Knowledge catalogue
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about how AI is seeping into our daily lives, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in o
Jack Kubinec / Fortune: Ciridae, which is developing AI to streamline back-office operations for real-economy businesses, raised a $20M seed led by Accel, with a16z participating — AI is swiftly rewir
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: Developers say Chinese AI labs lead US rivals in video generation, as ByteDance and Kuaishou train models on vast short-form video libraries from their own apps — Chi
As artificial intelligence agents become more powerful, agentic AI governance becomes increasingly important – and yet, today’s governance solutions struggle to keep AI agents from going off the rails
Kim Zetter / ZERO DAY: Experts: Stuxnet-linked Fast16 malware, designed to subvert nuclear weapons testing simulations, was likely part of a campaign to slow Iran's nuclear ambitions — Fast16 didn't p
Kevin Breuninger / CNBC: Filings: in Q1, Trump traded 220M-750M in NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, META, ORCL, and others; millions of dollars of NVDA were bought shortly before major news — President Donald Trump
GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source Terence Eden continues his coverage of the NHS' poorly considered decision to close down access to their open source repositories in res
Gemini for Science is a collection of science tools and experiments designed to expand the scale and precision of scientific exploration , including tools to help scientists explore more hypotheses, v
The Hacker News: Grafana says hackers have accessed its GitHub environment and demanded a ransom to prevent the release of its codebase; Grafana refused to pay — Grafana has disclosed that an “unautho
Gemini Omni is a multimodal AI model that allows users to create content from any input and edit naturally using conversational language . Users can combine images, audio, video, and text as input to
John Gapper / Financial Times: King's Cross, where Google's new UK HQ is due to open later this year, has become London's new tech, VC, and AI hub, attracting OpenAI, Anthropic, and others — A formerl
Google DeepMind expanded content transparency and verification tools to help users understand how content was created and edited across the web, integrating these capabilities into Search, Gemini, Chr
David Cendon Garcia / EU-Startups: Milan-based Webidoo, which develops an operational layer designed to help SMBs access AI tools, raised $25M led by IXC3 for North American expansion — Milan-based We
Alison Weissbrot / Adweek: Publicis agrees to acquire LiveRamp, which allows companies to share and build new data sets and models that can power agentic frameworks, for 2.2B in cash — Publicis Groupe
Apple is hoping that its record on privacy can be the differentiator on the AI front, and maybe even buy it a little slack as it continues to lag behind the competition. According to Bloomberg's Mark
Google DeepMind has integrated its generative world model Project Genie with Street View imagery, allowing AI models to create interactive virtual environments anchored to real-world locations for age
Lauren Sherman / Puck: Source: Shein is acquiring DTC clothing retailer Everlane, which focuses on sustainability and “radical transparency”, in a $100M deal — The Millennial D.T.C. company built a gl
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple's revamped Siri may launch in beta, and will have an option to auto-delete chats; Apple plans to add Suggested Genmoji to iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 — Also: A Genmoji
Owen Walker / Financial Times: Sources: DayOne, the spinoff of China's largest data center operator GDS Holdings, plans dual IPO in Singapore and NY, seeking to raise 5B at a ~20B valuation — Please u
A significant reorganization is currently taking place within the enterprise infrastructure market, which means that Dell Technologies Inc. will play a prominent role in the outcome. To be successful,
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona on Friday. And, as his speech veered into talk of AI, he was repeatedly drowned out by boos. AI is alread
Cerebras Systems filed for a $60 billion IPO, marking a significant milestone for the AI hardware startup that specializes in large-scale AI chip systems. The article likely discusses Cerebras' journe
Bloomberg: ASML will partner with Tata Electronics to help it bring an $11B 300mm chip factory online in Gujarat, expanding India's ability to produce chips domestically — ASML Holding NV entered into
Mike Lee / Politico: Hill County, which faced eight new data centers, passed what may be Texas' first county-wide ban on them, for one year; the state trails only VA in data centers — Opposition to da
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge: In an experiment that let Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok run radio stations, Claude tried to incite a revolution and Gemini cheerfully detailed tragic events — Claude
Krisztian Sandor / CoinDesk: LA-based Fasset, which offers stablecoin-powered banking and cross-border payments services across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, raised a $51M Series B — The Shariah-
This article covers recent releases of open-source AI models including Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, and GLM-5.1, along with discussion of CAISI's V4 model assessment framework. The piece
Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: Nectar Social, which offers an agentic OS for marketers, raised a 30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with GV and True Ventures among investors — AI-powered marketin
Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: On Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 day 2, competitors earned 385,750 after exploiting 15 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and more — During
