Sabrina Ortiz

When OpenAI and Anthropic called for a slowdown in AI developments, it set off a chain reaction. Since then, other AI teams, the stock market, and the White House have all had a lot to say.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," in which he proposed a three-part framework, including government intervention, to reduce the current risks posed by AI, citing examples such as the OpenAI-Hugging Face breach. Since then, other CEOs have publicly agreed, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk. Last week in an all-company meeting, Altman told the OpenAI staff that he was open to slowing the pace of frontier AI development.

On Monday, the stock market, ultimately a reflection of investor sentiment, responded to these developments with a downturn in AI-related stocks. As reported by CNBC, in the US, Intel closed down 6% while Nvidia fell more than 3%. In Japan, SoftBank, one of the biggest OpenAI investors, fell 10%. Europe saw similar trends, with ASML, a large supplier to the semiconductor industry, falling more than 5%. The downturn likely reflects fears that AI slowdowns or regulation could squeeze these companies' profits.

Backlash has also come from the White House. President Trump took to Truth Social to attack Amodei's call for a slower pace of AI development, arguing the only regulator the country needs is 'a strong and smart president.' The post echoes an earlier clash between the administration and Anthropic, after the Department of Defense designated the company a 'supply chain risk' this spring—a rare penalty typically reserved for foreign adversaries—following Anthropic's refusal to let its models be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

He also called the movements against data centers a conspiracy theory that only benefits China. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called out Amodei's essay as “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest," according to an AP report.

To add to the fray, right-wing activist Steve Bannon and left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders united at an event billed as a "Pro-Human Assembly" to urge lawmakers to do more in reference to AI, the latest in a run of unlikely alignments this week, with rivals like Musk and Altman finding common cause. And at the other end of the spectrum, we have Trump and Beijing pushing back against the idea of slowing AI down.

Our Deeper View

The latest escalation aside, an AI slowdown isn't a new concept. CNN reported on Monday, said that Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have discussed creating an AI industry standards body even before recent events, motivated by Demis Hassabis' July essay, which made a similar pitch for an ambitious AI safety plan. Yet White House advisor David Sacks railed against Anthropic and OpenAI for calling for a slowdown while standing at the frontier of the AI race, or, as he puts it, having a "duopoly on frontier intelligence." Given that both companies have presumably been considering this for a while and are at the forefront, we will ultimately watch and see whether rhetoric meets reality in slowing down their own development.

More than two years after its announcement, the new Siri is finally available to users.

On Monday, Apple launched its latest operating system updates across its ecosystem of platforms: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27. At the heart of the update is the long-awaited Siri AI upgrade, but there are also many other smaller AI updates that together create a more seamless user experience with AI.

At a high level, the new updates will make Siri a lot more helpful by enabling it to understand conversational prompts and interactions. Most importantly, it will use its personal context—or your specific information across the ecosystem of Apple apps—to better assist you and take action.

For instance, at the iPhone launch event in Cupertino last week, the team briefed me on using it for prompts such as "When is my marathon?" Then it could look into your email to find that information and populate it for you. And you could follow up with "Add it to my calendar," and it would do so. Another multi-step action it could take, using the new Visual Intelligence, is to scan a flyer with the camera, add the event to your calendar when prompted, and share the event in a group chat.

The Siri update alone should be a compelling reason for people with eligible devices (devices with chipsets powerful enough to support Apple Intelligence; see the list here), but other AI features are worth noting as well. The Deep View's Jason Hiner and I have both been testing the beta since June, and here are the highlights:

• Photo expand: Uses AI to fill in pixels of your image to make the image switch from portrait to landscape or fix an image where something got cut off, for example
• Spatial reframe: After an image is captured, you can drag to slightly change the angle it was shot from, with AI reframing in the pixels as needed
• Siri AI app: The standalone app is useful for chatting with AI via text input
• Expressive voices: Customizable Siri voice, including control over pace and expressiveness
• Dictation: Voice-to-text dictation is much more accurate and versatile, making writing better in any app

Lastly, while not AI, another major reason to download the update is the plethora of performance improvements Apple is promising, such as up to 80% faster AirDrop transfers, faster Apple Music playback start, faster PDF saving, faster message loading in Mail, and other quality-of-life upgrades.

