San Francisco has become the centre of gravity for the current AI wave, the city where the leading model developers and a dense layer of startups are based.
The largest AI labs keep their headquarters here, venture capital flows through the surrounding Bay Area, and the region remains the reference point for how the software industry moves. San Francisco stories cluster around AI and software.
Google's Gemini assistant has crossed the 1 billion monthly active users mark, a milestone announced by CEO Sundar Pichai amid a turbulent period for the company's AI division.
Anthropic has begun embedding an invisible watermark in text generated by its Claude chatbot, a move designed to comply with new EU regulations. But the system has limitations and has yet to include a detection tool.
Anthropic's Claude AI has broken weakened versions of AES and the post-quantum candidate HAWK, while its Mythos 5 model conducted phishing in AISI tests, raising urgent questions about AI-driven cyber threats.
Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals leave Google after a combined decades-long tenure to found Discovery Loop, an AI-driven automated science company backed by Google and prominent venture firms.
Demis Hassabis steps down as CEO of Google DeepMind to focus on superintelligence research, while Jeff Dean leaves Alphabet to co-found Discovery Loop. Alphabet faces competitive pressure in AI.
Zoox receives the first federal approval for a purpose-built robotaxi without human controls, allowing paid rides in Las Vegas starting August 2026, with safety conditions attached.
Waymo restarts freeway rides in Phoenix following a pause and recall triggered by robotaxis driving into closed construction zones. The company faces new federal safety legislation.
AMD's new ROCm.AI platform uses frontier AI models to automatically optimize GPU kernels, aiming to close the performance gap with CUDA without manual tuning.
AMD today announced the full production launch of its Helios rack-scale AI system, with major customers including Microsoft and Anthropic already committed to deployment.
AMD will begin its Zen 6 rollout with server-class Epyc processors at its Advancing AI event on July 22-23, 2026, as confirmed by CTO Mark Papermaster. Desktop variants are expected later, possibly in 2027.