AI Tech News.

Google Photos has added a toggle at the top of search results that lets users switch between classic search and Ask Photos. The toggle remains on classic search across simple queries but switches to Ask Photos for complex questions. Users who have not opted in may see the toggle to start onboarding.

Paytm reported a 79% rise in net profit to Rs 220 crore for Q1 FY27, with revenue up 28% to Rs 2,448 crore. Despite broad-based growth across segments, the stock fell 2.14% on the National Stock Exchange in Tuesday morning trading.

UK startup Rheya Labs developed backup batteries for sewage pumping stations that predict spill causes before power failures occur. The company became a finalist in Ofwat's £7.5 million Water Discovery Challenge, receiving up to £100,000 in seed funding from the Water Innovation Fund.

Neill Blomkamp posted an AI-generated horror clip on X on July 19, calling it his first full test AI film made with Seedance 2.0. The clip depicts a zombie soldier created through Project Nightborne. Critics note the video feels antiseptic and emotionally empty, with acting quality that has not advanced in nearly a year.

Of 203 companies listed on NYSE or Nasdaq in 2026, 49% have declining share prices. SpaceX, the largest IPO ever, trades at $123, down 45% from its post-IPO high. Green Circle Decarbonize Technology has dropped 88% to 47 cents per share.

Visakhapatnam is building over 6GW of AI data centre capacity by 2030. Google and Reliance are investing in the coastal city. Subsea cables will connect the region to global data traffic. The state government is implementing renewable energy and water management policies for the project.

Publishers now treat AI answer engines as a distribution layer, not a referral source. DataDome reports AI agent traffic grew 45% in Q2 2026, with Meta generating the majority. Decodo found AI-driven traffic grew 187% in 2025. LLMs.txt adoption reached 36,120 instances by May 2026, but 97% of files received zero requests.

Marketers are adopting AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini but cannot track whether usage delivers results. Agencies impose token caps and shift to output-based pricing without a standard way to measure AI's business impact. Publicis reported a 7% rise in operating costs partly driven by AI, with margin improvement offset by reinvestment.

Investors continue funding AI drug discovery startups despite a lack of approved drugs from the approach. The gap between AI-driven development and regulatory approval has not deterred venture capital. Companies like Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Insilico Medicine have raised significant rounds.

China is considering stricter export controls on AI models and chips. The potential restrictions target advanced semiconductor technologies and artificial intelligence software. The move signals escalating technology trade tensions between global powers.

The EU's digital chief warned that artificial intelligence is becoming a geopolitical weapon. The statement highlights growing concerns over AI's strategic use in international power dynamics and security.

Water UK stated the government's AI growth plans are fatally flawed because water forecasts exclude datacentres. Datacentres in England use 6.6m litres of drinking water daily, which could triple to 19.8m litres by 2030. New growth in water-stressed southern and eastern England may be impossible without policy change.

Hidden debt at Meta, Oracle, and other US tech giants reached $1.65 trillion, an eightfold increase in four years, driven by AI investments. The off-balance-sheet liabilities from data center leases and GPU contracts now exceed transparent debt, complicating investor risk assessment.

Bloomberg reports that a major AI breakthrough appears concerning. The development signals potential risks and challenges ahead for the technology sector. The piece highlights growing unease about the direction of artificial intelligence advancements.

Paytm reported a 79% YoY profit jump to ₹220 Cr and 27.6% revenue growth to ₹2,448 Cr in Q1. NVIDIA is offering credit support to AI cloud providers for GPU procurement, taking a share of future revenues. Redcliffe Labs is acquiring Megavision Diagnostics for ₹40 Cr. BlueStone posted a ₹6 Cr profit on 50% revenue growth.

CuspAI, a British startup, raised $450 million in Series B funding to use AI for discovering new materials in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. Backers include Jeff Bezos and the UK government's sovereign AI fund. The company partnered with Nvidia and other industry leaders.

A federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit. The payout delivers $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works to authors and publishers. Judge William Alsup had ruled that training AI on copyrighted text counts as fair use, but found Anthropic's use of pirate sites illegal.

David Sacks warned the U.S. could lose the AI race after a Chinese model's breakout. The warning highlights growing competition from Chinese AI models, which have demonstrated rapid advances and could challenge U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence development.

South Korea's chip exports climbed 180.6% in the first 20 days of July compared to the same period in 2025. Computer-related product shipments grew approximately 232%. Artificial intelligence-driven demand for semiconductors continued to fuel the economy.

DigitalOcean will raise prices on select NVIDIA and AMD GPU droplets starting August 1, 2026. The change reflects strong demand for advanced GPU capacity. DigitalOcean states it will still offer competitive GPU infrastructure pricing after the update.

Google is designing a server chip codenamed Frozen v2, optimized for its Gemini AI models and slated for release in 2028. The chip could deliver six to ten times better performance per watt than Google's current AI silicon, measured by tokens generated per unit of power. Google did not directly confirm the report.

A letter argues that artificial intelligence can assist with tasks but will struggle to fully replace human hands. The piece highlights the limitations of AI in replicating the nuanced physical dexterity and adaptability of human touch. The author emphasizes that certain manual skills remain uniquely human.

US AI startup Infinity raised $15 million to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware. The funding will support development of alternative AI chip solutions. The company aims to offer more competitive options in the AI infrastructure market.

Microsoft announced that its cloud and AI platforms are driving modernization across the Asia Pacific region. The company highlighted enterprise adoption of Azure AI and Copilot services to accelerate digital transformation for businesses and governments in the area.

Australia's stock market has emerged as a haven from the volatile AI trade. The market offers stability as global AI-related stocks experience sharp fluctuations. Investors are shifting focus to Australian equities for relative calm amid the AI-driven market turbulence.

Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to business websites across many industries fell roughly 40%, according to Cloudflare. Google's AI Search is cited as the cause, directly reducing the open web's audience and threatening site viability.

Researchers found sandbox escapes or boundary bypasses in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity by writing files trusted tools later use. Most of the vulnerabilities are patched.

Oracle could face a $7 billion collateral bill for its Wisconsin data centre project. The financial requirement stems from the company's agreement with the state. The potential payment represents a significant financial obligation tied to the data centre's construction and operation.

UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle appointed Feryal Clark as the first AI minister to attend cabinet meetings. The role places artificial intelligence policy at the highest level of British government decision-making. Clark will coordinate AI regulation and investment across departments.

Sony Music Entertainment filed a new lawsuit against AI music generator Udio, alleging copyright infringement of over 30,000 songs including works by Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Johnny Cash, and Harry Styles. The lawsuit claims Udio copied and ingested these songs into its generative AI models. Sony seeks up to $150,000 per work infringed and an injunction blocking Udio from further infringement.

NVIDIA unveiled Synthetic Video Detector at SIGGRAPH 2026, an AI tool that identifies AI-generated videos. The system processes 1080p video in 22 milliseconds on RTX systems and achieves up to 92% accuracy on uncompressed video. It ranks top on the AI GVD Bench and will integrate into Wowza's framework across 35,000 deployments.

The Beatbot AquaSense X is the first robot pool cleaner with an automatic filter-cleaning dock. The AstroRinse station backflushes the filter, dumps debris into a 22-liter bin, and recharges the battery. At $3,999, it costs roughly $1,400 more than Beatbot's own AquaSense 2 Ultra and more than twice as much as cordless rivals from Aiper or iGarden.

Oracle credit risk surged to near an 18-year high as investor angst grows over the company's debt load tied to AI spending. The credit-default swaps market reflects heightened concern about Oracle's ability to service its obligations amid heavy capital expenditures for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Attackers are exploiting two WordPress vulnerabilities chained together for pre-authentication remote code execution. Security researchers reproduced CVE-2026-63030 within minutes of disclosure. The bugs were likely reproduced with AI assistance, according to watchTowr principal security researcher Jake Knott.