Our Deeper View

While the new iPhone Duo is capturing most of the news cycle, don't sleep on the Siri AI upgrade to your existing iPhone and other Apple devices that comes in iOS 27 and other operating system updates. Of course, OS updates are worth installing to ensure your phone is protected from the latest security threats. However, this update, in particular, makes a strong case for updating, since it can make you feel like you have a new phone without spending an extra dollar. Having said that, if you have an iPhone model older than the iPhone 15 Pro—the oldest model to get the Siri AI update— then now might be the time to upgrade your hardware to not only take advantage of Siri AI but also future-proof your phone for the next waves of AI features.

The Apple Watch has officially become an AI wearable.

The iPhone maker is making a big move in ambient computing and ambient intelligence with a pair of new features on the Apple Watch that passively listen in the background and then try to provide you with information you might have missed or need to take action on.

Here's what to know about the two Audio Intelligence features:

• Live Rewind: This feature is a real-life rewind button. It is always listening, and when you double-press the digital crown on Apple Watch, it shows a transcript of the last 15 seconds of the conversation. This transcript can then be saved and revisited later in the Siri app. Also notable is that, when activated, it plays an audible chime and displays a full-screen animation of a microphone, so people know the feature is active and that their audio may be transcribed.
• Siri Recap: This feature is Apple's answer to Granola, providing users with high-level summaries from conversations recorded on the watch when the feature is activated. There are no transcriptions, attributions, or timestamps, a move meant to protect user privacy. Rather, you can find your summaries in the Siri app as a refresher on your day. If you'd rather it be more session-based, you can turn it on and off from the watch's Control Center.

"Just as Visual Intelligence makes sense of what you see, Audio Intelligence makes sense of what you hear. It harnesses the power of Apple Intelligence right on your wrist in a private and secure way," said Ron Huang, Apple's VP of sensing and connectivity, during the keynote.

With both Live Rewind and Siri Recap, Apple promises that it does not record or save audio. It says the audio is captured in the Secure Exclave on the Apple Watch's new S11 chip, which is inaccessible to the operating system, apps, the user, or Apple, and deletes the audio immediately after processing.

While we trust that Apple is not snooping on the audio, there's still a big question about how comfortable we are with the device listening in the background. And what about two-party consent states such as California? While this isn't recording audio and that will make it legally compliant—Apple says it will always comply with the local legal requirements—there's still the potential that you could be using technology to note a conversation with a person without their consent, where the two of you may have a different understanding about whether something being said is private or confidential. Again, Apple has also made it clear that the Audio Intelligence features can be turned off and disabled.

"Getting AI right across today’s products is therefore about far more than this upgrade cycle. It lays the foundation for a much broader roadmap spanning wearables, the home and entirely new form factors," said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight. "That lets Apple test the waters, understand how people actually use these features, and gather valuable feedback before moving into more novel devices such as Apple Glasses."

Our Deeper View

Devices that are constantly listening, watching, and absorbing context for AI to provide insights, reminders, and notes to their owners are coming in a big wave over the next 12-18 months. Lots of startups have already launched their own versions of these kinds of devices. But other than Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses, big tech companies have largely been hesitant to join the fray. Many of them still remember the backlash that Google Glass faced a decade ago. So it's a surprise to see Apple pushing the boundaries on this while society is still figuring out what the norms and expectations will be. Apple is straddling a fine line between the perception of convenience and surveillance. Since the feature isn't launching for another month—and even then it will still be in beta—clearly Apple is listening to the audience to gauge the reaction of users and recalibrate as needed.

The iPhone Duo may have taken the spotlight, with Apple positioning it as the device built for AI, but every other product on stage at its September 9 event told the same story.

The Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 exemplify the company's focus on building devices for the AI era. Both watches sport the new S11 chip, which unlocks deeper AI capabilities, including a brand-new suite called Audio Intelligence. The Siri Recap feature, part of the suite, helps position the watch as an AI wearable, without the company even needing to call it that.

Siri Recap provides users with high-level summaries from conversations recorded on the watch while the feature is activated, much like the AI note-taking app Granola, which has become massively popular and recently hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Users can turn Siri Recap on or off at any time from the Control Center, and, when on, these insights are then populated in the new Siri app. This is not a traditional transcript with timestamps, speaker attributions, or even quotes, so it is less of a voice memo replacement but, more so, a way to keep track of conversation highlights.

The Live Rewind feature works a bit differently, always listening, and when activated, giving users a 15-second transcript of the conversation that just happened. When activated, it plays an audible chime and has a full-display animation of a microphone so that people know the feature was activated. Predicting the hesitation of having AI listen to all your conversations, Apple clarified that the audio of the conversations is not recorded and the summaries and text snippets are end-to-end encrypted in the Siri app with iCloud syncing. Both features will arrive in beta later this year. Other AI Apple Watch Audible Intelligence features include:

• Sound recognition on Apple Watch: alerts users who are deaf or hard of hearing of important sounds
• Shazam on Apple Watch: now instantly detects the music playing around you and automatically displays the song title and artist's name on the Music Recognition widget in Smart Stack

Of course, all of the products, including the watches, AirPods 5, iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be able to take advantage of the new Siri AI overhaul, which The Deep View documented during WWDC in June, including a personal context that deeply informs your AI answers and more seamless conversational interactions with Siri that will allow for better assistance and dictation improvements. To support these features, the new phone lineup also got an Apple silicon upgrade with the new A20 Pro chip.

Our Deeper View

Apple is playing the long game with AI features, not necessarily marketing anything as an "AI device," but baking in features that will make a difference in users' everyday lives. It supports this with powerful chipsets that enable the features already announced at WWDC as part of iOS 27 and the other new OS-es, while also future-proofing the devices for future integrations. In the AI wearable realm, Apple may not have released AirPods with cameras, but the new Apple Watch lineup helps fill that void, since it's something people wear every day and now unlocks AI features exclusive to that device. Apple is also doing this in a distinctly Apple way, prioritizing user privacy. While it would have been easy for the Apple Watch to do what other AI wearables like the Plaud AI pin do (simply record and transcribe conversations), Apple chose not to and prioritized privacy instead. Though, I must admit, the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features do push the boundary and user perception will be super interesting to watch.

Enterprise learning courses are tedious and often unhelpful. Coursera wants to change that with AI.

On Wednesday, at its FWD 2026 event, the company unveiled Project Helix, a new AI-native learning platform that uses real-time skill insights, AI-powered guidance, and proof of capability to help enterprises train their employees at scale more effectively. Coursera CEO Greg Hart told The Deep View that the platform's value hinges on bringing users learning that directly translates into business outcomes.

"Helix is special because it flips that script: it uses AI not just to deliver more content, but to create deeply personalized, adaptive learning paths and portable proof of skills, so companies can actually close the gap between AI infrastructure and talent readiness," added Hart.

Both the organizations' leaders and learners can use natural language prompts to generate adaptive learning paths that use the knowledge from universities, industry-leading institutions, and real-world practitioners, according to the release. Other features include:

• Personalization: The platform suggests tailored learning experiences based on a learner's goal, role and demonstrated capability
• Assessments: The platform uses continuous assessment, practical observation and recognized credentials to prove skills growth

The product, which is first being offered to enterprises, is a reflection of the expanded scope of Coursera's audience since combining with Udemy in May 2026. Hart explained that both companies' audiences perfectly complemented each other, being the exact inverse. Before the combination, Coursera’s business was two‑thirds consumer‑focused and one‑third enterprise‑focused, and Udemy’s business was two‑thirds enterprise and one‑third consumer.

