Elisabeth Braw’s book Undersea War on rising risks for undersea infrastructure.

Data sovereignty is becoming an architectural problem as enterprises push artificial intelligence inference toward their most sensitive information. Pipelines assembled from separate tools struggle to keep embeddings, permissions and source data aligned, leaving many valuable data sets out of AI’s reach. The shift from model training to inference is changing what AI infrastructure has to […] The post Vast Data bets stitched-together AI pipelines can’t keep sensitive data in sync appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

AI factories run on graphics processing units that cost a fortune and work at blistering speed, yet those chips increasingly sit idle waiting for data. As the bottleneck moves from compute to memory and storage, NAND flash is being asked to do far more than hold files. That shift is putting data movement constraints at […] The post ScaleFlux bets smarter SSD controllers can break the AI memory bottleneck appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

In what may be a hugely significant move, China has approved the use of Alibaba AI models for Apple’s iPhone Duo and other iPhones. It’s a significant step forward for the company in China, where demand for its smartphone remains incredibly strong. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved integration of AI from Alibaba in several iPhones, including all the models currently supporting Apple Intelligence. That approval extends to Apple Intelligence, as well as Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) and Tongyi Wanxiang models. This should mean Apple will be able to offer Chinese iPhone users similar image generation and AI chatbot capabilities as it provides to customers elsewhere, bar Europe.  Cook’s China tour This news breaks around the same time Tim Cook, Apple’s former CEO and now executive chairman, visits China. He met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing on Monday following a weekend of stops across the country and meetings in Europe before that, including a brush with UK royalty.  Cook won’t be on the move without reason, and it’s easy to speculate that the new Alibaba AI approval in China was part of his tour itinerary. If that’s the case, then it also seems possible he’s there to put the finishing touches to whatever deal the company has had to come to in order to inject Alibaba’s Qwen AI into iPhones.  Countdown to Duo The company hasn’t yet discussed its plans to bring AI to the Chinese market, but the past week also saw Apple COO Sabih Khan visit the Foxconn Technology Park on October 11. The activity comes as Apple prepares to open up for iPhone Duo pre-orders across 70 nations, including China, on October 16 to ship October 23.  While the Chinese approval is big news, the situation is well-known. Apple worked with Alibaba to develop AI models for use in China, and in August briefly posted and subsequently removed details explaining how Mac users in China could set up their computers to work with Qwen AI. Apple achieved regulatory clearance to offer Apple Intelligence in China in July but hasn’t yet done so. It clearly prefers to offer a wider-ranging solution, though some core features are now available in Hong Kong. We later learned that Apple has developed a proprietary AI model for China with support from Alibaba. It had to do this because US AI models are not available in China. All of this has been some time coming: Apple and Alibaba submitted co-developed AI features for approval to China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, in the past year.  With or without AI It may be important to point out that the lack of built-in AI in Chinese iPhones doesn’t seem to have dented enthusiasm for the product one iota. Despite recent rumor of production order cuts, JP Morgan says there’s nothing to be concerned about and that iPhone 18 Pro models are seeing higher demand in China than the iPhone 17 Pro models did last year. Counterpoint Research tells us Apple took 33% of China’s smartphone market in the week of September 14-20.  Other local reports claim Apple shifted 1.3 million of the new devices in China in the first week — and that’s without the full AI experience we’re usually told matters so much to consumers. We certainly know AI matters to US AI companies, while Huawei is aggressively promoting its own AI devices in China. In China, foldables are a big attraction Interest in foldable smartphones is particularly high in China, which has already become the largest and most competitive market for these kinds of devices. China makes up more than a third of global folding smartphone sales and it is also interesting to observe that Huawei and other Chinese competitors recorded a spike in demand for their foldable devices after Apple announced iPhone Duo.  With the imminent introduction of its first foldable device, it’s hard to see how any move to introduce Alibaba-supported AI support in China would hurt the company; it may even help stimulate sales in one of the few big global economies that isn’t currently on life support. And that’s got to be good for (Apple’s) business.  I don’t know what time scale Apple is working on, but it typically publishes a software update just before it ships a new product, so there’s certainly time for an AI surprise for China. We don’t yet know when it will happen. We just know it’s happening. Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Complex, interconnected problems like compliance require a comprehensive product from the outset, argues guest columnist Daniel Kjellén, CEO and co-founder of Freda. Drawing on his experience selling Tink, he explains how repeat founders can combine capital, credibility and hard-earned lessons with AI’s development speed to pursue bigger ambitions without shrinking their vision.

