Bell Labs "created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age," writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language.

But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a "problem-rich" environment, suggests Arno Penzias, winner of one of Bell Labs' 11 Nobel Prizes: It was Bell Labs' responsibility, in other words, to create technologies for designing, expanding and improving an unruly communications network of cables and microwave links and glass fibers. The Labs also had to figure out ways to create underwater conduits, as well as switching centers that could manage the growing number of customers and escalating amounts of data.... Money mattered, too. Being connected to AT&T, the largest company in the world, was an advantage. The Labs' budget was enormous, and accounting conventions allowed its parent company to make huge and continuing investments in R & D. The generous funding, moreover, allowed scientists and engineers to buy and build expensive equipment — for instance, anechoic chambers to create the world's quietest rooms...

The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades. The first conceptualization of a cellular phone network, for instance, came out of the Labs in the late 1940s; it wasn't until the late 1970s that technicians began testing one in Chicago to gauge its potential. The challenge of deploying these technologies was immense. (The regulatory hurdles were formidable, too....)
The article also credits the visionary management of Mervin Kelly — who fortunately also "had access to funding in a decade when most executives and universities didn't" to hire the brightest people. (By the early 1980s Bell Labs employed about 25,000 researchers, technicians and support staff, with an annual budget of $2 billion — roughly $7 billion in today's dollars.) "The Labs' involvement in World War II suggested to Kelly that an exciting postwar era of electronics was approaching, but that the technical problems would be so complex that they required a mix of expertise — not just physicists, but material scientists, chemists, electrical engineers, circuitry experts and the like." At Bell Labs, Kelly would sometimes handpick teams and create such a mix, as was the case for the transistor invention in the late 1940s. He came to see innovation arising not from like-minded or similarly trained people conversing with each other, but from a friction of ideas and approaches. It meant hiring researchers who had different personalities and favored a range of experimental angles. It also meant personally designing a campus in Murray Hill where departments were spread apart, so that scientists and engineers would be forced to walk, mingle and engage in serendipitous conversations and debate ideas. Meanwhile, under Kelly, the Labs focused on hiring people who were deeply curious, not just smart. Kelly saw it as his professional duty to do far more than what was expected, with his laboratory and vast resources, to create new technologies...

The breakup of AT&T's monopoly, which led to a steady shrinking of Bell Labs' staff, budget and remit, shows us that no matter how forward looking your employees and managers may be, they will not necessarily see the future coming. It likewise suggests that technological progress is too unpredictable for one organization, no matter how powerful or smart, to control. Famously, Bell Labs managers didn't see value in the Arpanet, which eventually led to today's internet.

And yet, for at least five decades, Bell Labs created a blueprint for the global development of communications and electronics. In understanding why it did so, I tend to think its ultimate secret may be hiding in plain sight. The secret has to do with Bell Labs' structure — not only being connected to a fabulously profitable monopoly, but being connected to a company that could move theoretical and applied research into a huge manufacturing division that made telecom equipment (at Western Electric) and ultimately into a dynamic operating system (the AT&T network)... Scientists and engineers at the Labs understood their ideas would be implemented, if they passed muster, into the huge system its parent company was running.
Bell Labs racked up about 30,000 patents, according to the article, and celebrated its 100th anniversary last April.

It is now part of Finland-based Nokia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc. filed this week against Snap Inc. calls all that into question with claims of patent infringement. Numerous lawsuits are currently open in the US regarding the use of HEVC. Relevant patent holders, such as Nokia and InterDigital, have sued numerous hardware vendors and streaming service providers in pursuit of licensing fees for the use of patented technologies deemed essential to HEVC.

It's a touch rarer to see a lawsuit filed over the implementation of AV1. The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, says it developed AV1 "under a royalty-free patent policy (Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0)" and that the standard is "supported by high-quality reference implementations under a simple, permissive license (BSD 3-Clause Clear License)."

