AI
Abu Dhabi's Institute of Foundation Models and Inception42 released Jais 3, six open Arabic language models plus a speech recognition model that handles dialects from 19 Arab countries.
Business
Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint has agreed to acquire data security company Varonis in an all-cash deal at $49.75 per share. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Science
After a round of checkouts and tiny mirror adjustments, NASA says the Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Instrument is performing nearly 30% better than predicted.
Science
NASA's Perseverance rover passed Opportunity's record on October 11, reaching 28.10 miles on Mars, and did it in five and a half years instead of almost 15.
Apps
Google's Universal Cart is rolling out in the U.S. across Search and the Gemini app. It saves products from multiple retailers, tracks price drops and supports Google Pay checkout.
Hardware
The first Windows laptops built on NVIDIA's RTX Spark superchip, which pairs a Blackwell RTX GPU with a Grace CPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, are on sale from six PC makers.
Gadgets
Pre-orders for Apple's first foldable iPhone opened October 16. iPhone Duo pairs a 7.6-inch inner display with a 5.4-inch outer screen and the A20 Pro chip, and ships October 23.
Gaming
Microsoft has formed Xbox Labs, a small team led by Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet, to experiment with decompiled game ports, Apple Silicon and browser play, and AI-powered remixes.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA's new open Nemotron 3.5 models range from a 120B vision-language model for enterprise agents to Bolt models that run locally in 24GB and 4GB.
OpenAI
OpenAI has given developers three months' notice: GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini leave the API on January 14, 2027, fine-tuned versions included.
Gemini 4 Argon is rolling out globally across the Gemini API, AI Studio, Google Cloud and the Gemini app, with introductory pricing of $2/$10 per million tokens through November 30.
Meta
Meta has released the weights of Muse Spark Open, a multimodal mixture-of-experts model built for coding and agentic work that can run locally on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios.