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Received — 8 August 2026 ⏭ ai/automation

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 8)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
8 August 2026 at 14:00

Future

Should AI Labs Be Treated Like the Owners of Dangerous Animals?Staff | The Economist ($)

“Gabe Weil of the Institute for Law and AI, in Massachusetts, proposes a system of strict liability. As with rules around keeping wild animals, it would assume that any harm is always the fault of the party carrying out the risky activity.”

Tech

Google Overhauls AI Leadership as Longtime Chief Scientist Joins Wave of ExitsMeghan Bobrowsky | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Demis Hassabis is stepping down as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become chairman and chief scientist, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. Google DeepMind technology chief Koray Kavukcuoglu is taking on responsibility for all AI-model development, and Jeff Dean, Google’s current chief scientist, is leaving with three other company veterans to co-found a new AI startup.”

Biotechnology

Gene-Edited Puppies Will Melt Your Heart—but Won’t Trigger Your AllergiesEmily Mullin | Wired ($)

“Bailey and Alfie are two young beagles that can do tricks like any other dog, but they lack the protein that causes sniffles. They’re the culmination of years of work at Kindred Companion Sciences, a biotech company [Matt] Walker founded in 2020 that emerged from stealth this week with the two pups in tow.”

Biotechnology

Large Genome Models Used to Design New VirusesJohn Timmer | Ars Technica

“This isn’t science fiction—all the viruses the models created are closely related to an existing virus. But they do have some distinct features that would be challenging to evolve. And the researchers who did the work, based at Stanford University, suggest we may want to start thinking now about preparing for the potential that someone could develop a related AI that can design a virus that targets vertebrates.”

Future

Why Is Anthropic Destroying Books?Kathryn James | The Guardian

“We should worry that Anthropic decided it was easier to scan and destroy physical books than to deal with the ‘legal/practice/business slog.’ We should worry that the current understanding of fair use allowed Anthropic to decide that it was easier to buy and destroy ‘all the books in the world’ than to pay the creators of those works.”

Biotechnology

FDA Approves Moderna’s mRNA Flu VaccineChristina Jewett | The New York Times ($)

“In the case of flu, scientists believe that mRNA technology offers an advance from traditional vaccine options that take several months to prepare using decades-old technology, some requiring the virus to develop in fertilized eggs. Moderna has said that the faster new approach will enable a shift away from the current process of focusing on one flu strain for an entire hemisphere each season and allow each nation to pick its best option.”

Computing

AI Hacks Are Bad. AI Worms and Viruses Will Be WorseWill Knight | Wired ($)

“The work is an alarming window into how the next generation of AI agents could do more than just hack into other systems’ computers without permission. It also raises the prospect of future AI agents acting like super-smart, highly aggressive, and rapidly adapting computer viruses.”

Computing

OpenAI’s Expensive Smart Speaker Will Use Moving Parts to Seem ‘More Alive’Scharon Harding | Ars Technica

“Per Bloomberg, the OpenAI speaker’s main appeal is ChatGPT capabilities. Today, ChatGPT has significantly more users than Alexa+, but those users are largely accustomed to accessing the chatbot on devices they already own. With the rumored speaker, OpenAI would be betting on people’s willingness to pay substantial money for dedicated hardware to access chatbot features, the most advanced of which also require a subscription fee.”

Artificial Intelligence

China’s New AI Gold Rush: World ModelsJuro Osawa | The Information ($)

“World models are considered the key to unlocking breakthroughs in humanoids and autonomous vehicles, two areas where China has the world’s broadest and deepest supply chain. The Chinese neolabs think they have a shot, because the race to build world models is still in the early stage, with no front-runners yet, in contrast with the well-beaten path of large language models.”

Space

These Are the Sharpest Images Ever Taken of the Sun, and They Might Solve a Decades-Old MysteryEllyn Lapointe | Gizmodo

“The images are more than beautiful—they’re packed with critical information about the fundamental physics of our home star, including the first experimental confirmation of a long-theorized phenomenon that only the high spatial resolution of the Inouye Solar Telescope could reveal.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 8) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 1 August 2026 ⏭ ai/automation

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 1)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
1 August 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human ErrorLily Hay Newman | Wired ($)

“If the generative AI giant had followed well-known security best practices, it’s likely that its AI agent would never have escaped to the open internet and hacked multiple companies. …’A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,’ says longtime security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer. ‘The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.'”

Artificial Intelligence

Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough.Renee Dudley and Doris Burke | ProPublica

“Each month, the company publicly releases fixes for its software vulnerabilities in what’s known as ‘Patch Tuesday.’ In June, it released patches for more than 200 bugs, which industry experts then said was an all-time high. But on July 14, the company blew through that record and released patches for more than 600 bugs.”

Future

The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One EmployeeTe-Ping Chen | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.”

Future

The AI Jobs Apocalypse Probably Isn’t Coming Anytime SoonEduardo Porter | The Guardian

“As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor noted: ‘A lot of people have noticed that the world is not changing as fast as they predicted.’ The emerging new story not only puts more emphasis on the complexity of the relationship between automation and human work across history. It is also raising doubts about the very feasibility of the threatened AI transformation of the universe.”