Yet, Dolby's lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware [PDF] alleges that AV1 leverages technologies that Dolby has patented and has not agreed to license for free and without receiving royalties. The filing reads: "[AOMedia] does not own all patents practiced by implementations of the AV1 codec. Rather, the AV1 specification was developed after many foundational video coding patents had already been filed, and AV1 incorporates technologies that are also present in HEVC. Those technologies are subject to existing third-party patent rights and associated licensing obligations." Dolby is seeking a jury trial, a declaration that Dolby isn't obligated to license the patents in questions under FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) licensing obligations, and for the court to enjoin Snap from further "infringement."

Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, "pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs," reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a "system and method for dynamically and automatically updating item prices" to carry out markdowns in its ecommerce unit, a rapidly growing division that generated more than $150 billion in sales last year. Last week it received another patent for using machine learning to predict demand and recommend prices for goods. [...] Walmart said that both patents were "unrelated to dynamic pricing," as the patent issued in January was specific to markdowns and last week's patent was designed for merchant teams to make decisions, not the technology.

The patent granted in January involves an "end-to-end price markdown system" for ecommerce platforms such as Walmart.com based on data including predicted demand and consumers' price sensitivity. Last week's approved patent outlines ways to forecast demand and set prices at levels that will move stock over periods such as a week, a month or a quarter. "Example categories may include, for example, a food item, outdoor equipment, clothing, housewares, toys, workout equipment, vegetables, spices," according to the filing. The "demand forecasting and price recommendation" tool envisaged in the patent would incorporate sources including purchases, prices, methods of payment and customer ID, such as a passport or driver's license number. "Dynamic pricing or anything that smells like it is playing with fire," said Matt Hamory, a grocery industry consultant at AlixPartners, who cited "the goodwill that you can lose by getting customers to think or suspect or worry even slightly that you are doing things with pricing that are to your benefit and their detriment."

The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review a case challenging the U.S. Copyright Office's stance that AI-generated works lack the required human authorship for copyright protection, leaving lower court rulings intact. The Verge reports: The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can't be copyrighted. In 2019, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include "human authorship," disqualifying it from copyright protection.

After Thaler appealed the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled in 2023 that "human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright." That ruling was later upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. As reported by Reuters, Thaler asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling in October 2025, arguing it "created a chilling effect on anyone else considering using AI creatively." The U.S. federal circuit court also determined that AI systems can't patent inventions because they aren't human, which the U.S. Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance. The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination.

Apple has acquired Q.AI, a secretive Israeli startup whose technology can analyze facial skin micro-movements to interpret "silent speech," in a deal valued at close to $2 billion that marks the iPhone maker's second-largest acquisition ever, according to backer GV (formerly Google Ventures).

The four-year-old company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya. Patents filed by Q.AI show its technology being deployed in headphones or smart glasses to enable non-verbal communication with an AI assistant. The acquisition comes as Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses already let wearers talk to its AI, and Google and Snap are preparing to launch competing devices later this year.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Acer has filed three separate patent infringement lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, taking the unusual step of hauling the nation's largest wireless carriers into federal court. The suits, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, claim the companies are using Acer-developed cellular networking technology without paying for the privilege. Acer says it tried to negotiate licenses for years but reached a dead end, arguing it was left with no option except litigation. The case centers on six U.S. patents Acer asserts are core to modern wireless networks, rather than anything tied to PCs or laptops.

The company describes itself as reluctant to pursue courtroom battles, but it has been quietly building a large global patent portfolio after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D. Acer also notes that some of its patents count as standard-essential, hinting the carriers may be required to license them. All three companies are expected to push back, and the dispute could become another long-running telecom patent saga. Consumers will not notice any immediate changes, but if Acer wins or settles, it may find a new revenue stream far beyond its traditional hardware business.
Further coverage from Hot Hardware

Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he's working on "a potential key to unlock a huge power source that's rarely utilized today," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. [Alternate URL here.]

Waste heat... The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this "stack" is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that's needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source.

As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device's ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC's headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that's roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC's vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could "hit a sweet spot" if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat...

