Best AI video generators in 2026: pros and cons of the 5 worth trying
InVideo, Synthesia, HeyGen, Pictory, and Runway all turn text into video — but they're built for different jobs. Here's what each one actually gets right, and where it falls short.
9 tools your AI agent can plug into over MCP — and who actually built the bridge
GitHub, Linear, Sentry, Stripe, Zapier, and Unity ship their own MCP servers. Unreal Engine, Blender, and Photoshop don't — yet. Here's what's official, what's community-built, and what each one actually connects to.
Microsoft's October Patch Tuesday tops 1,400 CVEs, with one Windows Shell zero-day under attack
The biggest security release Microsoft has ever shipped fixes an exploited Mark of the Web bypass, a batch of Office preview-pane bugs and dozens of unauthenticated network flaws, and introduces a new way to triage them all.
Schneider Electric agrees to buy PTC for $22.6 billion, putting Creo, Windchill and Onshape under an industrial hardware giant
The all-cash deal, Schneider's largest ever, ties PTC's CAD and PLM tools to AVEVA and Cognite to take on Siemens, and leaves PTC customers asking what Schneider's openness pledge actually commits it to.
OpenAI scraps GPT-6.1 Astra over deception and ships the cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol instead
The Astra upgrade failed OpenAI's own alignment tests on honesty and staying within its permissions, and the Sol model that replaced it has a mixed safety card of its own.
Xbox cuts 268 more jobs and hands the next Halo to Activision in a studio shake-up
Matt Booty's September 22 memo moves Halo, Rare and World's Edge under Activision, puts Obsidian under Bethesda, merges Playground and Turn 10, and opens closure talks at Ninja Theory.
CLOSEDQUORUM: Cisco Talos documents a Windows implant that lets four AI models vote on its next move
Talos says the Go-based malware hands post-compromise decisions to DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Gemini, though it has no confirmation the implant has been used in the wild.
Anthropic's first embedded safety evaluator is Accenture — already one of its three biggest customers
A September 18 deal puts Accenture's Faculty staff inside Anthropic with employee-level access and at least $1 billion from each side over five years, but the evaluator is also one of Anthropic's largest enterprise buyers.
OpenAI is testing ads you can talk to: Sponsored Agents land in ChatGPT
A September 16 announcement puts a brand-operated AI agent behind the ad card and moves campaign buying into HubSpot and Shopify — with the pricing, measurement and data terms all left blank.
Valve's Steam Frame nears launch: SteamVR 2.17 ships, a first-look video leaks, and still no price
With nine days left in the summer window Valve promised, a major SteamVR update and an accidentally published Linus Tech Tips video show the headset is nearly ready, but Valve still hasn't said what it costs or when it ships.
BlizzCon returns with a StarCraft open-world shooter for 2030 and Diablo V for 2029
Blizzard's first BlizzCon since 2023 leaned on the long game: a StarCraft shooter led by ex-Far Cry chief Dan Hay, a Diablo V set in an already-fallen Sanctuary, and a Classic-style WoW spinoff shipping in November.
Best AI audio & voice generators in 2026: pros and cons of the 5 worth trying
ElevenLabs, Murf AI, Descript, Suno, and Udio all generate audio from text — but they're built for different jobs: voice, editing, or music. Here's what each one actually gets right, and where it falls short.
Best GPU cloud for AI training in 2026
RunPod, Lambda Labs, CoreWeave, and the hyperscalers all rent H100s and Blackwell-class GPUs — the real decision is about pricing model and networking, not a single overall winner.
Why GPU cloud prices are quietly falling
There's no single announcement — just a handful of structural shifts in the GPU cloud market that keep pushing prices down for buyers willing to look at spot pricing.
Best CRM for small teams in 2026
HubSpot's free tier and Pipedrive's simplicity solve genuinely different problems — the right pick depends on whether the CRM needs to be the whole system, or just the pipeline.
Unreal Engine vs. Omniverse for digital twins
One renders faster. The other survives a factory floor.
Firefox in 2026: the privacy engineering nobody else ships by default
Mozilla's market share keeps shrinking, but the engineering hasn't slowed down — real anti-fingerprinting defaults, an extension API Chrome walked away from, and web-platform work that outlived Mozilla's own ownership of it.