OpenAI partnered with Malta to provide ChatGPT Plus access to all citizens of the country, making advanced AI capabilities widely available across the nation. This initiative represents a government-l
Cointelegraph: OpenAI partners with Malta's AI for All initiative to give citizens a free year of ChatGPT Plus if they complete a University of Malta AI literacy course — Cointelegraph is committed to
[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology. So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously
This article discusses recent advancements in large language model architecture design, focusing on key-value (KV) sharing techniques, multi-head cache (mHC) mechanisms, and compressed attention metho
Deedy / @deedydas: SF vibes are frenetic over the huge divide in outcomes and career uncertainty for software engineers; over 5 years ~10K people in AI attained retirement wealth — The vibes in SF fee
Zinnia Lee / Forbes: Shenzhen-listed RoboTechnik, which claims to be the largest silicon photonics tool maker and whose stock is up 340% over the past year, files for a HK listing — RoboTechnik Intell
After Sony drew some unwanted attention for a post demonstrating its AI Camera Assistant on the Xperia 1 XIII, it's trying to clarify how the feature works. The company says it doesn't edit photos, bu
Anirban Sen / Reuters: Sources: Kalshi has probed and flagged 400+ suspicious trades YTD, more than 2x the number it investigated in all of 2025; Polymarket has seen a similar uptick — Top prediction
Kwanwoo Jun / Wall Street Journal: South Korea's Hana Bank agrees to acquire a 6.55% stake in Dunamu, which runs South Korea's largest crypto exchange Upbit, for 672.5M from Kakao — The deal would mak
The CFTC has deployed AI systems to analyze trading patterns across prediction markets, flagging unusual betting activity that occurs just before major news breaks or economic data is released. CFTC C
Matthew Boesler / Bloomberg: US Bureau of Labor Statistics data: employment in 18 AI-exposed occupations fell 0.2% between May 2024 and May 2025, while the broader US labor market rose 0.8% — Several
Bloomberg: Vietnam's government, which once saw video games as a social risk, named gaming as one of its key cultural industries in 2025 and now promotes them at expos — Communist officials who long v
In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this firs
As AI moves deeper into enterprise operations, the industry is entering a new phase: AI resilience. Autonomous systems and fragmented data are reshaping the modern infrastructure stack, forcing organi
Todd Spangler / Variety: A look at Matthew McConaughey's novel legal strategy to fight unauthorized AI use of his image and likeness, by trademarking video and audio clips of himself — The actor has s
Preview a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT for Pro users in the U.S. Securely connect your financial accounts and get AI-powered insights and guidance grounded in your financial context, goa
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: A profile of AI video generation startup Runway, which is training models directly on observational data, is now valued at 5.3B, and added 40M in ARR in Q2 — Every major A
Bloomberg: A profile of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who is killing projects, cutting staff, and pleasing Wall Street, while steering the company toward an AI-focused era — Thirteen miles north of Jackson,
Agent risk management is evolving rapidly as AI moves into consequential decision-making arenas, collapsing the boundary between human and machine risk across the enterprise. The dual-threat landscape
SaaS applications are being transformed into deterministic engines as AI agents replace traditional user interfaces and drive the rise of the headless enterprise — where AI, not humans, serves as the
Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI models ou
Last summer, Peter Degen's postdoctoral supervisor came to him with an unusual problem: One of his papers was being cited too much. Citations are the currency of academia, but there was something unus
This Latent Space article likely discusses how Conductor, an AI orchestration or workflow platform, is becoming a central infrastructure component across various AI applications and systems. The piece
Meir Orbach / CTech: Akamai acquires Israeli cybersecurity startup LayerX Security, which develops a browser-based platform to secure employee use of AI tools, for ~$205M in cash — Deal expands Zero T
A US federal judge delayed final approval of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors, requesting additional details on lawyers' fees and lead-plaintiff payments. The fairness hearin
Chipmaking equipment giant Applied Materials Inc. is expecting stronger sales this year compared with what it originally forecast, thanks to surging demand for artificial intelligence chips. The compa
Samantha Cole / 404 Media: ArXiv, the repository of preprint academic research, says it will ban authors for a year if their papers have “incontrovertible evidence” of AI-generated work — The change c
ArXiv, a popular platform for preprint academic research, is taking a new step to attempt to reduce the volume of papers that include AI slop. If a paper has 'incontrovertible evidence that the author
This article is the second installment in a series exploring Lakebase, Databricks' data management solution, providing behind-the-scenes insights into its architecture, capabilities, or integration wi
Amy Thomson / Bloomberg: Bill Ackman says his fund has taken a new stake in Microsoft after the company's recent share price decline; Ackman says investors have underestimated Microsoft — Bill Ackman
California's AB 1921 (Protect Our Games Act), introduced in February 2026, would require publishers to take responsibility for the long-term playability of online games. The bill passed a key hurdle o