NerdNews

Google's Gemini app has reached 1 billion monthly active users, keeping pace with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The app has seen rapid growth, with 63% of users interacting with it via voice feature and generating over 150 million images daily.

An unreleased Anthropic model has made significant progress on the Riemann hypothesis, a long-standing unsolved problem in mathematics. The model tested 650 different ideas and spent 31 million output tokens to achieve this breakthrough, which was confirmed by in-house mathematicians and formalized using the Lean proof assistant.

Spotify will begin labeling AI-generated artists with 'AI Persona' profile tags and exclude their music from editorial and algorithmic recommendations. The move aims to balance innovations driven by AI while managing low-quality content. Artists can appeal their AI Persona label if they think it's been incorrectly applied.

OpenAI is expanding its Daybreak cybersecurity program, giving partners access to a new model called GPT-5.6-Cyber, which is less likely to refuse higher-risk tasks. The program is available in two tiers: Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red, with the latter providing access to specialized cybersecurity models. OpenAI has also introduced new partners to the program, including Accenture, IBM, and Cisco.

Google's AI chatbot Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing product in Google's history. Gemini is used in various Google products and services, including Gmail and Drive, and its user base includes over 100 million iOS users. However, despite its success, Gemini's growth may be slowing down due to internal shakeups and competition from other AI models.

Gartner advises that traditional vulnerability management is no longer enough due to AI-powered attacks. Instead, organizations should focus on outcome-driven security, measuring whether security investments reduce attacker opportunity and improve resilience. This shift requires new metrics, such as outcome-driven metrics, to demonstrate return on investment for cyber security initiatives.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.6-Cyber, a large language model for cybersecurity tasks, and introduces a two-tier security access program, Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red, to mitigate potential misuse of its AI models.

Thousands of lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap, and other tech firms can move forward, alleging that addictive algorithms and lack of guardrails around harmful online content have led to a rise in depression, anxiety, and body image issues among young users.

Meryem Arik discusses strategies for achieving order-of-magnitude cost reductions in LLM inference architectures by making trade-offs across hardware, inference runtimes, and scheduling

Abbott has partnered with Google Health to connect its Lingo continuous glucose monitor to the Google Health app, allowing users to see metabolic data and receive AI-driven recommendations. The partnership aims to help non-diabetics make better lifestyle choices, but the benefits of glucose monitoring for this population are still unclear. The companies will conduct a large-scale study to uncover connections between activity, sleep, and metabolic health.

Uber has sold its entire stake in Serve Robotics, a company that spun out of Uber in 2021. Serve Robotics is an autonomous delivery robot company that had a partnership with Uber to deploy its robots on the Uber Eats app. The sale comes as a surprise to Serve, and the two companies have diverging views on their business models.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is set to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where he will detail the company's journey and lessons learned from designing, manufacturing, and delivering hardware at scale. Scaringe will discuss Rivian's investments in EVs, robots, and autonomy, including its roadmap to full Level 4 autonomy by 2028 and the launch of its R2 SUV.

A US Appeals court has ruled that Meta and other tech giants, including TikTok-owner ByteDance, YouTube-owner Google, and Snapchat-owner Snap, must face thousands of social media addiction lawsuits. The lawsuits claim that the companies' social media platforms have caused mental health problems in young users due to their addictive design features. The court's decision allows the lawsuits to proceed, potentially resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in fines.

Aptoide, a third-party app store, is now available on the Google Play Store in the US, allowing users to download alternative app stores directly from the Play Store. This change is a result of Google's litigation with Epic, which required Google to open up the Play Store to third-party stores.

Google is set to reveal new Pixel devices on August 12th, including the Pixel 11 lineup with various colors and a built-in light on Pro models, a next-gen Pixel Fold, and a Pixel Watch 5. The event will be hosted by Trevor Noah and feature notable guests.

Six npm packages have been found to query an attacker-controlled Ethereum wallet to retrieve command-and-control (C2) addresses, which are then used to fetch malware. The packages, identified by Sonatype Research Labs, use a technique called NullReceiver to read bytes from an Ethereum transaction and decode them into IPv4 addresses.

The FBI is investigating a fake Wi-Fi attack on a Delta flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta, where passengers allegedly created a fake hotspot to harvest personal credentials. The incident occurred after the DEF CON security conference and is believed to be related. No arrests have been made, and the flight's safety was not compromised.

Netflix redesigned its Service Topology system to support production scale. The system now uses three stages to separate intermediary resolution from enrichment and persistence, propagates backpressure to Kafka, and uses server-sent events instead of gRPC for high-volume internal transfers.

The DeadLock ransomware operation uses a decentralized infrastructure that relies on blockchain-backed services to protect its communication with victims and data-leak activity. It emerged in mid-2025 and uses double-extortion tactics, with 80 organizations listed on its data leak site as of July this year. The ransomware operators adopted a new approach that uses the Polygon blockchain to store configuration data and posts on the leak site, making it harder to take down.

A high-severity Microsoft SharePoint remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2026-45659) is being exploited by ransomware gangs. The flaw allows attackers with low privileges to execute arbitrary code on unpatched SharePoint servers. CISA has flagged it as abused by ransomware gangs and ordered Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to secure their servers.