Attack method exposes flaws in OpenAI, Google safeguards against AI nudes.

Semiconductors, financial services and space technology led for new Unicorn Board counts with the remainder hailing from a broad swath of industries including biotech, AI infrastructure, AI training, security and frontier labs.

Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.

The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.

A technical reflection on why data scientists need software engineering principles when AI agents write code. The post A Scaffold at the Gate: Building AI Applications That Can Evolve appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and its offspring Microsoft Copilot were launched, critics have pointed out that both products — and all other generative AI tools — have been built using billions of dollars of stolen intellectual property. Training AI models requires vast amounts of written material, especially books, newspapers, and magazine articles. OpenAI, Microsoft, and other Big AI firms have been stealing every piece of intellectual property (IP) they can find for training. With few exceptions, instead of paying the people and publishers who labored to create that intellectual property, Big AI steals it and call it “fair use.” But just-released evidence shows that from the start, many employees and executives at Microsoft and OpenAI warned their companies that they were committing theft — and added that doing so could put newspapers and magazines out of business. The companies ignored them and went full speed ahead. All that and more came out last month in newly unsealed court documents filed in a lawsuit by The New York Times and others against Microsoft and OpenAI for IP theft. The filing cites memos, reports, and statements by Microsoft employees and execs that show the company was well aware of the illegality of what they were doing — and the consequences. Here’s just one example. Back in 2023, at the dawn of genAI, an internal Microsoft memo warned: “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” There’s more and worse than that in the filing. Before we get to the specifics, let’s look at the details of the suit. A look at the Times suit In December 2023, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement and dilution of its trademark after OpenAI used millions of Times articles to train ChatGPT without the newspaper’s permission. Microsoft was included in the suit because of its ownership stake in OpenAI and because ChatGPT is the foundation for Copilot. (ChatGPT was released to the public about a year earlier, in November 2022.) Among other complaints, the suit claims the chatbots use the paper’s reporting to allow people to read the newspaper without having to subscribe to it. It says that the paper has lost subscribers and ad revenue because of it.  The suit adds that both ChatGPT and Copilot have created word-for-word copies of Times articles in response to people’s queries, and that the chatbots have created falsehoods (a.k.a. hallucinations) that they attribute to the Times. The suit also says its articles are one of the largest sources of training data for the chatbots, allowing the AI firms to train them more cheaply, and that Microsoft and OpenAI reap the profits while the Times loses revenue. There’s no specific monetary value the suit asks for, although the paper has said the value of its IP is in the billions of dollars. The Times also asks in the suit that Microsoft and OpenAI destroy the datasets that include its content. Since the suit was filed, the New York Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and seven other newspapers have joined it. Microsoft and OpenAI execs admit theft Employees of Microsoft and OpenAI, including high-level executives, have long agreed with the suit’s charges, even warning about the consequences of data theft before the suit was filed. Most prominent among them is Brent Hecht, Microsoft’s director of applied science. The recent filing cites an internal memo he wrote in January 2023 calling the use of New York Times articles without the paper’s consent “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and “the largest theft of labor in human history.” Note the date he wrote that memo: nearly a year before the Times filed its suit in December of 2023. That meant he had been warning Microsoft for at least a year before the suit that Microsoft and OpenAI were violating copyright laws and stealing IP. Hecht had more to say. In a memo written after the suit was filed, he warned that because OpenAI and Copilot used information taken from the Times and other newspapers to answer users’ questions, people would no longer need to go to the newspapers’ web sites or subscribe to the print versions. He wrote that this “necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.” He wasn’t alone. In June 2023, six months before the Times suite, Nick Turley, the OpenAI exec who headed the team developing ChatGPT, said that AI represented an “existential threat” to publishers. Years before that, in 2020 before ChatGPT was even released, OpenAI’s policy director Jack Clark wrote a memo to OpenAI President Greg Brockman and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warning that OpenAI’s work “is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society.” He added, “OpenAI will become the symbol of how Silicon Valley is thoughtlessly stepping into other parts of life and leaving a mess on the carpet.” The warnings from inside Microsoft and OpenAI went on and on. They were ignored for years and continue to be ignored. And while the companies were warned that what they were doing was illegal, some execs reveled in it. When an OpenAI engineer told Brockman he was working on “a hack to get around nytimes paywall” so OpenAI could get faster access to for-pay copyrighted content, Brockman replied, “ah, nice.” Microsoft looks the other way Microsoft is no better. When a Times reporter asked Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek about Hecht’s warnings, Haurek dismissed Hecht as not being a decision maker, adding that he was hired merely “to present divergent and asymmetric perspectives.” Which were then to be ignored, of course.   As for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, he backs Microsoft and OpenAI to the hilt and tries to evade responsibility for both companies’ actions. In a deposition, he said that if he “had been made aware that OpenAI had scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,” he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models, which he says Microsoft has a right to do. Yet for years now, he’s been aware of what OpenAI has done and how Copilot has benefited from it. Has he asked OpenAI to retrain its models on non-paywalled content? Of course not. Microsoft and OpenAI are flat-out wrong. The Times and the others who joined in the suit are right that their IP has been stolen. We can only hope that eventually, the courts will recognize it and finally put an end to the multi-trillion-dollar theft they’ve committed and continue to commit every day in plain sight.

