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September 22, 2026, 10:35 AM
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Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft lays off 268 Xbox employees across Halo Studios and other studios, as part of an ongoing gaming “reset”; Activision will take over Halo and two others  —  Deals to sell off Ninja Theory fell through over the summer. … Microsoft is laying off around 260 Xbox employees today …
Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal:
Shopify plans to allow Meta's Muse to complete purchases on behalf of users at Shopify-powered stores via its one-tap checkout service Shop Pay  —  Shopify plans to allow Meta's personal AI agent to complete purchases on behalf of users with the e-commerce platform's roster of stores
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
A researcher says a flaw in Meta's Muse Mac app lets any app or terminal command access users' Muse authentication tokens; Meta says it issued a hotfix  —  Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.”
Bloomberg:
Sensor Tower: users downloaded Muse 902K+ times in the six days from its September 8 launch, above Meta AI's 773K in the same post-launch period; META jumps 12%
David Phelan / Forbes:
Apple unveils Apple Music Hall, a 600-person live music venue built in its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station with two recording and mixing studios  —  This voice experience is generated by AI.  Learn more. … Apple has just announced a new live music venue, built into its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station.
Xiaomi:
Xiaomi debuts open-weight omnimodal models MiMo-V2.6 Pro and Flash; Pro allegedly performs “on par with Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol across most agent benchmarks”  —  Frontier intelligence, all the modalities, built in public.  Today, we are releasing and open-sourcing the MiMo-V2.6 series.
Reuters:
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu says the company plans to train a 5T- to 10T-parameter AI model, as it lays out a sweeping push across AI models, chips, and data centers  —  Alibaba Group (9988.HK) said on Tuesday it was developing an AI model up to four times larger than the company's flagship model …
Bloomberg:
Alibaba's T-Head unveils the Zhenwu V900 AI accelerator, which it says triples its predecessor's performance and can scale to clusters of up to 500K units
Paula Doenecke / Bloomberg:
Finnish neocloud startup Verda raised $189M led by Emergence at a $1B+ valuation and aims to raise up to $1.5B in equity and debt in 2026 and up to $10B in 2027  —  Cloud startup Verda has raised $189 million in fresh financing, underscoring continued investor appetite for the infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence boom.
Financial Times:
Sources: multiple staff at the UK's AISI have been signed off work with stress, as tight model release schedules and AI fears lead to low morale and burnout  —  Top researchers at Aisi, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind report burnout and stress over developing powerful AI
Will Oremus / The Atlantic:
Some universities have barred using AI detectors due to student-instructor distrust over false positives; some educators have just cancelled writing assignments  —  Professors are tearing their hair out over AI detectors.  —  Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI.
Mackenzie Hawkins / Bloomberg:
US startup Firebird is building a 300MW data center in Armenia, set to host 70K+ Nvidia chips by 2027; sources: Trump pledged Nvidia export approvals to Armenia  —  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's smallest republic was an electronics and tech center for the Communist superpower.
More: Bloomberg Law.  Forums: r/armenia
Tim Hardwick / MacRumors:
Apple quietly updates its press release to say new Photographic Styles texture and grain controls are limited to iPhone 18 Pro models and the iPhone Duo  —  Apple's new Texture and Grain controls for Photographic Styles are not available on iPhones other than the latest iPhone 18 Pro models …
Bloomberg:
Harvey, Abridge, Ramp, Rogo, and other AI startups are embracing open-weight models or training their own models to reduce expensive reliance on frontier labs  —  The $15.6 billion legal startup Harvey built its business around training AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4 to do specialized work for lawyers.
Juliet Macur / New York Times:
Amazon, Walmart and other companies are using drones for fast deliveries in Richardson, Texas, but residents complain about noise and clumsy package drops  —  In Richardson, a fleet of drones has started to deliver goods quickly.  But the noise is drowning out life for some residents: 'We can't live like this.'
Joel Khalili / Wired:
The Austrian Academy of Science, Mistral, and Sail Reply plan to launch Apollo, an Ancient Greek LLM trained on ~600M historical Greek words, available for free  —  In the hope of uncovering new details about ancient life, researchers have developed a large language model that fills in the gaps in papyrus fragments.
John Higgins / The Verge:
Apple announces new $350 Beats 360 headphones, with IPX4 rating, swappable ear cups, a replaceable battery, ANC, Find My support, and more  —  Everyone has seen someone at the gym or running around their neighborhood wearing headphones that were never designed for workouts.  Quite often those headphones are Beats.
CoinDesk:
Binance acquires a $100M stake in Circle, and both companies sign a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform  —  Binance bought $100 million of Circle shares as the companies signed a five-year deal that pays the crypto exchange to promote the USDC stablecoin on its platform.
OpenAI:
OpenAI says it is working with an independent math advisory group to responsibly share AI advances, following an open letter raising concerns from researchers  —  Loading...  On August 28, we began training a new internal model.  In addition to resolving the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 10:35 AM ET, September 22, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

Salon:
Salon, launched in 1995 to cover politics, culture, and more, says it is closing: “business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly”

Denise Petski / Deadline:
Amazon Prime Video sets November 20 for the premiere of “Melania, The Series”, the two-episode follow-up to Brett Ratner's “Melania” documentary

Financial Times:
Bomb threats force the evacuation of Irish newsrooms, including national broadcaster RTÉ, which briefly went off air and resumed broadcasts from a mobile unit

More News

Earlier Picks

Bloomberg:
Tencent launches Hy Image 3.5 Preview, saying that during internal testing the AI image model achieved results on par with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro
Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal:
British Columbia sues OpenAI for alleged safety violations and negligence for failing to flag the Tumbler Ridge shooting suspect's ChatGPT activity to police
Maureen Farrell / New York Times:
Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy has delayed its IPO, originally planned for this month, as investors question the company's sought-after valuation of $50B+
Nichola Groom / Reuters:
California Governor Gavin Newsom signs seven bills aimed at regulating data centers, imposing requirements on electricity costs, water use, and local oversight
OpenAI:
OpenAI says automated research could improve alignment, but “fully autonomous RSI is not happening today” and shouldn't be pursued “until it can be done safely”
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