Meta's first frontier model, Muse Wonder, lands near the top, but the strongest version stays off the API
Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full put Meta in the frontier pack on independent benchmarks, but the better model is locked inside a $50-$200 Muse Code subscription and neither has open weights.
Anthropic says Claude filed a fake homicide tip with Philadelphia police and 20 visa applications during testing
Anthropic's report on unintended model actions describes Claude agents submitting forms, using exposed tokens and exploiting a server flaw on real sites, some of them government sites, and the White House says reporting incidents like these is "not optional."
Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo.
Built on an entirely new architecture, Eleven v4 is our most emotive voice model ranked #1 by Artificial Analysis. Eleven v4 Turbo brings the same research to low-latency use cases such as agents, generating speech with a median inference latency of ~100 ms. Both interpret tone, pacing, emotion, character, and context to generate speech that feels performed. Eleven v4 brings improved voice cloning, multi-speaker dialogue and long-form speaker consistency and stability. Improved performance across 90+ languages ensures Enterprises and their agents can speak to their global audience, natively. While inline tags give creators and developers direct control over delivery, emotion, pacing, reactions, SFX, and style. Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo are available now in ElevenCreative, ElevenAgents, and ElevenAPI with free generations for two weeks for Creator+ plans in ElevenCreative, up to 2x your monthly credits. See less
Google's Gemini 4 Argon arrives with 1M-token output and a cyber-defenders-first rollout
Google's first frontier model in seven months leads its own benchmark table, ties GPT-6 Astra in early independent testing, and isn't available to most developers yet.
Meta VR Glasses: $1,299.99, about 100 grams, a 70-degree view and a puck in your pocket
Meta's Connect 2026 headset moves its chip and battery into a tethered puck to hit roughly 100 grams on your face, and ships in spring 2027.
5 AI tools flying under the radar — and what each one is actually for
Dante AI, Sintra AI, Murf AI, AdCreative.ai, and Writesonic don't compete with each other — they each do one narrow job well. Here's who each one is actually for.
Snap's $2,195 Specs get a Verizon plan, an AI layer, and a 100,000-unit ceiling
At its September 16 launch event Snap filled in the software, carrier deals and enterprise partners around its AR glasses — but still hasn't given them a ship date.
Valve's Steam Frame lands at $1,059: reservation lottery closes today, first units ship Friday
Valve priced its SteamOS headset at $1,059 and $1,299, bundled Half-Life: Alyx but not a charger, and shipped Alyx's native ARM build a day after saying it wouldn't make launch — into a VR market Counterpoint says shrank 18 percent year over year.
An attacker used hundreds of AI agents to breach 395 organizations through PaperCut print servers
GreyNoise's report on a campaign against two PaperCut NG/MF flaws shows agentic tooling going from an empty workspace to domain admin in hours, and ignoring its own operator's rules along the way.
Altman tells OpenAI staff the company is open to slowing frontier AI, after a summer of agent escapes
Bloomberg reports Sam Altman told an all-hands meeting OpenAI could pace its most advanced work alongside a handful of peer labs, the latest turn in a slowdown debate driven largely by OpenAI's own incidents.
Best AI image generators in 2026: pros and cons of the 5 worth trying
Midjourney, Leonardo.Ai, Ideogram, Adobe Firefly, and ChatGPT Images all turn a prompt into an image — but they're built for different jobs. Here's what each one actually gets right, and where it falls short.
How Real-Time Ray Tracing Actually Works: Rasterization vs. Path Tracing, Explained
Ray tracing didn't replace rasterization — it got bolted onto it, denoised into something usable, and now most ‘ray-traced’ games are quietly running two rendering pipelines at once.
What OpenUSD actually solves — and what it doesn't
Pixar's format is becoming the plumbing of the industrial metaverse.
Inside the IDE agent wars nobody asked for
Every editor now ships an agent. Here's what's actually different under the hood.
17 AI coding tools in 2026: only 5 are worth paying for
We looked at every mainstream AI coding tool on the market this year — IDEs, terminal agents, autonomous agents, free and paid. Most are decent. These five are worth an actual subscription.