TechCapsules

The U.S. government has begun purchasing ChatGPT through a token‑based model under a new OneGov agreement between the General Services Administration (GSA) and OpenAI. The contract replaces the prior $1‑per‑month fee with a 50% discount for consumption‑based payments and will run for 27 months. It is projected to grant access to the AI platform for roughly 23 million public servants nationwide. The shift aligns with executive order 14402, which favors fixed‑price contracts with performance metrics, yet the token [...]

Elon Musk regained his status as the world’s sole trillionaire after Tesla and SpaceX shares surged. Tesla’s third‑quarter deliveries reached 486,532 vehicles, surpassing the 461,100 forecast by analysts and its own consensus of 461,974, a 5.3% beat, though still 2.1% below the 2025 record of 497,099. The Model 3 and Model Y accounted for 98% of sales. SpaceX stock climbed over 17%, topping $174 per share, buoyed by expectations that its AI‑compute leasing business will add a

Anthropic has released a public‑beta add‑on that embeds Claude into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides via a sidebar. The integration lets users correct spelling, rewrite text, and restyle sections in Docs without altering formatting; generate formulas or tables in Sheets; and create or update slides in Slides using existing layouts. Users can preview edits before they are applied and can also link Google Workspace files directly into Claude conversations. The add‑on is available to paid Claude subscribers [...]

Thomas College in Waterville received a $3 million Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant to embed artificial intelligence across all academic programs. The multi‑year initiative will hire full‑time staff, including an AI specialist in residence, to train faculty, integrate AI into curricula, expand applied learning, and establish a dedicated design space for fabrication, robotics, and data acquisition. The grant aims to ensure every graduate gains practical, critical, and ethical AI literacy, enabling the college to launch new majors and support [...]

SAP unveiled a suite of new AI agents and assistants at its SAP Connect event, expanding the scope of its Joule platform. The launch, part of the Autonomous Enterprise vision, introduces Joule Work, Joule Studio, and autonomous agents that integrate with SAP’s Business AI Platform. These tools are now available as managed products through the SAP for Me portal, with general availability starting this month. SAP highlighted productivity gains—20% in finance, HR, and procurement—and showcased automation in [...]

AI has already automated 10 distinct roles across industries, from customer‑service chatbots that resolve routine tickets to software that triages medical imaging, prioritizes shipping queries, and drafts earnings releases. These systems perform tasks that rely on pattern recognition, language generation, and structured data, allowing human workers to focus on higher‑level decision making. The remaining five roles—surgeons, licensed counselors, electricians, corporate officers, and legal professionals—remain human‑led because they require physical dexterity, emotional judgment, or legal accountability that current [...]

TwelveLabs released Pegasus 1.6, a video‑understanding model that adds temporal context, spatial reasoning, and task completion judgment to egocentric footage. The update targets physical AI, enabling robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles to interpret real‑world actions from a first‑person perspective without specialized cameras. Pegasus 1.6 supports five workflows—action segmentation, dense captioning, quality scoring, search, and curation—allowing developers to convert raw video into structured, reviewable training data. The company claims the model speeds up model training and improves safety [...]

SpaceX announced plans to launch up to 100,000 Starlink broadband satellites and a separate constellation of 1 million Starmind AI satellites, the largest satellite count the company has ever disclosed. The Starmind network will operate in tight clusters of roughly ten satellites, linked by laser bandwidth, to provide on‑orbit AI compute. SpaceX urges all operators to share ephemeris data to mitigate collision risks, citing 650 maneuvering satellites that posed threats in 2026. The company’s FCC filing and new [...]