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After more than 30 years the cybersecurity field, Keith Jones recently realized that his role had changed, from being a single contributor to manager of a fairly large team. And this team was getting a lot accomplished — tasks that used to take up a huge chunk of his workday.
No, his company hadn't hired a group of new employees to work under him. He simply accelerated his use of artificial intelligence tools. Now, instead of grinding through a lot of basic tasks, that work is done for him while he focuses on bigger-picture work.
"It really feels like I have a team behind the scenes, but what I have is Claude [Anthropic's AI tool]," says Jones, who currently works as a cybersecurity researcher. "I've been thinking for the last several months about how much differently I work now than I did a year ago, when I would sit and write all the low-level stuff before I could get to the 10% of the good stuff I really wanted to focus on. Now I can sit back and say, ‘Give me three different ways to solve this problem.'"
width="1024" height="678" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"Keith Jones, cybersecurity researcher
Keith Jones
Most people working in the technology field, like Jones, have had to figure out how best to work with AI. The technology has come on strong, with many companies making its use mandatory and actively evaluati
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Chinese smartphone makers have been followers in the global market, embracing the concepts and paradigms set in the past 20 years by Apple and Google. But AI may be giving the Chinese an opportunity to break away and set their own path forward.
Specifically, Chinese companies are integrating AI more fully into smartphones, and also using AI for limited robotics in phones. Here's what you need to know about these emerging trends.
China's ZTE recently showed its Nubia NaviX Ultra. The phone runs ByteDance's Doubao AI agent, which users can access with voice commands or by pressing a button on the phone. The phone has no home screen and no conventional app store.
Another Chinese company, called StepFun — it was founded in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft vice president and chief scientist at Microsoft's Software Technology Center Asia — sells a phone called the StepX Neo. It runs a proprietary operating system called Step AOS based on Android, Linux, and an RTOS containing a built-in AI agent called Step Amoo. The StepX Neo splits phone functions into four primitives (communication, apps, files, system tools) that the agent recombines based on the stated goals of the user.
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There's really only one problem: my laptop is too old for a Windows 11 update. On October 14th, 2025, Windows 10 will reach the end of its life period, which means no new features or security updates. The former is not a big problem. The latter will be a disaster.
I'm not alone in this situation. Over 50 percent of users are still running Windows 10, and this figure is gradually dropping. How many will have updated in six months' time is anyone's guess, but whatever the percentage, one thing is clear. A large proportion of the world's 1.6 billion Windows PCs will still be running Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025.
What makes this challenging is that Windows 11 is so technically demanding that it's not possible to update all fully functional computers. Sadly, my six-year-old laptop is one of them.
If Microsoft stops updating Windows 10, it wo
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What's under the hood here? A brand-new 2025-era AMD Ryzen 9 270 processor, a hefty 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM, and a speedy 1TB Gen 4 SSD that all come together to zip through any task you need to handle. It'll boot up in a flash, won't struggle with Windows 11, move enormous files in minutes, and run games as smoothly as butter. (It has two memory slots and can be expanded up to 64GB of RAM, by the way.)
And don't forget that just-released Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card that future-proofs this laptop for several years at least. It unlocks Nvidia's latest gaming features, including DLSS 4, and you'll love how it plays on the 16-inch IPS screen with 1920×1200 resolution and 165Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync support.
It offers more connections than most modern laptops, too, with dual USB-A on the right side plus USB4, USB-C, USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left side. Use it for up to 10 hours on a single battery charge, and other nice bits include a 1080p webcam, backlit keyboard, and a CPU that qualifies it as a Copilot PC for AI features.
Best Buy has this listed as a "Techtober Deal" that ends on (or around) October 12th, so don't miss it.
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