Daily reads: Jul 24, 2026

Microsoft AI released MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash in public preview, positioning them as production-ready models for tools including Bing, PowerPoint, Excel, GitHub Copilot, and Azure. The company says its in-house models can handle high-volume creative and speech workloads while cutting costs by as much as 89% versus OpenAI alternatives.

Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua will leave the top role after nearly three decades, staying on until a successor is hired. The move comes as Mobileye pushes beyond driver-assistance chips into autonomous driving, robotaxi services, and humanoid robotics following its acquisition of Mentee Robotics.

98.css is a CSS library for recreating Windows 98-style interfaces using semantic HTML elements like buttons, inputs, and labels. It includes no JavaScript, works with frameworks such as React or vanilla JavaScript, and can be installed via npm, GitHub releases, or imported from a CDN.

Amazon is previewing an Alexa Plus update that lets the assistant connect more deeply with smart-home products from Bosch, Delta, Ecovacs, iRobot, Yale Home, Whirlpool, Tapo, Eufy, and others. The assistant can interpret more complicated requests, such as choosing the right washing machine cycle based on a user’s description of a garment’s care needs.

Etched is developing inference-focused hardware designed to maximize throughput and latency across frontier AI models, with custom silicon expected to ship in 2026. The company says its architecture incorporates low voltage inference and cluster-scale memory to support dense transformers, sparse MoEs, and emerging model designs like Mamba.

OpenAI is integrating its full-duplex GPT-Live audio model into the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS and Windows, connecting voice control to Codex and ChatGPT Work. Developers can use natural speech to coordinate coding tasks, review pull requests, debug apps, and interact with agentic systems while the voice layer routes complex work to background reasoning models.

AMD is introducing Helios, a rack-scale AI system aimed at competing more directly with Nvidia’s data center offerings. The company says the system will begin shipping to customers later this year.

Amazon’s Echo Show 21 is on sale for $319.99, an $80 discount and the lowest price seen so far. The 21-inch smart display combines a kitchen TV, smart calendar, video-calling screen, and smart home hub with support for Zigbee, Matter, and Thread.

Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3, a multimodal model that can generate images and up to 20-second audio-video clips from a single prompt. The company says the model is jointly trained across modalities and will ship through FLUX 3 Video, Image, Action, and an upcoming open source Dev version, though access is initially limited.

Patreon is laying off 20% of its workforce, according to a staff memo from CEO Jack Conte that was posted online. Conte said the company’s core business remains strong, but it needs to respond to market changes and reduce costs to stay stable.

The article frames FCC Chairman Brendan Carr as using his regulatory power to pressure broadcasters over speech critical of Donald Trump, including ABC’s brief removal of Jimmy Kimmel. It also links Carr’s actions to broader FCC moves affecting broadcast consolidation, children’s programming, license threats, and internet provider fees.

Cisco’s Amy Chang said tests of 15 flagship AI models found multi-turn attacks succeeded as often as 88.3%, while single-turn red-teaming missed key risks. A VentureBeat survey found 54% of enterprises have already seen an agent security incident or near-miss, yet only about a third use scoped identities or sandboxing for agents.