American authorities are accusing Chinese companies of “distillation activities at an industrial scale.” The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued a joint cybersecurity advisory, warning organizations that Chinese AI companies are extracting the “proprietary functionalities and capabilities” of frontier American models. 

Specifically, the agencies are accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting “billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests” from American models, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok, since 2024. Distillation is the term for a method in AI development in which the output of a powerful model is used to train newer ones.

The warning states that DeepSeek used data and capabilities from various Claude, Gemini, GPT and Grok models to train its own, including the R1. That’s the powerful, open-source reasoning model the company released in early 2025. Moonshot AI, the agencies said, extracted “significant” data from Claude’s Fable to train Kimi K3, which is considered one of the most advanced models developed by a Chinese company. Anthropic created Fable to bring some of the capabilities of Mythos, its state-of-the-art cybersecurity model exclusively available to Project Glasswing participants, to the public. Similarly, Moonshot’s Kimi K2 used GPT-4o data, the agencies add. 

The warning lists the American frontier models the Chinese companies allegedly used to train their own, along with the mitigations US firms can implement to combat “malicious distillation campaigns.” 

American companies have long alleged that Chinese firms are trying to copy their technologies. Shortly after DeepSeek became the top free iPhone app early last year, OpenAI said that, along with Microsoft, it had been banning accounts it suspected of “distilling” its technologies. DeepSeek was one of the companies it investigated. Earlier this year, Anthropic also accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of wide-scale distillation campaigns. But it’s not just Chinese companies: In OpenAI’s announcement about pulling its models from Cursor, it noted that Elon Musk admitted to using OpenAI’s output to train xAI models during cross-examination in the lawsuit he filed against the company. 

It can recommend recipes with ingredient lists you can quickly add to your cart.

Choosing places to visit or the best flights just got a lot easier with Gemini.

Creating full travel itineraries with Gemini

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

AI can also save you during your trip

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

ASUS is getting ready to give its Vivobook lineup a major style refresh in India. The company has confirmed that its next-generation Vivobook laptops will launch on September 16 at 12 PM, bringing new colors, premium all-metal builds, and up to 38 hours of battery life under the campaign tagline “Your Vibe. Your Color.” The lineup will span both traditional clamshell and 2-in-1 convertible models powered by AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon processors.

Fun Asus Vivobook Colors and Design

The biggest visual change is the introduction of three new finishes: Light Blue, Cool Silver, and Matte Gray. While Silver and Gray cater to users who prefer understated, professional-looking machines, the new Light Blue variant adds a more youthful and lifestyle-oriented option to the lineup. All models will feature an all-metal chassis with a refined metallic finish, giving the laptops a more premium feel than traditional plastic-bodied notebooks. ASUS also claims the new Vivobooks can deliver up to 38 hours of battery life, though the exact endurance will depend on the processor and configuration.

The refreshed portfolio will include the Vivobook 14 Flip, Vivobook S14 Flip, Vivobook S14, Vivobook S16, and Vivobook 16. ASUS has confirmed that the lineup will span AMD, Intel, and Snapdragon-powered configurations, giving buyers a wider choice across traditional laptops and 2-in-1 convertibles. While the company has yet to reveal detailed specifications, the teaser suggests the new Vivobooks will continue to target users looking for everyday performance across work, studying, entertainment, and creative tasks.

ASUS is also bundling an introductory protection offer alongside the launch. Buyers will be able to purchase a package that includes two years of extended warranty and three years of accidental damage protection for just ₹99, despite the bundle being valued at ₹5,599.

Small and medium-sized business owners can lack the time and budget required to keep their audience engaged. If you work to fill in the gap and offer related services, getting things done in the right and professional way for your clients can be an easy flow at the onset, but it can become complex over time. From keeping the audience engaged with graphics, videos, and catchy captions, social media content requires extra effort.

However, using AI on the side changes the equation and makes it easier to handle these tasks for SMB clients. You can generate consistent visuals across platforms with a professional finish. Here is how you can scale the content production process.

Outline the Brand Details

Creating professional social media content for small and medium-sized business clients requires outlining and clearly defining the brand details. It is the first step, and it determines how the audience embraces the information. This ranges from the visuals to other elements. For your visuals, outline the colour codes, font families, and logo placement rules. In addition to your image style preferences, languages and audience engagement styles are extra details to state clearly and put forward. However, these details must be convertible into AI parameters. 

