Business, technology and what comes next.
NextNow / Section
Artificial intelligence, platforms, infrastructure and the tools reshaping business.
Madden NFL 27 is expanding the presentation around the game with seasonal broadcast packages, Scott Hanson recaps, stadium traditions and dynamic weather. The result increasingly resembles an NFL broadcast players can control.
DoorDash’s order volume is still growing quickly, but the more consequential shift is underneath the marketplace: a delivery network increasingly designed to choose among human couriers, robots and drones order by order.
Atlas shuts down Aug. 9 as OpenAI moves browser-based agentic work into ChatGPT and Codex. Google is embedding Gemini into Chrome while Perplexity keeps Comet as a browser. The emerging contest is less about browser chrome than who controls the agent that can act across the web.
AI-referred shoppers are arriving with higher intent and converting better than conventional traffic. Retailers are racing to become visible inside ChatGPT and Gemini while drawing a hard line around checkout, loyalty and customer data.
AI is not simply replacing software features. It is changing the unit of value from access to execution, forcing software companies to rethink architecture, pricing and what their products are actually responsible for.
China’s underwater data centers show real gains in energy, land and freshwater use. But the case for scaling them depends on what happens to the heat, marine habitat, maintenance economics and a seafloor we still barely understand.
Advanced models are gaining the ability to navigate systems, execute actions and circumvent safeguards. The institutions responsible for deciding how much risk is acceptable are still trying to determine what should be tested, by whom and what happens after a model leaves their control.
July payrolls missed economists’ forecasts by more than 100,000 jobs. Revisions to prior months, slowing hiring and emerging changes in how companies use labor suggest the decline was less sudden than the headline implies.
The first AI-generated viruses were engineered to kill bacteria, not people. That makes this experiment safer. It does not make the precedent benign.
A New Mexico court found Meta’s platforms created a public nuisance, bringing the company’s total liability in the case to $942 million and imposing five years of youth-safety requirements.
