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Google has begun allowing rival third-party app stores to be distributed through the Google Play Store, a concrete change following the court order in the Epic Games antitrust case.

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, sued Google over its restrictions on alternative app stores inside Play and on developers' payment options. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation on October 1, rival Android app stores can now access the Play Store's catalog and be distributed through it, and developers have greater freedom to direct users to alternative payment and distribution channels.

The EFF is a digital-rights advocacy group and its post favors competition; the exact scope of compliance should be checked against Google's own statements and the court's order. For developers, the actual effect on distribution reach and payment fees is what to watch next.

A reasoning chain can now be scored step by step for wasted work, and picking fine-tuning data by that score makes inference cheaper with almost no loss in task accuracy.

Models that re-derive steps they have already settled burn compute and add latency; until now the only checks were reading trajectories by hand or comparing total lengths, neither of which says which step was the redundant one.

On the redundancy class of the PRMBench dataset, the score identifies redundant steps more than 10 points more accurately than embedding-similarity and information-gain baselines, and it tracks the actual reasoning length of QwQ-32B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and GPT-4.1. It comes from the SLIDER framework, which uses partial information decomposition to split what two adjacent reasoning steps contribute to the final answer into unique, redundant and synergistic parts, and flags a step as repetitive when redundancy dominates.

The evaluation is the authors’ own and covers that redundancy dataset; the paper was submitted on September 30 and accepted to an ICLR 2026 workshop on logical reasoning in large models.

The union representing American Airlines pilots (APA) has filed a court objection to Spirit Airlines' $10 million sale of its data to Google.

After Spirit shut down earlier this year, Google won a bankruptcy auction for its data with a $10 million bid, saying it could be used to improve its products and AI models. According to Business Insider on October 3, APA filed its objection on Tuesday, saying more than 700 of its members formerly worked at Spirit and that the sale would disclose pilots' confidential employment and training information.

The filing argues that voluntary safety and training programs depend on confidentiality, and that reselling the data could chill participation across US commercial aviation. The unions representing Spirit's pilots and flight attendants had already objected. Google says the sale excludes customer and credit card information and that identifying details will be scrubbed. The court has not ruled.

ServiceNow launched Flow on October 1, a service desk feature that handles employee requests in natural language inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. The company says teams can get it running in a day without an implementation project or additional infrastructure.

Flow targets two kinds of buyers: organizations that avoided ITSM software because of its complexity, and departments, remote offices and newly acquired business units inside companies that already use ServiceNow. Employees describe problems in natural language; the system retrieves company information and either acts or escalates with context. After a support worker resolves an issue, an IT manager can turn that solution into an automated workflow with one click. More than 100 prebuilt connectors are included.

Pricing is consumption-based: existing customers draw from their current AI entitlement pool, and new customers can buy with a credit card without an existing ServiceNow relationship. ServiceNow did not disclose specific consumption rates. The day-one setup and one-click automation claims come from ServiceNow's own announcement and demonstration.

Walapay, a cross-border payments infrastructure company, announced on October 1 that it raised $4.6 million in a seed round led by Generative Ventures.

Walapay uses stablecoins and a single API to handle collections and payouts across currencies and regions, with direct integrations in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The company said the funding will go toward expanding its licensing footprint and deepening banking partnerships.

Valuation and round terms were not disclosed. The company also said its infrastructure could serve autonomous agents making payments on their own, but that remains a plan with no shipped product.

CoreWeave announced its Forge platform at the Fully Connected event, where newly trained model checkpoints can be hot-loaded into live deployments.

The platform includes Agent Lens activity tracing, model distillation, and an RL Rollouts service that updates live models without redeploying the system. Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering, said users can start with serverless inference and add pieces gradually.

Customer Cognition's research head Silas Alberti said its Devin agent trains continuously, targeting 99.99% reliability across data centers. TheCUBE, which produced the coverage, is a paid media partner for the CoreWeave-sponsored event, so all of the above is vendor statement.

Volantis announced on October 1 that it has raised an $88 million Series A led by angel investor Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures, with John Doerr and former Intel AI products head Naveen Rao among the participants.

The startup is building an inference chip with an optical memory interconnect: wiring that reaches beyond 200 millimeters lets it attach more than 220 memory chiplets, which the company says yields over 30 times the memory bandwidth of current accelerators. It plans to ship the A-1, an appliance about a third of a standard rack, next year.