Set up your Social Media Pages Guidelines

Social media platforms are more than one, with different rules applying to their use. To create professional content with AI, you need to set up approaches that will fit into any of the usage and aid your brand’s consistency. For instance, X is well-suited for short messaging, and you can easily engage in real-time conversations. LinkedIn comes in as more professional, usually best suited for long-form explanations and business-focused visuals. Facebook and Instagram present a broader channel for visual and text-based posts as well as community-driven conversations. 

Select and Train the AI Tool

There are various available AI tools for content creation, both free and paid. Whether you are choosing any, the initial setup is essential for the overall content you want to create. You can make adjustments or refine your assets to match the auto-processing. This step-by-step process to set up these tools includes

• Upload brand assets, including logos, fonts, and colour palettes, to the AI tool you are using.
• Layout your preferred post types, themes, and message formats.
• You can generate professional sample posts that meet your brand standards. 
• Make your custom adjustments from the feedback received from the tool. 

Create Your Content Workflow

With assets and setup all in place, you can build a structured process for creating and managing social media content posts. For instance, you can generate multiple posts for SMB clients’ media platforms and schedule them for the day or week. Creating a professional content workflow also revolves around mapping out themes and campaign priorities.

Ways You Can Use AI for Social Media Content for Small Businesses

There are several ways of using AI to create professional social media content for small and medium-sized businesses. These help SMB clients cut work hours, improve work standards, and maintain brand consistency across platforms. 

If there is multiple content to brainstorm before sharing across social media pages, AI tools are handy for breaking them down. Rather than going on long deliberations with a blank slate, you can input a few ideas on AI tools for suggestions. These include ideas about the business, production, and target audience. 

• Repurpose Long-form Content

Aside from expanding ideas, you can repurpose and cut down long-form content with AI to match the demands of social media pages. Turn blog posts or newsletter articles into guides for X posts or Instagram carousel headings. You can also convert this content to generate Facebook reels. 

• Schedule Posts and Hashtags

You can inquire from AI on the best posting time and lead on non-saturated hashtags that match your niches.

With an AI, you can generate alt-texts for photos and social media content to make it more professional. It helps patch product details like material, colours, and size that social media platforms can index.

• Automated Response Templates

Beyond creating content, one of the leverages of AI is automated professional responses. You can easily create polite and human-like reply templates for common questions. Training your AI tool over time best positions it to act on your behalf when you’re absent. 

What are the Best AI Tools for Professional Social Media Content

Zawa

Zawa offers a worksuite for creating and coordinating social media content. The AI branding agent is an ideal tool for small and medium-sized business owners. And you can leverage it for content creation and marketing. Outline your business details and create an ideal brand kit – from logos to flyers and social media posts. Zawa AI image upscaler is a plus for enhancing image quality and conveying your content in all shades of professionalism.

Zawa AI Agent for Creating Social Media Content and SMB Clients

Zawa is a professional branding tool that helps designers serve SMB clients faster. The AI agent comprises a full-featured worksuite with various tools to plan, modify, and adjust brand content from scratch. Simply put, it is an add-on for creativity and branding. From logos to posters to social media posts, you can incorporate it into a small business’s workflow, especially if you are particular about professionalism. It allows you to establish a consistent visual identity without a design team and to bring your ideas to life across channels in high-quality formats.

With the Zawa AI Product Video Generator, you can easily create videos with your product image. The AI supports shoppable videos and UGC-style, ready-to-use videos in a few minutes while you select your preferred avatar. Also in the worksuite are smart social media tools that you can use to create standard captions and images for your page. Other tools, like the video text remover, video remix and logo generator, video enhancer, come in handy for your media creations.

Buffer

One of the best AI tools to share your content in a professional format is Buffer AI. Social media comprises multiple channels with different rules. And going through all of it at a time can be taxing. Buffer puts you in the mainstream by running multi-channel campaigns. You can bring together content topics, promotions, and schedule your posts. It helps adapt the content calendar with social channels, making feeds more valuable. 

Canva

Canva is handy for creating professional social media content and images – for yourself and clients. You can generate media designs using AI-powered template suggestions and image placement. The tool features an extensive template library. As a small business owner, you can adopt the background removal, image enhancement, and text-to-image generation features.

Content Studio

For small business owners, following online leads and updates is essential for tracking and modifying media content. However, you cannot stay there all day. Content Studio reduces the scroll work and lets you track preferred topics. In addition to adding preferred topics, you can view metrics for each content piece, including your post. These range from news articles to social media posts.