“Helix is only possible because we brought Coursera and Udemy together," said Hart. "The combination gives us the most comprehensive skills platform in the world and the ability to build a new AI‑native learning experience much faster than either company could have done alone.”

Project Helix is expected to be broadly available to enterprise customers in the first half of 2027.

Our Deeper View

Traditionally, corporate learning assessments have been something employees click through to earn a completion badge before returning to their actual work. However, as Coursera and Udemy demonstrated with this product launch, AI can be useful in helping create courses that serve both organizational goals and learner needs through natural language inputs. Tracking is a key part of this: the ability to document and more accurately assess what users are actually learning, allowing companies to adjust course content accordingly. It's also worth noting that this doesn't replace existing course formats. Users who prefer the traditional learning methods can still use them, and perhaps enhance the experience with these new features as supplements.

Robots that box, dance, climb stairs, and play soccer greeted me at IFA 2026.

While robots are typically part of the tech conference razzle-and-dazzle, this time was a bit different, as many of these robots were actually available for purchase. While the prices are steep, costing up to tens of thousands of dollars and, in most cases, not yet affordable or justifiable for most consumers, the hardware itself looks ready and has convinced me that the leap from spectacle to a product you can buy is closer than we think.

"Looking at human-like robots, it's a spectacle, it's an eye-catcher. But the question is valid: what does it mean for me? Is it just a movie, a show? Or do I benefit from it? Maybe not in the next couple of months, but in years, yes," Leif Lindner, CEO of IFA Berlin, told The Deep View.

Lindner added that he recently visited robotics camps in Shenzhen, where one of the biggest challenges identified in making truly human-like robots was their dependence on vast amounts of data for training and operation. Also, making these household helper robots a longer-term prospect depends on consumer trust in how their data is used.

Yet AI developments will likely soon make it possible to close that gap. For instance, obtaining accurate simulated data is much easier than it was before AI exploded onto the scene, as seen in advancements by Nvidia with its Omniverse and Cosmos platforms and by physical AI startups such as Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, all of which are trying to tackle that problem.

In terms of data, people are increasingly willing to share a lot of their personal information, data, and even real-time feeds through products like smart glasses to get smarter AI features. Ultimately, with AI helping close the gap on both of robotics' biggest obstacles, I believe a robot in the household may be a future that's closer than we think.

"Robotics is, for me, the alarm clock for everybody to showcase that innovation is here. Therefore, we are saying the future is now," added Lindner.

Our Deeper View

Of course, AI won't solve the cost problem, as humanoid robots still carry very steep price tags. Even if they reach the point where they can do everything the ideal version of them is meant to do, the purchase could be hard to justify. For instance, the Xiaomi CyberOne runs $99,999, and the Unitree G1 runs $13,500. But that's the standard curve for new hardware: computers and cars followed the same path before supply and demand evened out. And we're likely to finance robots like cars or computers. That's why I don't think humanoid robots will be commonplace in households within 5 or even 10 years. But what's striking is how fast they are advancing, with AI not just reshaping products but also how people think about data privacy. A robot-filled future, once assumed to belong to sci-fi or being decades or even centuries away, suddenly feels closer than expected.

Disclaimer: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to IFA 2026 was paid for by IFA. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.

For years, voice dictation's fatal flaw was that it struggled to accurately understand what you were saying. While AI has nearly eradicated that issue with products such as Wispr Flow and Google Rambler, a new problem has taken its place.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Google debuted its Pixel 11 lineup, and one of the standout AI features was the new Rambler voice dictation, which integrated into Google Keyboard (Gboard) and offered the same capabilities that Wispr Flow has been able to do for years: precisely understanding users' voice dictation, eliminating filler words, and following a user's train of thought.

As someone who cannot work without Wispr Flow, I tested out Rambler for all my communication, both personal and work, as soon as I got my review units. I soon ran into a hang-up I had never noticed before: tone.

To my boyfriend's credit, he was the first to bring it up, saying he preferred Wispr Flow because it adapted better to his expressions, such as automatically including exclamation points. In what would become foreshadowing, I told him to give Rambler some grace, since it, like Wispr Flow, claims to get to know you better over time and eventually implement that in its dictation.

