Tech News Today reveals a battlefield defined by two distinct but interconnected conflicts. On one front, the software giants are in a street fight, with Canva launching a full-scale assault on Adobe’s creative dominance using AI as its primary weapon. On the other, the hardware king, Nvidia, just unveiled the impossibly powerful new systems that will fuel the entire war, all while strategically funding its own future customers.
Daily technology news update: October 31, 2025
Today’s news isn’t just a collection of product updates; it’s a snapshot of an industry consolidating around AI. We’re witnessing the birth of “Creative Operating Systems,” as both Canva and Adobe race to become the one platform you never have to leave. They’re using agentic AI as the hook, turning complex tools like Photoshop into simple chatbots. But this entire software war is being fought on Nvidia’s turf. Nvidia’s $5 trillion valuation isn’t just about selling chips; it’s about becoming the central bank for the AI economy, funding the startups that will, in turn, be forced to buy its next-generation hardware like the Vera Rubin. Everyone else, even Apple, is just trying to keep up.
Nvidia tightens its grip on the AI world with the Vera Rubin Superchip
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, steering a company now flirting with a $5 trillion market cap, has unveiled the Vera Rubin AI Superchip. This new platform, succeeding the GB200/GB300, is a liquid-cooled monster built on a 72-rack scale, integrating six trillion transistors. Its CPU boasts 88 custom ARM cores paired with two Rubin GPUs, delivering 100 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute and 2 TB of low-latency memory for generative AI workloads. The base system is 100 times more powerful than the older DGX-1. Higher-end configurations, like the Rubin Ultra NVL576, will offer up to 15 exaflops of inference performance. Mass production is slated for the second half of 2026, solidifying Nvidia’s roadmap as the non-negotiable standard for the next wave of AI.
Nvidia’s investment strategy: building its own customer base
Underscoring its role as the AI economy’s kingmaker, Nvidia is reportedly planning to invest between $500 million and $1 billion into Poolside, an AI startup focused on software development. This investment is part of a new $2 billion funding round valuing Poolside at $12 billion. This isn’t Nvidia’s first stake in the company. The move perfectly illustrates Nvidia’s strategy: aggressively fund the most promising AI startups, which in turn become locked-in, high-volume customers for its advanced GPUs. Nvidia isn’t just building the hardware; it’s building its own market.
Canva declares war on Adobe with its ‘Creative Operating System’
Canva has officially declared war on Adobe, launching its “Creative Operating System” for its 260 million users. The move is a direct attempt to create a single, unified ecosystem that rivals Adobe’s creative cloud. The COS integrates Canva’s Visual Suite and platform infrastructure, but its core weapon is AI. It’s powered by a new Design Foundation Model to automate tasks and introduces “Ask @Canva,” a conversational AI assistant designed to act as an on-demand design consultant, handling everything from content creation to brand guidance.
Video: Canva
Canva’s next move: Weaponizing Affinity as a free Adobe killer
As part of its assault on Adobe, Canva is weaponizing its recent acquisition of Affinity. The professional Affinity suite—which previously sold as three separate apps (Designer, Photo, Publisher) for around $70 each—is being relaunched as a single, all-in-one application that is now “free forever.” This strategic move aims to pull professional users from Adobe’s subscription model. The catch: while the core software is free, all the new AI-powered editing tools within the Affinity interface will require a paid Canva Premium subscription, neatly tying its professional and consumer funnels together.
Adobe fights back, turning Photoshop into a conversational AI agent
Adobe isn’t taking the threat lying down. At its Max conference, the company unveiled its own “agentic AI” assistants for Photoshop and Express, effectively turning its complex software into a conversational chatbot. The AI can handle prompts from “Make my hat blue” to the crowd-pleasing “rename all my disorganized layers.” The Express assistant is in public beta, while the more advanced Photoshop version is on a waitlist. Adobe also previewed Project Moonlight, a new Firefly platform AI that acts as a “creative partner,” analyzing a user’s past social media and Lightroom data to suggest new, high-engagement content ideas.
Video: Adobe
Google’s first AI ad is here, and it’s too scared to show a human
In a revealing move, Google has released its first ad created entirely with its own generative AI tools, including Veo 3. Instead of showcasing realistic humans, the ad stars a toylike plush turkey escaping a farm—a deliberate choice to sidestep the “uncanny valley” that has made other AI-generated ads feel unsettling. Robert Wong of Google’s Creative Lab admitted that people in marketing can seem “drunk on AI” and that the company wants to avoid “AI slop.” The ad, part of the “Just Ask Google” campaign, suggests that even the creators of the technology are apprehensive about showing what it can really do to a mass audience.
Apple’s AI-powered Siri is now delayed until 2026
Apple remains conspicuously behind in the generative AI race. On an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook claimed “good progress” is being made on the long-overdue AI upgrades for Siri. These advanced features, first announced at WWDC 2024 and heavily marketed with the iPhone 16, were delayed in March 2025 and are now not expected until spring 2026, likely with an iOS 26.4 update. The delay for features like on-screen context and multi-step questions has already sparked class-action lawsuits. Despite reporting a record $102.5 billion quarterly revenue, Apple’s AI ambitions remain a story of “coming soon.”
Microsoft and Meta’s cheap Vision Pro alternative is now ready
Microsoft and Meta are making their joint play for the spatial computing workforce. The Windows 11 remote desktop feature is now officially out of preview and available to all Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S users via the Horizon OS v81 update. After 10 months in testing, the feature allows users to stream their PC display into the headset, creating a private, multi-monitor virtual workspace. The full release adds a new ultrawide display mode, creating a massive, curved monitor experience that directly counters Apple’s much more expensive Vision Pro.
The streaming format wars continue as Disney+ embraces HDR10+
In the ongoing, slow-burn war over video formats, Samsung has scored a significant win. Disney+ and Hulu streams now support Samsung’s HDR10+ dynamic metadata format, which optimizes picture quality scene-by-scene. Over 1,000 Hulu titles within the Disney+ app are already upgraded, with more originals to follow. This brings Disney into alignment with Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+, further cementing HDR10+ as a key competitor to Dolby Vision and strengthening the Samsung TV ecosystem. The feature is available on most Samsung Crystal UHD and QLED TVs made from 2018 onward.
YouTube adds contextual ‘easter eggs’ to its Like button
YouTube is rolling out a small but charming update to its interface: 20 new genre-specific animations for the Like button. Tapping “Like” on a music video will now show floating musical notes, a pet video will spawn paw prints, and a sports clip will feature a bouncing basketball. The one-second animations are described by YouTube engineers as “easter egg-style” microinteractions. This is part of a broader UI refresh aimed at a cleaner, more immersive look, though the dislike button, notably, remains unmodified.
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