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Microsoft said in a statement Monday it remains committed to developing first-party Xbox consoles. The reassurance came after rumors circulated suggesting the gaming division might abandon hardware manufacturing. The speculation gained traction following a 50% price increase for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and retailers including Costco removing Xbox products from their shelves. Microsoft said it is "actively investing in our future first-party consoles and devices designed, engineered and built by Xbox." The company's multi-year partnership with AMD for next-generation hardware also continues. Devices in development include the Xbox Ally range under codenames Omni and Horseman, according to Windows Central. Xbox Series X and Series S production has also not stopped, the report added.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Monday that ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, marking an increase of adoption among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments. ChatGPT's impressive growth comes as OpenAI is on a race to secure as many AI chips and build as much AI infrastructure as possible. In August, OpenAI said it was on the cusp of reaching 700 million weekly active users, already an increase from 500 million weekly active users at the end of March. "Today, 4 million developers have built with OpenAI," Altman said. "More than 800 people use ChatGPT every week, and we process over 6 billion tokens per minute on the API. Thanks to all of you, AI has gone from something people build play with to something people build with every day." Altman made the announcement during the keynote presentation for OpenAI's Dev Day, which also included announcement for new tools for building apps inside of ChatGPT, as well as constructing more complex agentic systems. "This will enable a new generation of apps that are interactive, adaptive, and personalized, that you can chat with," Altman said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Tucked in the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains is a factory that has figured out a way to manufacture in America that's cheaper, quicker and better. It's the home of a famous American writing implement: the Sharpie marker. Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink. At least half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year, each one made of six parts. Only the felt tip is imported, from Japan. It didn't used to be this way. Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad. That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie maker Newell Brands challenged his team to answer a question: How could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia? "I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing," he said. Peterson is now the CEO. And these days, most Sharpies -- in all 93 colors -- are made at this 37-year-old factory. Newell did it without reducing the employee count, and without raising prices. But to get to this place took close to $2 billion in investments across the company, thousands of hours of training and a total overhaul of the production process. The result is a playbook for making low-cost, high-volume products domestically, albeit one that requires long-term planning and a lot of investment.

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Deforestation is draining color from butterfly populations in Brazil. Researchers studying butterflies in the state of EspÃrito Santo found 31 species in natural forests but only 21 in eucalyptus plantations. The plantation communities were dominated by brown-colored species. Roberto GarcÃa-Roa, part of the research project, said the colors on butterfly wings have been designed over millions of years. Lead researcher Maider Iglesias-Carrasco from the University of Copenhagen observed a general feeling of emptiness in the plantations. Ricardo Spaniol from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul discovered in 2019 that the most colorful Amazonian species often disappear first after deforestation, probably because of the loss of native vegetation and increased exposure to predators. Eucalyptus plantations cover at least 22 million hectares around the world. Spaniol's research found that forested Amazon habitats regenerating for 30 years after use as cattle pasture showed a remarkable increase in butterfly color diversity.

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Deloitte will partially refund payment for an Australian government report that contained multiple errors after admitting it was partly produced by AI [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The Big Four accountancy and consultancy firm will repay the final instalment of its government contract after conceding that some footnotes and references it contained were incorrect, Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said on Monday. The department had commissioned a A$439,000 ($290,300) "independent assurance review" from Deloitte in December last year to help assess problems with a welfare system for automatically penalising jobseekers. The Deloitte review was first published earlier this year, but a corrected version was uploaded on Friday to the departmental website. In late August the Australian Financial Review reported that the document contained multiple errors, including references and citations to non-existent reports by academics at the universities of Sydney and Lund in Sweden. The substance of the review and its recommendations had not changed, the Australian government added. The contract will be made public once the transaction is completed, it said.

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European labor regulations enacted nearly a century ago now impose costs on companies that discourage investment in disruptive technologies. An American firm shedding workers incurs costs equivalent to seven months of wages per employee. In Germany the figure reaches 31 months. In France it reaches 38 months. The expense extends beyond severance pay and union negotiations. Companies retain unproductive workers they would prefer to dismiss. New investments face delays of years as dismissed employees are gradually replaced. Olivier Coste, a former EU official turned tech entrepreneur, and economist Yann Coatanlem tracked these opaque restructuring costs and found that European firms avoid risky ventures because of them. Large companies typically finance ten risky projects where eight fail and require mass redundancies. Apple developed a self-driving car for years before abandoning the effort and firing 600 employees in 2024. The two successful projects generate profits worth many times the invested sums. This calculus works in America where failure costs remain low. In Europe the same bet becomes financially unviable. European blue-chip firms sell products that are improved versions of what they sold in the 20th century -- turbines, shampoos, vaccines, jetliners. American star firms peddle AI chatbots, cloud computers, reusable rockets. Nvidia is worth more than the European Union's 20 biggest listed firms combined. Microsoft, Google, and Meta each fired over 10,000 staff in recent years despite thriving businesses. Satya Nadella called firing people during success the "enigma of success." Bosch and Volkswagen recently announced layoffs with timelines stretching to 2030.

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Fortune tested the AI Friend necklace for two weeks and found it struggled to perform its basic function. The $129 pendant missed conversations entirely during the author's breakup call and could only offer vague questions about "fragments" when she tried to ask for advice. The device lagged seven to ten seconds behind her speech and frequently disconnected. The author had to press her lips against the pendant and repeat herself multiple times to get coherent replies. After a week and a half the necklace forgot her name and later misremembered her favorite color. The startup has raised roughly seven million dollars in venture capital for the product and spent a large portion on eleven thousand subway posters across the MTA system. Sales reached three thousand units but only one thousand have shipped. The company brought in slightly under four hundred thousand dollars in revenue. The startup told Fortune he deliberately "lobotomized" the AI's personality after receiving complaints. The terms of service require arbitration in San Francisco and grant the company permission to collect audio and voice data for AI training.

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Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries about how the immune system regulates itself. The three researchers split 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.17 million). Their work identified regulatory T cells and the FOXP3 gene that controls them. Dr. Sakaguchi spent more than a decade solving a puzzle about the thymus. He discovered that the immune system has a backup mechanism to stop harmful cells from attacking the body's own tissues. Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell found the specific gene responsible for this process while studying mice that developed severe autoimmune disease. More than 200 clinical trials are now underway based on their research. Cancers attract regulatory T cells to block immune attacks. Researchers are developing drugs to turn the immune system against these cancer cells. In autoimmune diseases, regulatory T cells are missing or defective. The FOXP3 gene provides a starting point for drugs that teach the immune system to stop attacking itself.

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OpenAI and AMD announced a multibillion-dollar partnership on Monday for AI data centers running on AMD processors. OpenAI committed to purchasing 6 gigawatts worth of AMD's MI450 chips starting next year through direct purchases or through its cloud computing partners. AMD chief Lisa Su said the deal will result in tens of billions of dollars in new revenue over the next half-decade. OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares at 1 cent per share, representing roughly 10% of the chip company. The warrants will be awarded in phases if OpenAI hits certain deployment milestones. The partnership marks AMD's biggest win in its quest to disrupt Nvidia's dominance among AI semiconductor companies. Mizuho Securities estimates that Nvidia controls more than 70% of the market for AI chips.

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Vibe coding tools "are transforming the job experience for many tech workers," writes the Los Angeles Times. But Gartner analyst Philip Walsh said the research firm's position is that AI won't replace software engineers and will actually create a need for more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it..." The idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding [Walsh said]... "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like." "Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers," the article points out. "In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' — ages 22-25 — in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier." And yet Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code, doesn't even use the term vibe coding. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

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