AI music model maker Suno on Wednesday unveiled a new model family called Suno v6, which it says was developed using licensed data from music labels and distributors such as Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.

Suno has faced multiple lawsuits from record labels, which accused the startup of using copyrighted data to train its AI models, which let you generate music with prompts. Suno settled with Warner Music Group last year, and struck a deal with BMG last month.

The company said Suno v6 is not trained using the data it used to train previous versions of its music-generating model.

The startup is releasing three versions of the model: The base Suno v6 model is available to paying users, and is said to be reliable and steerable for controlled outputs; Suno v6 wild is an experimental model, also available to paying users, that’s meant to be used for ideation and getting unexpected results. Lastly, Suno v6 mini is a faster version available to all users. The company plans to retire its older models.

Suno says the new model lineup offers greater flexibility in how you use them. Suno v6 lets you edit a part of a song using a prompt or a word in the lyrics, and even lets you use text, images or video as references to create tracks. You can separate an instrument from a sample and create a new beat with it.

The startup also said it plans to add new features such as letting users remix songs — provided the respective artists opt-in to a new program it is setting up with music labels that lets Suno use their songs for AI-generated features.

Jack Brody, Suno’s chief product officer, said through derivative work, there is more opportunity for revenue generation for all stakeholders

“I think the music ecosystem and our partners are always looking for ways to create more revenue opportunities for their rights holders and artists. So a big part of this release is creating additional revenue streams there,” Brody told TechCrunch in an interview.

Last month, Suno said it plans to add a watermark to songs generated using its platform. It also recently also introduced new download limits based on the account’s tier.

“We can help manage some of the broader ecosystem challenges like streaming fraud and kind of mass exportation and uploading to distributors that are low intent. At the end of the day, we think it is up to the distributors and the platforms to govern what content goes on there,” he said.

Suno is still facing lawsuits from labels like Sony and Universal Music Group, artists like Jason Isbell, and users alleging it ignored security while chasing profits. The model announcement comes a day after the company admitted to training its models using YouTube videos.

Despite these controversies, Suno has raised over $819 million in funding to date, according to PitchBook data.

A last-minute report ahead of Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro unveiling says that the Dynamic Island will let users display more Live Activities.

It’s been regularly reported that Apple has reduced the size of the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 18 Pro, despite clear limits on what it can do. But now according to Bloomberg, Apple is adding a little more functionality even as it cuts back on the size of the feature.

Specifically, it’s claimed that the reduced Dynamic Island will display three ongoing tasks as Live Activities. At present, two can be displayed and it’s possible that will continue, but the new version will let users toggle between three.

Live Activities were added to the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022, and provide at-a-glance information. Flight details can be displayed there, for instance, or sports scores, or the time until an Uber arrives.

Originally this was Apple making the most of the cutout necessary for Face ID. By adding black pixels either side of the cutout, it could switch to displaying icons or text in that space when wanted.

Users could see continuously what was happening with an activity. Then they could tap on the Dynamic Island to have a pop-up showing more detail

It was a clever move that, as ever with Apple’s design, has been copied by Android. But as useful as Live Activities are in their present form, they may be changing soon.

That’s because Apple is reportedly still working toward removing the cutout entirely. It would do so by having the Face ID sensor entirely under the display, and may even do so by 2027.

Live Activities have proven too useful to be abandoned, so Apple will surely still display them. Apple is unveiling the iPhone 18 Pro during its September 9, 2026 event.

I’ve spent years reviewing smartphones, and if there’s one aspect where Honor never fails to impress, it’s the bold design experiments. Earlier today, Honor gave us our first glimpse at the Magic 9 Pro Max flagship phone with ARRI camera imaging tech. The phone is scheduled for launch later this month in China, followed by wider availability in other markets.

Before we dig into the hardware specs, let’s talk about the design. The phone borrows inspiration from the iPhone 17 Pro, specifically the large camera island at the back and the dual-tone finish on the rear shell that combines glass and metal. Where the phone actually stands out is a separate circular camera bump that also houses the periscope-style telephoto zoom camera.

Another standout aspect, of course, is the paint job. This is the first time that I’m seeing a distinctively grass-inspired green shade on a smartphone. And I have to say, it looks fresh. The only other brand that has tried something similar is Google, which is offering a shade of olive green on its Pixel 11 Pro Fold foldable and the Pixel 11 Pro smartphones.

Honors China division, through a series of teasers, has already confirmed that the Honor Magic9 Pro Max will come equipped with two 200-megapixel camera sensors at the back. The main snapper employs a 200MP 1/1.28-inch sensor, while the telephoto camera relies on a 1/1.4-inch sensor with a matching resolution.

