Intel shared a sneak preview of its upcoming AI Playground app at Computex earlier this week, which offers yet another way to try AI image generation. The Windows application provides you with a new way to use generative AI a means to create and edit images, as well as chat with an AI agent, without the need for complex command line prompts, complicated scripts, or even a data connection.
The interesting bit is that everything runs locally on your PC, leveraging the parallel processing power of either an Intel Core Ultra processor with a built-in Intel Arc GPU or through a separate 8GB VRAM Arc Graphics card.
AI Playground, which will be available later this summer as a free download, is built with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind. “We do not see AI Playground as a replacement for the many wonderful AI Projects and applications,” the company wrote in a recent blog post, “but we do see AI Playground as the easy path to get started with AI.”
It installs like a standard Windows application and switching between the image creation, image editing, and chat functions is a matter of clicking the tabs at the top of the screen. Image generation can be as simple as entering a short prompt and clicking a single button. A number of esoteric values and adjustments like “Steps,” “LoRAs,” and “Schedulers” have been rolled into more general and approachable “Resolution” and “Quality” settings, though they are still available to more advanced users through Manual mode.
While the Answer LLM’s performance wasn’t particularly impressive in the demo video above (that is not how you structure a haiku), the chatbot can be further fine-tuned to improve its performance through interacting with the user as well as through input text and documents. And that’s really where AI Playground sets itself apart from more advanced models like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT — since everything on AI Playground runs locally on the user’s PC, the chances of their data, prompts, and outputs being leaked are drastically decreased.
What’s more, the LLM is open source and can easily accommodate Pytorch models from other generative AI applications, allowing for a unique mix of flexibility and privacy that cloud-based applications don’t currently offer.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.