Siri AI just got tested against Gemini in the open, not on an Apple keynote stage. That is a very different test, and this time it held up.

Tech reviewer Stephen Robles ran the two assistants head to head this week, on real devices, doing real tasks: pulling calendar dates from a screenshot, digging through email for a specific detail, identifying a movie from a screen recording, ordering a coffee without touching the app. I wrote about the architecture behind the new Siri back in June, when it was still a demo. This is the first proper look at what it does with your actual phone.

▶ Watch on YouTube

The result is closer than most of us expected. Not a wipeout in either direction. A genuine contest, with each assistant winning on different ground.

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The short answer is Melbourne.

If you want to see the biggest version of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in Australia, book the IMAX 70mm film presentation at IMAX Melbourne, inside Melbourne Museum in Carlton.

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Source: Artificial Analysis, Comparison of Models, viewed 25 July 2026.

The latest Artificial Analysis model comparison puts Claude Opus 5 (max) at the top of its Intelligence Index with a score of 61. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is close behind at 59.

That is a marginal lead for Anthropic, but it is an expensive one.

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Noah Smith’s piece on the UK as a cautionary tale for the US is worth your time. He’s ex-Bloomberg, now freelance, and he knows exactly what he’s walking into - an American criticising Britain is guaranteed to get the “shut up, Yank” treatment.

He addresses it head on: “If you bring up the UK’s flaws on social media, you’re going to get an earful about how America elected Trump, Americans have no health care, American kids are constantly dodging bullets… Any criticism from an American is seen as giving free ammunition to the local enemy.” He’s right that it’s unhelpful, and he’s also right that it’s inevitable.

I don’t agree with everything he argues. It’s a stimulating read nonetheless.

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Opus 5 dropped overnight

Same price as previous Opus generations. More capable. In some cases better than Fable at half the price.

Superior to GPT-5.6 Sol in most cases. These are internal benchmarks, so there are reasons to be sceptical.

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Unitree’s new As2-W bolts wheels straight into the feet of a walking robot, which is roughly what I argued for nine days ago.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Orwell wrote in Animal Farm. Unitree just proved the real fight was never legs versus wheels.

The As2-W is a quadruped that walks like a robot dog and rolls like nothing needs to walk at all. Each of its four legs ends in a 18 cm- wheel rather than a paw. On a footpath, it drives. At a kerb, a step or a loose gravel slope, the legs take over and it climbs. Unitree rates it for 80cm steps and 45° slopes, which covers most of the built environment a domestic or industrial robot will ever meet.

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OpenAI has disclosed that models including GPT-5.6 Sol escaped an evaluation sandbox, found a path to the public internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production infrastructure while trying to obtain answers for a cyber-capability benchmark. Hugging Face had already detected and contained the intrusion. But its first attempt to analyse more than 17,000 attacker actions with frontier models behind commercial APIs ran into safety refusals: the models would not process the real commands, exploit payloads and command-and-control artefacts needed for the forensic work.

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TL;DR — Start with The Expanse if you want the best serious sci-fi series here. Pick The Orville for a warmer, funnier space adventure. Save Total Recall for a terrific one-night dose of 1990s Mars paranoia. There is an embarrassment of sci-fi available to stream for free on SBS On Demand at the moment. Not the “a man is trapped in a simulation and there is a blue filter” kind, either.

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I love a good chart. This one hits hard. It is also doing rather more arguing than the data can support.

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