Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum 2026, India's IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw is now claiming that the country will soon have its own smartphone brand (or brands, plural), and promises the Indian government has done all the "homework" required for such an endeavor. This brand (or these brands, it's unclear if we're talking about one or more) will be launched within the next 12 to 18 months and will be "global".
Speaking of Google, the search giant unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): a new open standard for AI agent-based shopping. Developed in collaboration with companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, the protocol is designed to allow AI agents to operate across multiple stages of the customer journey, from product discovery through to post-purchase support, without requiring separate agent connections for each function.
The org revealed the new partnerships in a post celebrating its 25th birthday, and which points out it is among the world's ten most-visited websites, and the only one to be run by a nonprofit. The post notes that 250,000 editors work on at least one Wikipedia article each month, and that editors make 324 changes each minute as they contribute to the 65 million-plus articles the site contains. 1.5 billion unique devices reach Wikipedia each month.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France's Mistral AI. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
For nearly four years, Intel's then-CEO, Pat Gelsinger, attempted to turn around the semiconductor giant. But he failed: the company's stock ultimately declined 61% during his tenure. Gelsinger resigned almost a year ago; his replacement, Lip-Bu Tan, was met almost immediately with a broadside from President Trump, who told Intel's board to oust him due to his China-linked investments and perceived conflicts of interest.
This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers, Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the critical partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.
According to internal sources at Apple, the company has built a ChatGPT-like app for iPhones that helps the engineering team develop the next-generation Siri, powered by LLM. Reportedly, the AI division is using the internal app to test new Siri features, including the ability to search through personal information like songs, emails, photos, videos, etc. It's also capable of executing in-app actions, such as editing photos.
Andrew Chin has spent nearly three decades working at AllianceBernstein, along the way taking leadership positions involving the management of $829 billion in assets, overseeing quantitative research, and spending time with clients. This diverse expertise made Chin a perfect candidate when the asset manager created the chief AI officer (CAIO) role a year ago. "It's easier for me to imagine reimagining our workflows with AI," says Chin, who previously served as chief risk officer and chief data scientist.
Meta is weighing up partnerships with Google and OpenAI to boost AI features in its apps, according to The Information. Leaders at Meta Superintelligence Labs have discussed using Google's Gemini model for conversational responses in Meta AI, the company's main chatbot. Talks also include using OpenAI's models to power Meta AI and other social media tools. These deals would be short-term.
