identify failures and help reshape the interface.

Oracle Adds AI Studio Skill to Fusion 26C, Deploying Pro-Code Agents Inside Fusion Apps

The new pro-code path is built around where an agentic application runs: Oracle is tying developer tools to Fusion’s existing data, workflow, security, and audit infrastructure.

Aug 27, 2026Tools

Launch Tools

OpenAI’s 10-Day WebMCP Challenge Pushes Websites to Expose Tools for AI Agents

The contest is an early test of whether sites will publish agent-facing actions instead of relying only on interfaces designed for human clicks.

Harvard Uses 7 AI Faculty Avatars in a $699 Founder Bootcamp, While Keeping Live Advice Human

The program makes repeatable startup practice available on demand, but reserves live expert sessions and investor access for the human side of the experience.

Cohere’s Parse 5 Turns Enterprise Documents Into Markdown for $1.50 per 1,000 Pages

The compact vision model is built for high-volume retrieval and document-processing pipelines, but its headline benchmark result leaves out chart and visual-grounding tests.

Perplexity Puts Open-Weight Models Behind One API, With OpenAI and Anthropic Formats

The compatibility layer lets developers retain familiar client interfaces while Perplexity takes on deployment routing; access is still limited to a private preview.

ChatGPT Lets Temporary Chats Use Memory, Then Convert Them to Regular Chats

The update separates using established ChatGPT context from keeping a conversation, but saving a session moves it into normal history, memory, and account-level data controls.

Aug 27, 2026Infrastructure

Anthropic Puts Model-Agnostic MHS in Preview for AI-Controlled Machinery

Anthropic’s proposed interface could reduce the bespoke work of connecting agents to equipment, but broad adoption still rests on future safety work and an open-source release.

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash Adds 40-Second Scene Extensions and 4K Finishing Controls

Google is combining continuity controls, lower-cost previews and high-resolution finishing in one video workflow, though its extension and reference windows remain short.