Taking the zoom output to the next level is a new 500mm teleconverter kit, tagging alongside the 200mm teleconverter hardware. Dedicated zoom extender kits are all the rage these days, as we have seen with the likes of Oppo Find X9 Ultra and the Vivo X300 Ultra. Over the front, you get a pill-shaped cutout for the front camera. It is significantly smaller than what you see on Apple’s current crop of smartphones.

Notably, the iPhone 18 Pro is expected to feature a smaller Face ID cutout, with some improvements to the underlying Live Activities system, as well. As far as the partnership goes, Honor is promising some big upgrades for creators. “For creators, ARRI LogC3 preserves more highlight and shadow information for post-production, while ARRI Wide Gamut 3 provides a broader color space and ARRI Looks offer controlled cinematic color styles,” says the company.

Brenpoly’s PolyMO is a palm-sized desk creature with a bright 1.8-inch AMOLED face, a microphone, a speaker, and a capacitive screen, and its health is bound to how long you stay inside the apps that eat an evening. Sit it on a table, pair it over Bluetooth to an Android phone, and the little face blinks, grows hungry, gets bored, and moves through life stages on its own clock. Spend too long on flagged feeds and it falls ill. Leave the illness untreated long enough and it dies for good. That is the whole contract.

The hardware is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 Touch AMOLED 1.8 board with 368 x 448 pixels and a built-in microphone and speaker. Any of the V1 or V2 panel variants will suffice, as the firmware is intelligent enough to detect which driver you’re using on the fly. 3D printable shells are available in the repository, allowing you to simply put your board into a nice little body to make it appear less like a development kit and more like a finished product. All of the simulation logic for hunger, happiness, age, sickness, and death is executed on the ESP32, which is saved in flash memory and timed using the board’s internal clock. Pull the power cable, and PolyMO will continue to tick without saying anything.

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To communicate with PolyMO, simply speak toward the case, and the board will stream Opus audio via BLE. The Android companion app handles the rest, transcribes the footage with Whisper, transmits it to a local language model for analysis, and finally provides the response back via radio. There is no chat window on your phone for the conversation to take place in; instead, you complete all of your setup, select your models, and monitor screen time from there. The models aren’t even provided with the software; you have to extract them from the file system using the system file picker. The program isn’t even asking for an INTERNET permission; if that happens, the build would fail the unit tests. That’s sort of the point of having a device that can hear you and read notifications.

Screen time is more of a variable that changes depending on the weather (which, of course, you have no influence over) than a setting that you can turn on or off. You have a basic allocation for each sitting, which is set to roughly five minutes on the applications you’ve identified as favorites, and you may adjust it in small increments. Crossing the line causes the pet to become ill, not death. Satiety and happiness scores (all of which are integer values ranging from 0 to 4) will decrease faster when the pet is sick. Simply close the app that was making it sick or give it a slap (aka, tap the face), and the illness will be gone. Leave both scores at zero for long enough (approximately 12 hours, unless you muck things up and speed up the process), and death becomes a state that must be willingly restored. Quiet hours from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. will pause the death timer and most calls, but late-night scrolling may still make your pet sick.

Care is an action-based game; a few touches on the screen or a brisk shake of the case for around three seconds will initiate play. A simple tap on the face can cure a lot of ailments. Simply ignore a call when your score reaches zero and the firmware believes you committed a mistake, as this counts against your lifespan. Life stages progress from egg to kid to teen to adult around every 12, 36, and 72 hours, after which older stages begin to degrade much faster. Facial expressions and personas are all derived from JSON files, so a joyful face must smile, while a stiff face lacks a mouth. Your responses are concise, employ sentence case, and are all influenced by the present situation, so your hungry pet speaks like, well, a hungry pet. You may even set it to describe a notice aloud so you don’t have to glance down.

Firmware is built with ESP-IDF, and on the phone side, we utilize Kotlin with BLE, Opus, Whisper.cpp, Llama.cpp, Piper, and espeak-ng for phonemes, all because we need them. The source code is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Unfortunately, because of the phoneme connection, the released APK becomes GPL-3.0, thus if you ship tagged binaries, you must also supply the matching source. To build, you must flash the board, assemble the program using JDK 21, retrieve all native source, drop prebuilt libraries into place, and keep your firmware and app on the same commit to ensure that the wire protocol matches. If you receive a black screen after a flash, a simple power cycle will generally fix it.
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