For Johnson, the potential application he's most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth's surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells — a well-known access point for underground heat — offers another opportunity. "You don't need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere," Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC's CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn't reveal the customer, but said it's a "major Southeast utility company." "Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important," McQuary said...

On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 — money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.
"Johnson, meanwhile, hasn't stopped working on new inventions," the article points out. "He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery..."

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be "analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process."

"They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention," the office said. "When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard."

The office reiterated its guidance from last year that AI itself cannot be considered an inventor under U.S. patent law. However, it rejected the approach taken by the PTO during former President Joe Biden's administration for deciding when AI-assisted inventions are patentable, which relied on a standard normally used to determine when multiple people can qualify as joint inventors.

Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis.

The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

Intel's long-time Xeon chief architect Ronak Singhal is leaving the company after nearly 30 years, marking yet another high-profile departure amid Intel's leadership churn and intensifying competition from AMD and Arm-based cloud CPUs. The Register reports: The Carnegie Mellon alum holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering, along with at least 30 patents involving CPUs. Singhal joined Intel in 1997 after spending the previous summer as an intern at Cyrix. After a year in Intel's Rotation Engineers Program, he spent the remainder of his tenure helping to develop some of the chipmaker's most consequential and, at times, controversial processors. Most notably, Singhal oversaw the core development of Intel's 22nm Haswell and 14nm Broadwell processor architectures. His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well. [...]

Singhal is only the latest Xeon lead to jump ship since the start of the year. In January, Sailesh Kottapalli, another senior fellow, left for Qualcomm barely a month after former CEO Pat Gelsinger's unceremonious "retirement." Even before Gelsinger's eviction, Intel's datacenter group has been something of a revolving door. Last summer Singhal's long-time colleague Lisa Spelman departed the company, eventually landing a spot as CEO of HPC interconnect vendor Cornelis Networks. Her replacement, Ryan Tabrah, lasted seven months in the role, about half as long as Intel datacenter boss Justin Hotard, who defected for the forests of Finland to lead Nokia as its new President and CEO back in April.

In fact, the churn now extends all the way to the top. On Monday, Intel announced its CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, would be leaving the business. The move is part of a broader executive shakeup that will see former Arm engineer Kevork Kechichian take over as head of Intel's datacenter engineering group. Jim Johnson, meanwhile, will take over as head of the chipmaker's client computing group while Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar will head up a new central engineering division.

Last week, following a recent U.S. Customs ruling, Apple reintroduced blood oxygen monitoring to certain Apple Watch models in the U.S., sidestepping an ITC import ban stemming from its legal dispute with medical device maker Masimo. Today, Masimo fired back with a new lawsuit against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 9to5Mac reports: The company says US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) overstepped its authority and violated due process when it reversed its earlier decision on August 1 and allowed Apple to restore the feature. Moreover, Masimo says it found out about the decision when Apple publicly announced the return of the feature: "It has now come to light that CBP thereafter reversed itself without any meaningful justification, without any material change in circumstances, and without any notice to Masimo, let alone an opportunity for Masimo to be heard. CBP changed its position on Apple's watch-plus-iPhone redesign through an ex parte proceeding. Specifically, on August 1, 2025, CBP issued an 3 ex parte ruling permitting Apple to import devices that, when used with iPhones already in the United States, perform the same functionality that the ITC found to infringe Masimo's patents. Masimo only discovered this ruling on Thursday, August 14, 2025, when Apple publicly announced it would be reintroducing the pulse oximetry functionality through a software update."

The company is now asking the court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block the CBP's decision, and reinstate the original ruling that "determined that Apple's redesigned watches could be imported only to the extent the infringing functionality was completely disabled." As reported by Bloomberg Law, Masimo says the following in its supporting brief: "Each passing day that this unlawful ruling remains in effect irreparably deprives Masimo of its right to be free from unfair trade practices and to preserve its competitive standing in the U.S. marketplace." Masimo further argues that CBP's move "effectively nullified" the ITC's exclusion order against Apple. Apple's appeal of that ban is still pending before the Federal Circuit.

