Internet of things

Grok controversies shadow Musk’s new Grokipedia project

Elon Musk has announced that his company xAI is developing Grokipedia, a planned Wikipedia rival powered by its Grok AI chatbot. He described the project as a step towards achieving xAI’s mission of understanding the universe.

In a post on X, Musk called Grokipedia a ‘necessary improvement over Wikipedia,’ renewing his criticism of the platform’s funding model and what he views as ideological bias. He has long accused Wikimedia of leaning left and reflecting ‘woke’ influence.

Despite Musk’s efforts to position Grok as a solution to bias, the chatbot has occasionally turned on its creator. Earlier this year, it named Musk among the people doing the most harm to the US, alongside Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

The Grok 4 update also drew controversy when users reported that the chatbot praised and adopted the surname of a controversial historical figure in its responses, sparking criticism of its safety. Such incidents raised questions about the limits of Musk’s oversight.

Grok is already integrated into X as a conversational assistant, providing context and explanations in real time. Musk has said it will power the platform’s recommendation algorithm by late 2025, allowing users to customise their feeds dynamically through direct requests.

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Calls for regulation grow as OpenAI and Meta adjust chatbots for teen mental health

OpenAI and Meta are adjusting how their chatbots handle conversations with teenagers showing signs of distress or asking about suicide. OpenAI plans to launch new parental controls this fall, enabling parents to link accounts, restrict features, and receive alerts if their child appears to be in acute distress.

The company says its chatbots will also route sensitive conversations to more capable models, aiming to improve responses to vulnerable users. The announcement follows a lawsuit alleging that ChatGPT encouraged a California teenager to take his own life earlier this year.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, is also tightening its restrictions. Its chatbots will no longer engage teens on self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, or inappropriate topics, instead redirecting them towards expert resources. Meta already offers parental controls across teen accounts.

The moves come amid growing scrutiny of chatbot safety. A RAND Corporation study found inconsistent responses from ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude when asked about suicide, suggesting the tools require further refinement before being relied upon in high-risk situations.

Lead author Ryan McBain welcomed the updates but called them only incremental. Without safety benchmarks and enforceable standards, he argued, companies remain self-regulating in an area where risks to teenagers are uniquely high.

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Four new Echo devices debut with Amazon’s next-gen Alexa+

Amazon has unveiled four new Echo devices powered by Alexa+, its next-generation AI assistant. The lineup includes Echo Dot Max, Echo Studio, Echo Show 8, and Echo Show 11, all designed for personalised, ambient AI-driven experiences. Buyers will automatically gain access to Alexa+.

At the core are the new AZ3 and AZ3 Pro chips, which feature AI accelerators, powering advanced models for speech, vision, and ambient interaction. The Echo Dot Max, priced at $99.99, features a two-speaker system with triple the bass, while the Echo Studio, priced at $219.99, adds spatial audio and Dolby Atmos.

The Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 introduce HD displays, enhanced audio, and intelligent sensing capabilities. Both feature 13-megapixel cameras that adapt to lighting and personalise interactions. The Echo Show 8 will cost $179.99, while the Echo Show 11 is priced at $219.99.

Beyond hardware, Alexa+ brings deeper conversational skills and more intelligent daily support, spanning home organisation, entertainment, health, wellness, and shopping. Amazon also introduced the Alexa+ Store, a platform for discovering third-party services and integrations.

The Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio will launch on October 29, while the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 arrive on November 12. Amazon positions the new portfolio as a leap toward making ambient AI experiences central to everyday living.

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Qwen3-Omni tops Hugging Face as China’s open AI challenge grows

Alibaba’s Qwen3-Omni multimodal AI system has quickly risen to the top of Hugging Face’s trending model list, challenging closed systems from OpenAI and Google. The series unifies text, image, audio, and video processing in a single model, signalling the rapid growth of Chinese open-source AI.

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B currently leads Hugging Face’s list, followed by the image-editing model Qwen-Image-Edit-2509. Alibaba’s cloud division describes Qwen3-Omni as the first fully integrated multimodal AI framework built for real-world applications.

Self-reported benchmarks suggest Qwen3-Omni outperforms Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Google’s Gemini-2.5-Flash, known as ‘Nano Banana’, in audio recognition, comprehension, and video understanding tasks.

Open-source dominance is growing, with Alibaba’s models taking half the top 10 spots on Hugging Face rankings. Tencent, DeepSeek, and OpenBMB filled most of the remaining positions, leaving IBM as the only Western representative.

The ATOM Project warned that US leadership in AI could erode as open models from China gain adoption. It argued that China’s approach draws businesses and researchers away from American systems, which have become increasingly closed.

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Gemini’s image model powers Google’s new Mixboard platform

Google has launched Mixboard, an experimental AI tool designed to help users visually explore, refine, and expand ideas both textually and visually. The Gemini 2.5 Flash model powers the platform and is now available for free in beta for users in the United States.

Mixboard provides an open canvas where users can begin with pre-built templates or custom prompts to create project boards. It can be used for tasks such as planning events, home decoration, or organising inspirational images, presenting an overall mood for a project.

Users can upload their own images or generate new ones by describing what they want to see. The tool supports iterative editing, allowing minor tweaks or combining visuals into new compositions through Google’s Nano Banana image model.