HireQuotient integrated its EasySource AI recruiting platform with Paylocity, targeting deskless and frontline hiring in manufacturing, building services, construction, healthcare, and insurance. For mid-market companies with 500 to 1,000 employees, the integration delivers 70% faster time-to-hire and an estimated $100,000 in annual savings.

ONEXPLAYER began selling the X2 Mini Pro handheld directly through its online store. The device starts at $2,499 and reaches $3,229 with 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, and the Frost Bay liquid cooling system. It uses AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 388 processor with Radeon 8060S graphics and an 8.8-inch OLED display.

NodeMeta is building a connected digital economy around its NTE token on BNB Smart Chain. The ecosystem includes OneKey, a unified Web3 dashboard, and TrustScan AI, a security and token-verification platform. NodeMeta plans to burn up to 40% of the 11 billion NTE supply and pursue over 30 exchange listings within three years.

Researchers at Writer published a paper showing a systematic optimization of the AI harness, the orchestration layer around a foundation model. The approach reduces tokens per task and drops cost-per-successful-task by up to nearly 40% without sacrificing accuracy, addressing the ROI paradox of enterprise AI production costs.

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS, a hosted text-to-speech model in Flash and Plus tiers. Flash targets real-time interaction with 300 ms latency. Plus ranks first on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard at $27.59 per 1M characters. The model supports 16 languages and 86 inline tags for expressive control.

JadePuffer, an autonomous AI agent, now uses custom EncForge ransomware to encrypt AI assets like training datasets and model checkpoints. The Go-based binary targets 180 file extensions across the AI/ML stack. Sysdig reports the attacker breached a Langflow instance vulnerable to CVE-2025-3248 and deployed six Python scripts in five minutes to deliver the payload.

The Nasdaq lost early gains as persistent fears over oil prices and artificial intelligence weighed on the market. The decline reflects ongoing investor concerns about rising energy costs and the impact of AI developments on technology stocks.

Seoul National University's SafeDrive model generates multiple driving trajectories, scores each for safety using sensor data, and picks the safest path. The research, led by professor Jun Won Choi, earned a CVPR 2026 highlight paper, the first Korean end-to-end autonomous driving paper to do so. SafeDrive has been integrated into the EAD reference model backed by Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

SES AI announced the date for its second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. The call will cover the company's performance for the quarter. Investors and analysts can participate to hear the results and outlook.

Seismic scaled AI-driven prospecting across its sales team using ZoomInfo. The company announcement details how Seismic integrated ZoomInfo data to enhance sales efficiency and targeting. The deployment aimed to improve lead generation and streamline the sales process through automated data enrichment.

Researchers from Zhejiang University devised Bit2Watt, an attack where malicious cloud tenants use GPU workloads to destabilize datacenters and electrical infrastructure. The attack can induce voltage excursions, harmonic distortion, and damping degradation. A 1,000-GPU assault on a 1-MW grid could create 46.8 percent total harmonic distortion, potentially triggering cascading failures and blackouts exceeding 80 percent.

Natural raised $30 million in a Series A led by Forerunner to build payment infrastructure for AI agents. The startup, founded in 2025 by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, enables autonomous payments and fund transfers. Natural competes with Stripe and has hired staff from Stripe, Ramp, and Square.

Bristol Myers Squibb is deploying NVIDIA's Vera Rubin systems, giving the drugmaker what it calls the most powerful AI computing infrastructure in life sciences to speed drug discovery.

A SaaStr AI Media advertising campaign generated 5.4 million impressions and drove 11,749 B2B buyers to a sponsor's signup form across 67 newsletter editions. The audience is 63% VP or above, with nearly half being founders, CEOs, or C-suite executives. Every advertiser receives a live dashboard with reconciled, per-send attribution data.