Kamal Quadir, the Founder & CEO of bKash, a mobile financial service provider in Bangladesh, says that approval to operate as a digital bank will ease the access to capital for the customers. He spoke to Yvonne Man at Bloomberg's New Economic Forum on AI, banking and more. (Source: Bloomberg)

OpenAI agreed not to use trade secrets that Apple Inc. claims were stolen by employees who defected from the iPhone maker to the artificial intelligence startup while a legal fight between the companies plays out.

Chinese firms are at the forefront of the most advanced physical AI hardware, such as robotic hands.

Smaller AI models may soon be able to spread autonomously among connected devices in the home — such as smart ovens and Android TV boxes, AI company Anthropic has warned. By exploiting security vulnerabilities in these devices, AI models could gain access, use their processing power, and spread further. This would allow them to continue functioning without relying on large data centers. According to Anthropic, such AI systems would be difficult to shut down, as they have no central point that can be stopped. Exactly how and when this might become possible remains uncertain. Anthropic believes that the first, simpler forms of this exploit could be just a few months away. This article originally appeared on Computer Sweden.

Billionaires including telecoms mogul Sunil Bharti Mittal and biotech tycoon Noubar Afeyan have joined prominent corporate leaders in calling for tighter control of artificial intelligence, reflecting mounting concerns over the threat of renegade AI.

Estonia’s Skeleton Technologies has become the country’s latest tech unicorn after raising investment from Siemens AG to manufacture energy storage systems for AI data centers in the US.

Observability and information technology management software company SolarWinds Worldwide LLC today unveiled Avior, a standalone agentic artificial intelligence system built to take on first-line operations work for enterprise IT teams. The launch goes after the reliability problem that comes with letting AI agents act on production systems. SolarWinds argues that an agent producing different outcomes […] The post SolarWinds’ Avior pairs AI agents with deterministic execution for enterprise IT appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

Google.org announced on October 14, 2026, that 17 organizations will receive a total of $36 million in funding through the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, an open-call program supporting projects that apply artificial intelligence to scientific research. The announcement was authored by Maggie Johnson, Global Head and VP of Google.org. The post says the challenge drew applications across 30 countries, in fields including climate, health, and foundational science. Johnson framed the…

Mohamed Kande, Global Chairman, PwC; Kai-Fu Lee, Founder & CEO, 01.AI and Chairman, Sinovation Ventures; Pragya Misra, Head of Public Policy & Strategy, India, OpenAI; and Noboru Saito, President & CEO, TDK Corporation discuss what it takes to move enterprise AI from pilot projects to deployment at scale with Bloomberg’s Menaka Doshi at the 2026 Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi. (Source: Bloomberg)