Apple has reintroduced blood oxygen monitoring to certain Apple Watch models in the U.S. by shifting the feature's calculations to the paired iPhone, sidestepping an ITC import ban stemming from its legal dispute with medical device maker Masimo. TechCrunch reports: Blood oxygen data will be measured and calculated on the user's paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This means users won't be able to view the data on their Apple Watch, as they'll need to do so on their iPhone. Apple says the update announced today is enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling, which means that the tech giant is allowed to import Apple Watches with the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature.

The change doesn't affect previously sold models with the original version of the feature or units bought outside the U.S. The redesigned feature only applies to Apple Watches that were sold after the ITC import ban took effect in early 2024. These users can access the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming on Thursday.

The abstract of a paper featured on NBER: Most U.S. innovation output originates from firms that operate R&D facilities across multiple local markets. We study how this geographic structure influences aggregate innovation and growth, and whether it is socially optimal. First, we develop an endogenous growth model featuring multi-market innovative firms that generate knowledge spillovers to geographically proximate firms. In equilibrium, firms may operate in too few or too many local markets, depending on how sensitive are the local spillovers they generate to their local size. Second, to quantify these effects, we link the model to data on firms' R&D locations, patents, and citation networks. Using an event-study design, we show that firms' spatial expansion increases spillovers to other firms and estimate how these spillovers depend on a firm's local footprint. Our estimates imply that U.S. innovative firms operate in too few markets relative to the social optimum. Third, using quantitative counterfactuals, we find that policies promoting broader spatial scope yield larger welfare gains than standard R&D subsidies. Moreover, unlike R&D subsidies, such policies can also reduce regional inequality.

An anonymous reader shares a report: India is set to begin mass-producing electric-vehicle batteries within 18 months, a step hailed as a leap towards industrial self-reliance. Yet the structure of this new industry looks troublingly familiar, echoing a pattern of dependence that has long marked India's economy.

Nowhere is this dependence clearer than in the heft of intellectual property. The portfolios of India's largest battery-makers, Amara Raja and Exide, contain just seven patents combined. This pales in comparison to the industry's giants: China's CATL sits on a hoard of over 43,000 patents, while South Korea's LG Energy Solution possesses some 70,000.

Having largely missed the global lithium-ion boom, India's established lead-acid manufacturers built a business model on licensing technology rather than inventing it. This long-standing habit is now reflected in deals that create deep technological dependency. A 2022 agreement between Exide and China's SVOLT, for example, calls for SVOLT to not only transfer intellectual property but also to oversee plant construction, supply the equipment and integrate the factory into its own Chinese supply chain. Amara Raja's deal with Gotion High-Tech in June 2024 follows a similar template.

Western Digital has succeeded in having the sum it owed from a patent infringement case reduced from $553 million down to just $1 in post-trial motions, when the judge found the plaintiff's claims had shifted during the course of the litigation. From a report: The storage biz was held by a California jury to have infringed on data encryption patents owned by SPEX Technologies Inc in October, relating to several of its self-encrypting hard drive products.

WD was initially told to pay $316 million in damages, but District Judge James Selna ruled the company owed a further $237 million in interest charges earlier this year, bringing the total to more than half a billion dollars. In February, WD was given a week to file a bond or stump up the entire damages payment. Selna granted Western Digital's post-trial motion to reduce damages, writing that "SPEX's damages theory changed as certain evidence and theories became unavailable" and there was "insufficient evidence from which the Court could determine a reasonable royalty."

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk forfeited patent protection for semaglutide -- the active ingredient in blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy -- in Canada after failing to pay a $450 maintenance fee in 2019. The company had paid maintenance fees through 2018 but requested a refund for the 2017 fee, apparently seeking more time to decide whether to continue protecting the patent.

When the 2019 fee came due at $450 with late penalties, Novo never paid despite having a one-year grace period. Canadian patent authorities confirmed the patent "cannot be revived" once lapsed. The oversight is particularly costly given Canada represents the world's second-largest semaglutide market, worth billions annually. Generic drugmaker Sandoz plans to launch a competing version in early 2026, while Novo's U.S. patent protection extends until at least 2032.

