Shipments of desktop, notebooks and workstations in the second quarter took a hit due to supply constraints and price increases, according to Omdia.
According to Omdia, notebook shipments fell 4.2% in the second quarter compared to a year ago and desktops fell 1.3%. Although Apple got the press for its MacBook price increases, all of the PC makers have been raising prices.
IBM has updated its IBM Bob agentic software platform with multi-agent tools, AI cost and use analytics (Bobalytics) and pre-built enterprise workflows for IBM Z, IBM i and Plus Java Modernization. Here's more on Bob 2.0.
OpenAI outlined GPT-Live, a model that can listen and speak at the same time. The model can even use fillers to keep a conversation going. The evaluations include "pleasantness and flow of conversation."
Samsung Electronics said it will host its Galaxy Unpacked event July 22 in London to announced what is expected to be new foldable devices. Meanwhile, Google has sent out updates for its Pixel 11 launch Aug. 12 in New York. Aside from new features all eyes will be on the price tag due to higher memory prices.
SambaNova said it has raised $1 billion in a Series F round and now has a valuation of $11 billion. SambaNova specializes in fast on-prem AI inference. The company said General Atlantic led its latest round.
The company also said JPMorgan Chase is now using SambaNova RDUs.
OpenAI said in a post on X that GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna will launch Thursday. The company is expanding preview access globally.
Previously: OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 in limited preview pending US goverment sign off
Meta launched Muse Image its first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. Muse Image will roll out on Instagram and WhatsApp first before expanding to Facebook, Messenger and its ad platform.
Anthropic said Claude Cowork is available on web and mobile in addition to desktop. The desktop is still the best option due to local file access, but other features are all available on web and mobile. The beta will start for Max plans and expand from there.
Databricks announced Vibe Data Modeling, a multi-model LLM agent that enables you to describe your business and create a data model that ships in a single notebook and can become a fully deployed model in the Unity Catalog. According to Databricks, a minimum viable model can be deployed in less than two hours.
Salesforce Ben argues that Salesforce's penchant for renaming every product repeatedly hampers the company. What used to be a running joke about renameforce.com is confusing customers. Just imagine what'll happen when Salesforce eventually becomes Agentforce.
People have the AI bubble all wrong. It's not a technology bubble. It's a real estate bubble that rhymes more with the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 than the dot-com boom. That's the takeaway from a post by Groundbreaker.
The gist:
"The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its actual anatomy is that of a credit-driven real estate cycle - which is precisely why the 2008 mechanics apply - and the two break for entirely different reasons.
Technology cycles are driven by innovation and adoption; their risks are obsolescence and competition; they live or die on whether the product is wanted, and they can de-rate slowly as the future is repriced.
Real estate cycles are mechanical: leverage, hard assets, occupancy - debt-financed construction at scale, commercial leases disguised as take-or-pay contracts, and long construction lags that guarantee supply arrives after demand has turned. Walk down the AI build-out and every feature is a property development in disguise: a data center on entitled land, financed with debt against the structure and leased to tenants on take-or-pay terms."
Hat tip to Wall Street money manager George Noble for flagging the Groundbreaker post.
Anthropic posted interesting research on J-space, a set of neutral patterns in Claude that reveals internal thoughts. J-space wasn't programmed, but has emerged.
"We present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role...
We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you've heard of language models having a "scratchpad" or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process."
