AI Briefing

Apple is finally expected to drop the Gemini-powered Siri beta today, Waymo just hit half a million paid rides per week across 10 cities, and bots have officially overtaken humans on the internet. Meanwhile, Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for eating its lunch, and Meta is pouring $10 billion into a single data center. The age of AI infrastructure is here — and it's reshaping everything from how we hail a cab to who's actually browsing the web.

01Product9to5Mac ↗

Apple Expected to Drop iOS 26.5 Beta Today With Gemini-Powered Siri

Apple is expected to release the iOS 26.5 developer beta today, March 30, debuting the long-awaited Gemini-powered Siri overhaul. Apple is paying Google roughly $1 billion per year for a custom 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini model running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, keeping user data isolated from Google's servers. This is arguably the biggest architectural shift in iPhone history — Apple outsourced its AI brain to its biggest rival while wrapping it in Apple's privacy guarantees. If it works, Siri goes from punchline to genuine competitor overnight.

02IndustryTechCrunch ↗

Waymo Hits 500,000 Paid Rides Per Week Across 10 US Cities

Waymo is now completing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week — a tenfold increase from 50,000 in May 2024 — with about 3,000 autonomous vehicles logging over 4 million fully driverless miles weekly. The company expanded from its original three cities to 10, adding Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando in just the past year. With a target of 1 million rides per week by year's end, Waymo is proving that autonomous ride-hailing isn't a science project anymore — it's a rapidly scaling business.

03IndustryCNBC ↗

Bots Have Officially Overtaken Humans on the Internet, Report Finds

A new report from Human Security found that automated bot traffic has officially surpassed human internet traffic, with AI-driven automated traffic growing eight times faster than human traffic year-over-year. Traffic from AI agents grew nearly 8,000% in 2025 alone. The finding challenges a foundational assumption of the internet — that there's a human on the other side of the screen — and has major implications for advertising, security, content moderation, and the reliability of any metric based on web traffic.

04PolicyPYMNTS ↗

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement

On March 20, Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the company scraped nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles to train its models and continues to use their content through real-time retrieval-augmented generation. The publishers argue ChatGPT is cannibalizing traffic to their websites by generating AI summaries that eliminate the need to visit the original source. This isn't just another AI copyright case — it strikes at the core business model of knowledge publishers and could set a precedent for how RAG-based systems handle copyrighted reference material.

05IndustryCNBC ↗

Meta Boosts West Texas AI Data Center Investment Sixfold to $10 Billion

Meta increased its investment in an El Paso, Texas AI data center from an initial plan to over $10 billion, aiming for 1 gigawatt of capacity by 2028. The facility, only five months past groundbreaking, underscores the staggering infrastructure demands of frontier AI training and inference at scale. It's part of a broader industry trend where hyperscalers are committing tens of billions to secure the compute needed for next-generation models, effectively turning AI capability into a capital expenditure arms race.