The bandwidth and token-throughput figures are the company's own, and valuation and terms were not disclosed. CEO Tapa Ghosh wrote in a company blog post that the goal is a coding agent finishing a task in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes — a claim that awaits real hardware.

Microsoft released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, the first streaming transcription model in its MAI family, on October 1. It keeps producing provisional transcripts while the speaker is still talking.

According to Microsoft, the model accepts speech over a WebSocket, returns its first transcript hypotheses within 320 milliseconds on average, supports more than 60 languages with automatic language detection, and is priced at 54 cents per audio hour on the Vercel AI Gateway. The company itself notes that real-world speed also depends on the network connection and the model generating the reply, so the latency figure is not guaranteed in every scenario.

For comparison, the non-streaming MAI-Transcribe-2 released last month costs 10 cents per audio hour and waits until the speaker finishes before processing; the streaming variant costs more than five times as much in exchange for live output. Microsoft also shipped two text-to-speech models the same day, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. Combined with its Mai-Thinking-1 reasoning model, Microsoft now has the components for a full voice agent built in-house, consistent with its stated goal of reducing what it pays OpenAI and Anthropic.

Satlyt, a startup developing AI software for satellites, has closed an $8 million seed round. Per a TechCrunch report on October 1, the round was led by early-stage fund Non Sibi Ventures; valuation and terms were not disclosed.

Satlyt was founded in 2024 by Rama Afullo, previously a product manager on SpaceX's Starlink business. The company lets satellites with GPUs process data onboard, cutting how much must be beamed to Earth. In March, the first satellite carrying its platform reached low-Earth orbit, running Google's open-source Gemma 3 1B model to diagnose software faults in orbit.

The company's own simulated evaluation found the system cut telemetry sent down for analysis by more than 64%; the test simulated a set of common satellite software faults. Another satellite carrying Satlyt's software was scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX rocket on the day of the report, with NASA using it to test orbital computing methods.

Cloudflare opened its AI Gateway Auto Router to public beta on September 30. Setting the model to cloudflare/auto lets the system pick a model per request automatically.

The router runs a classifier on GPUs across Cloudflare's edge, scoring each request on dimensions including complexity, ambiguity and stakes, then combines those signals with model prices to pick a capable-enough option, accounting for cache-rewrite costs when switching models mid-session.

Cloudflare's own internal benchmark reports: across 291 simulated office tasks, Auto Router scored 86.6% success at $2.10 total cost; Claude Opus 5.5 scored 96.6% at $5.91; GPT-6 Sol scored 84.2% at $2.64. That puts the router at 35% of Opus's cost and 80% of Sol's.

All of these figures come from Cloudflare's own internal benchmark and OpenCode deployment, covering email, calendar and file workflows; whether the savings transfer to other companies' workloads remains to be seen.

The Loughton datacentre the UK government called its "largest sovereign AI datacentre" will miss its planned 2027 launch: the grid operator has told developer Nscale the 90MW it needs will not be available until the early to mid-2030s.

The project is being built in Essex by UK startup Nscale, whose investors include Nvidia and which is preparing for a roughly £26bn listing. When Keir Starmer's government announced the UK AI strategy in 2025, it cited the site as a flagship; in March the Guardian revealed the location was still an operating scaffolding yard.

The delay is not unique. Regulator Ofgem disclosed in June that 315 datacentres were queueing to connect to the National Grid, representing 73GW of demand against a national peak capacity of 45GW.

Limits: UKPN would not comment on the individual project, and the delay timeline comes from reporting; Nscale says it remains committed and is investigating onsite generation and a faster connection.

Tesla's Cybercabs authorized for commercial use in Texas rose from 45 to 169 in their first month, still far below Waymo's 1,154.

According to Texas DMV public records reviewed by CNBC, the wheel-less, pedal-less two-seaters launched in Austin on Sept 3. Paying passengers reported waits of 45-plus minutes and misplaced pickups and drop-offs; wait times have come down in recent weeks.

For comparison, Waymo has 1,154 vehicles authorized in Texas and completes more than 500,000 paid rides weekly across the US. NHTSA opened an audit query into Cybercab compliance after the launch, and Tesla obtained an extension to its response deadline.