However, despite my consistent use, Rambler has yet to adapt to my excited and bubbly tone, opting instead to send the driest texts. The catalyst for this review was when I was Slack messaging TDV editor Jason Hiner and had to clarify that I had used Rambler because the message I sent sounded absolutely nothing like me. It was much less friendly, more serious, and more to-the-point than I naturally speak or write in Slack messages.

While it's still polite, the absence of tone indicators, such as punctuation, that you typically use can make people who know you think something is wrong.

For instance, my boyfriend sent a text via voice dictation using Rambler that was fine on its face, but the punctuation made it read as dry and dismissive. After a long day, I misread it that way and brought it up, sparking an issue that never would've happened without the dictation software's punctuation choices. There's actually research to back this reaction:

• A 2016 Binghamton University study found that texts ending with a period were rated less sincere than those that did not.
• A 2025 follow-up study found that when periods were placed after every word, for instance, typing "What. Do. You. Need." instead of "what do you need," the perceived "mean" rating, or how mean of a tone the reader perceived in the texts, was higher, highlighting how readers interpret punctuation in a sentence as an intentional, meaningful act.
• A 2018 The Atlantic article explored the phenomenon of people using so many exclamation points while texting and featured Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication, who said: The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker. If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.

Our Deeper View

In theory, AI voice dictation features are huge game changers for productivity. If you say it out loud, it will transcribe it for you, saving you the time it takes to type, since most people can speak at least 2-3x faster than they can type. But transcribing what you say is only half the battle, as the consequences of not having that so-called social smile can be serious. For that reason, Wispr Flow remains the undisputed leader until Google fixes this in Rambler. However, this discussion does raise the question of how AI will transform text communication in the future, and how our perceptions of tone in text will evolve as a result. Oh, and to prove my point: I used Wispr Flow to write this entire article, and it understood my intent and intonation perfectly.

Mac has been the undisputed home of local AI, but Nvidia is giving Microsoft an assist to get Windows in the game.

On Thursday at IFA 2026, Nvidia unveiled new tools and hardware aimed at making it easier for more PC users to run AI locally on Nvidia GPUs for faster local inference. For starters, Nvidia RTX Spark arrives in October in new Windows PCs from Lenovo and Acer, on display this week at IFA. RTX Spark has a 1 Petaflop RTX Blackwell GPU, up to 128GB of unified memory and a highly efficient 20-core Grace CPU, which, when combined with new agent frameworks, gives Windows PCs the power to run always-on AI agents locally.

Nvidia is also offering a simpler model setup on Windows for three of the most popular agent apps: Perplexity Portable Computer, Hermes Agent, and OpenClaw. Here is a quick rundown of the features, according to the release:

• Perplexity Portable Computer: Will be available on Nvidia RTX GPUs with at least 24GB VRAM running Linux or Windows
• Hermes Agent: Coming soon, configuring a local model in Hermes will be streamlined with one-click setup across RTX and DGX systems on both Windows and Linux
• OpenClaw: Nvidia worked with Microsoft to reduce set-up friction and the result is that the OpenClaw Windows App simplifies setting up an optimized local model on any RTX GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM

Building on its efforts to improve AI use efficiency, the tech giant also unveiled NVIDIA Personal AI Router (PAIR), a free, open-source software tool that can coordinate a household's PCs to run local AI together. NVIDIA says that PAIR can automatically discover compatible PCs on a local network and route independent inference requests to the system with available capacity. Ultimately, this is meant to bypass the bottleneck that is caused when multiple agents or tasks are waiting on a single GPU.

Our Deeper View

The rise of AI agents has led working professionals to discover brand-new ways AI can assist with their work. However, the caveat is that agents can quickly rack up token costs and so power users typically want to move to running AI locally. Until now, it has largely meant a reliance on Mac products, as seen by the shortage of the Mac mini and Mac Studio, and the rollout of cutting-edge AI features arriving on Mac first. The release of Nvidia RTX Spark on Windows by Nvidia is significant, as it gives users who don't want to be locked into Apple's walled garden more choice. It may also sway developers from overlooking Windows when unveiling the latest features on desktop apps, which would be a win for Microsoft and for Windows users.