A Texas jury ruled that Intel may hold a license to patents owned by VLSI Technology through its agreement with Finjan Inc., both controlled by Fortress Investment Group -- potentially nullifying over $3 billion in previous patent infringement verdicts against Intel. Reuters reports: VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts for allegedly infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in their first trial in 2021, which a U.S. appeals court has since overturned and sent back for new proceedings.

An Austin, Texas jury determined that VLSI was entitled to nearly $949 million from Intel in a separate patent infringement trial in 2022. Intel has argued in that case that the verdicts should be thrown out based on a 2012 agreement that gave it a license to patents owned by Finjan and other companies "under common control" with it. U.S. District Judge Alan Albright held the latest jury trial in Austin to determine whether Finjan and VLSI were under the "common control" of Fortress. VLSI said it was not subject to the Finjan agreement, and that the company did not even exist until four years after it was signed.

MIT has formally requested the withdrawal of a preprint paper on AI and scientific discovery due to serious concerns about the integrity and validity of its data and findings. It didn't provide specific details on what it believes is wrong with the paper. From a post: "Earlier this year, the COD conducted a confidential internal review based upon allegations it received regarding certain aspects of this paper. While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper. Based upon this finding, we also believe that the inclusion of this paper in arXiv may violate arXiv's Code of Conduct.

"Our understanding is that only authors of papers appearing on arXiv can submit withdrawal requests. We have directed the author to submit such a request, but to date, the author has not done so. Therefore, in an effort to clarify the research record, MIT respectfully request that the paper be marked as withdrawn from arXiv as soon as possible." Preprints, by definition, have not yet undergone peer review. MIT took this step in light of the publication's prominence in the research conversation and because it was a formal step it could take to mitigate the effects of misconduct. The author is no longer at MIT. [...]

"We are making this information public because we are concerned that, even in its non-published form, the paper is having an impact on discussions and projections about the effects of AI on science. Ensuring an accurate research record is important to MIT. We therefore would like to set the record straight and share our view that at this point the findings reported in this paper should not be relied on in academic or public discussions of these topics." The paper in question, titled "Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation" and authored by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, investigated the effects of introducing an AI-driven materials discovery tool to 1,018 scientists in a U.S. R&D lab. The study reported that AI-assisted researchers discovered 44% more materials, filed 39% more patents, and achieved a 17% increase in product innovation. These gains were primarily attributed to AI automating 57% of idea-generation tasks, allowing top-performing scientists to focus on evaluating AI-generated suggestions effectively. However, the benefits were unevenly distributed; lower-performing scientists saw minimal improvements, and 82% of participants reported decreased job satisfaction due to reduced creativity and skill utilization.

The Wall Street Journal reported on MIT's statement.

Google has overtaken IBM to become the leader in generative AI-related patents and also leads in the emerging area of agentic AI, according to data from IFI Claims. Axios: In the patents-for-agents U.S. rankings, Google and Nvidia top the list, followed by IBM, Intel and Microsoft, according to an analysis released Thursday.

Globally, Google and Nvidia also led the agentic patents list, but three Chinese universities also make the top 10, highlighting China's place as the chief U.S. rival in the field. In global rankings for generative AI, Google was also the leader -- but six of the top 10 global spots were held by Chinese companies or universities. Microsoft was No. 3, with Nvidia and IBM also in the top 10.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: This morning, while summarizing an Apple "product blitz" he expects for 2027, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a "mostly glass, curved iPhone" with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone's 20th anniversary... [T]he closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that "forms a continuous loop" around the device.

Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company's first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says. Gurman also suggests that Apple's home robot — a tabletop robot that features "an AI assistant with its own personality" — will come in 2027...

Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing.
Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Apple is also "actively looking at" revamping the Safari web browser on its devices "to focus on AI-powered search engines." (Apple's senior VP of services "noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI.")