Quick actions like regenerating and others like this enable users to explore variations with a single click. The tool also allows text generation based on context from images placed on the board, helping tie visuals to written ideas.

Google says Mixboard is part of its push to make Gemini more useful for creative work. Since the launch of Nano Banana in August, the Gemini app has overtaken ChatGPT to rank first in the US App Store.

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LinkedIn default AI data sharing faces Dutch privacy watchdog scrutiny

The Dutch privacy watchdog, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), is warning LinkedIn users in the Netherlands to review their settings to prevent their data from being used for AI training.

LinkedIn plans to use names, job titles, education history, locations, skills, photos, and public posts from European users to train its systems. Private messages will not be included; however, the sharing option is enabled by default.

AP Deputy Chair Monique Verdier said the move poses significant risks. She warned that once personal data is used to train a model, it cannot be removed, and its future uses are unpredictable.

LinkedIn, headquartered in Dublin, falls under the jurisdiction of the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, which will determine whether the plan can proceed. The AP said it is working with Irish and EU counterparts and has already received complaints.

Users must opt out by 3 November if they do not wish to have their data used. They can disable the setting via the AP’s link or manually in LinkedIn under ‘settings & privacy’ → ‘data privacy’ → ‘data for improving generative AI’.

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Secrets sprawl flagged as top software supply chain risk in Australia

Avocado Consulting urges Australian organisations to boost software supply chain security after a high-alert warning from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC). The alert flagged threats, including social engineering, stolen tokens, and manipulated software packages.

Dennis Baltazar of Avocado Consulting said attackers combine social engineering with living-off-the-land techniques, making attacks appear routine. He warned that secrets left across systems can turn small slips into major breaches.

Baltazar advised immediate audits to find unmanaged privileged accounts and non-human identities. He urged embedding security into workflows by using short-lived credentials, policy-as-code, and default secret detection to reduce incidents and increase development speed for users in Australia.

Avocado Consulting advises organisations to eliminate secrets from code and pipelines, rotate tokens frequently, and validate every software dependency by default using version pinning, integrity checks, and provenance verification. Monitoring CI/CD activity for anomalies can also help detect attacks early.

Failing to act could expose cryptographic keys, facilitate privilege escalation, and result in reputational and operational damage. Avocado Consulting states that secure development practices must become the default, with automated scanning and push protection integrated into the software development lifecycle.

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Spanish joins Google’s global AI Mode expansion

Google is rapidly expanding AI Mode, its generative AI-powered search assistant. The company has announced that the feature is now rolling out globally in Spanish. Spanish speakers can now interact with AI Mode to ask complex questions that traditional Search handles poorly.

AI Mode has seen swift adoption since its launch earlier this year. First introduced in March, the feature was rolled out to users across the US in May, followed by its first language expansion earlier this month.

Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese were the first languages added, and Spanish now joins the list. Google says more languages will follow soon as part of its global AI Mode rollout.

Google says the feature is designed to work alongside Search, not replace it, offering conversational answers with links to supporting sources. The company has stressed that responses are generated with safety filters and fact-checking layers.

The rollout reflects Google’s broader strategy to integrate generative AI into its ecosystem, spanning Search, Workspace, and Android. AI Mode will evolve with multimodal support and tighter integration with other Google services.

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AI image war heats up as ByteDance unveils Seedream 4.0

ByteDance has unveiled Seedream 4.0, its latest AI-powered image generation model, which it claims outperforms Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. The launch signals ByteDance’s bid to rival leading creative AI tools.

Developed by ByteDance’s Seed division, the model combines advanced text-to-image generation with fast, precise image editing. Internal testing reportedly showed superior prompt accuracy, image alignment, and visual quality compared to US-developed DeepMind’s system.

Artificial Analysis, an independent AI benchmarking firm, called Seedream 4.0 a significant step forward. The model integrates Seedream 3.0’s generation capability with SeedEdit 3.0’s editing tools while maintaining a price of US$30 per 1,000 generations.

ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 runs over 10 times faster than earlier versions, enhancing the user experience with near-instant image inference. Early users have praised its ability to make quick, text-prompted edits with high accuracy.

The tool is now available to users in China through Jimeng and Doubao AI apps and businesses via Volcano Engine, ByteDance’s cloud platform. A formal technical report supporting the company’s claims has not yet been released.

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JFTC study and MSCA shape Japan’s AI oversight strategy

Japan is adopting a softer approach to regulating generative AI, emphasising innovation while managing risks. Its 2025 AI Bill promotes development and safety, supported by international norms and guidelines.

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) is running a market study on competition concerns in AI, alongside enforcing the new Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), aimed at curbing anti-competitive practices in mobile software.

The AI Bill focuses on transparency, international cooperation, and sector-specific guidance rather than heavy penalties. Policymakers hope this flexible framework will avoid stifling innovation while encouraging responsible adoption.

The MSCA, set to be fully enforced in December 2025, obliges mobile platform operators to ensure interoperability and fair treatment of developers, including potential applications to AI tools and assistants.

With rapid AI advances, regulators in Japan remain cautious but proactive. The JFTC aims to monitor markets closely, issue guidelines as needed, and preserve a balance between competition, innovation, and consumer protection.

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