Disclaimer: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to IFA 2026 was paid for by IFA. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.

HTC, once a dominant force in smartphones, is throwing its weight behind smart glasses.

On Tuesday, HTC made its Vive Eagle AI glasses available in the US, Europe, and Australia, expanding from their original spring launch, when they were available only in Taiwan. The glasses offer exactly what you'd expect: AI assistance, speakers, microphones, and a camera. However, there are two key distinguishing features that users, and other manufacturers, should note.

Before jumping into that, however, here's a rapid-fire list of specs and my thoughts on them:

• Camera: 3K video quality and 12 MP camera; good quality captures most of the time, though sometimes overexposed or blurry in places
• Weight: 49 grams, lightweight, comfortable and on par with Meta Ray-Bans
• Lens: Zeiss lens in three options; also prescription compatible, -8D to +4D
• Speakers: Two stereo, bass-enhanced, open-ear speakers; sound is great, though there is the expected sound leakage
• Mics: 4-mic array, 1 directional (in the nose bridge) and 3 omnidirectional, noise cancellation software; in a loud cafe, my mom could still hear me well on a phone call
• Processor: Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1; same chipset as Meta Ray-Bans, performs on par
• Battery: HTC claims 4.5 hours of music, 3 or more hours of calls, and 36 or more hours of standby; I have only used it session-based, so I can't verify what all-day use is like

I intentionally left the privacy features outside the quick rundown, as they deserve their own section. The company is positioning the product as "HTC's privacy-first AI smart glasses," and in my testing, it more than delivered.

As soon as you cover the LED light while recording, it stops capturing media and verbally says, "LED covered, recording has stopped," to prevent bad actors from recording non-consenting individuals. While the feature is offered on other models, including Meta Ray-Bans, I found this to be the most responsive so far.

The camera is also disabled when the glasses are not worn, a feature I only noticed after trying to take a selfie with them. This is meant to prevent individuals from being recorded by the glasses lying inconspicuously on a table. Lastly, they are ISO 27001-certified for information security management and ISO 27701-certified for privacy information management, certifications not held by other AI glasses.

The other standout is the magnetic Powerboost accessory, roughly the size of a flash drive, which lets you charge your smart glasses while still wearing them. This solves the problem of dead batteries that require you to remove the glasses to use a case or cable. Downside: the PowerBoost accessory can't fully charge the glasses, even when fully charged itself, likely because it's a 120 mAh battery. It boosted the battery from 39% to 84% in about an hour before dying in my tests. It's still useful for quick top-offs to get you through a full day, which is especially useful if you have prescription lenses and want the glasses to be your daily drivers. I'd love to see more companies adopt this approach.

I saved the AI features for last because I found them about as useful as competitors like Meta: cool in concept, but not entirely life-changing yet. While HTC does give users the option to choose between Gemini and ChatGPT, which is notable, the company notes that the experience may differ from using the models on your phone or other devices. I found that to be entirely true, with the answers I got using the Gemini and ChatGPT apps being much more robust and preferable.

Our Deeper View

The VIVE Eagle will launch at $499, and the Power Boost accessory is an extra $49, placing them at the high end of the spectrum, nearly double the price of the standard Meta Ray-Bans. However, if privacy is a priority, it may be worth the premium. Unlike Meta and Google, HTC is not a company that makes money off your data, so that also makes it a safer long-term bet if you prioritize privacy. The other big reason to buy is if you want smart glasses to be your full-time glasses and don't want to take them off to charge them. In addition to the PowerBoost accessory, you can also simply charge the glasses while wearing them because of the magnetic charger on the arm. While Gemini and ChatGPT aren't a game-changer on the glasses yet, they're likely to improve and could be more appealing as a long-term bet on the glasses.