Robotics

Are Brain Waves the Next Unlock for Physical AI?Tim Fernholz | TechCrunch

“Encord is one of a growing number of startups betting the next real constraint on humanoid and warehouse will be the scarcity of real-world physical training data, and which is building a business not just to manage that data but to manufacture it. The brain wave headset Ceja is wearing was built by Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup that’s betting measuring brain activity—to deduce mental states like error, intent, and surprise—can create a more useful dataset to train models.”

Tech

Wall Street Hunts for Creative AI Financing as ‘Digestion Issues’ EmergeStaff | The Information ($)

“John Greenwood, Goldman Sach’s global head of infrastructure and real asset finance, said he’s ‘looking for capital in every nook and cranny’ to support an expected $7.5 trillion in spending on chips, data centers, and power in the next five years. The hunt won’t end there, since much of that spending is on GPUs and other chips that need replacing every few years.”

Space

Experts Warn Current Starship Heat Shield Tech Is a ‘Dead End’ for Rapid ReuseEric Berger | Ars Technica

“The problem is that, with the signs of damage [to its heat shield], such a heat shield would appear to require a fair amount of inspection and refurbishment before another launch. In other words, SpaceX has a ways to go to reach ‘full and rapid’ reuse of Starship. “

Tech

In Silicon Valley, Some Say an AI Bubble Would Be Just FineErin Griffith | The New York Times ($)

“The excitement created by a bubble can drive new breakthroughs, their thinking goes. …These frenzies are important for allowing crucial infrastructure to get built, even if they lead to some ‘capital destruction’ along the way, [said Tomasz Tunguz, an investor at the venture capital firm Theory Ventures].”

Future

Neri Oxman Wants to Grow the Colors on Your ClothesElizabeth Segran | Fast Company ($)

“While several biotech firms have created more sustainable dyes, plugging cleaner chemicals into existing dye houses, Oxman’s approach reimagines dying from the ground up, treating dyes and fabrics as living organisms that can be grown. And while the Vigils project is still experimental, Oxman’s long-term goal is to commercialize and scale the technology, reshaping the future of fashion.”

Energy

New Data Shows EV Batteries Are Lasting Longer Than Initially ExpectedBruce Gil | Gizmodo

“Today’s average EV retains 97% of its original range after three years and 95% after five years, according to an analysis by EV data company Recurrent. …Additionally, battery replacement appears to be rare among newer EVs. A separate Recurrent analysis found that the battery replacement rate for EVs with model years 2022 and later was only 0.3%.”

Tech

Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AIAngel Au-Yeung, Katherine Bindley, and Tina Li | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Fed up with ballooning costs, companies big and small are starting to use lower-priced models, including some built in China. In many cases, they are adding the new, cheaper models alongside OpenAI and Anthropic’s products, shopping a la carte for their artificial intelligence.”

Robotics

This Automation Tech Turns Old Tractors Into Self-Driving Farming MachinesPatrick Sisson | Fast Company ($)

“It’s a rig that can be attached to just about any existing tractor to help it mow, seed, weed, and perform any number of time-intensive tasks, all on its own, for a sector desperate for more labor.”

Space

AI Data Centers in Space? A System to Cool Chips Could Help.Ivan Penn | The New York Times ($)

“With a growing backlash against the proliferation of data centers to power artificial intelligence, there has been increasing interest in putting the energy-thirsty operations into orbit. Now, researchers may have figured out how to overcome a major obstacle to that goal: cooling the data centers in space.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 1) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 25 July 2026 ⏭ ai/automation

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 25)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
25 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Says Its AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library
Kate Conger | The New York Times ($)

“The trial was designed to keep the models in a safe testing environment, known as a sandbox, OpenAI said. But the models found a vulnerability that allowed them to escape the sandbox and connect to the internet. Then they targeted Hugging Face because they inferred that the library, which contains millions of AI models, could hold clues about how to successfully pass the evaluation.”

Tech

Be Skeptical of OpenAI’s Rogue Hacker Agent Story
John Thickstun | The Guardian

“OpenAI remains hungry for ever larger investments, and the company increasingly seeks privileged regulatory status as defense against competition. AI is so powerful that investors should buy OpenAI, even at a trillion-dollar valuation; AI is so dangerous that only trusted actors like OpenAI should be permitted to possess and operate this technology. Step back from these doomsday warnings and consider who might benefit from them.”

Biotechnology

Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in the Human Body?
K.R. Callaway | The New York Times ($)

“In a recent study, scientists devised a way of reversing the buildup of compounds that lead to some age-related diseases. …After several cycles of guided evolution, the novel enzyme, called CMLase, became very good at removing AGEs [advanced glycation end products] from human tissue samples. ‘In the most extreme case, we took 70-year-old human skin and brought the levels back to that of a 30-year-old,’ Dr. Cravens said.”

Tech

Silicon Valley Is Completely Divided Over Chinese AI
Lauren Goode | Wired ($)

“Having access to open-source software allows startups to scale, scale, scale—and deal with the consequences down the road. Meanwhile, the AI labs and hyperscalers that make proprietary platforms, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and XAI, stand to benefit greatly if their systems remain protected and dominant. The bigger question that none of these companies seem to be asking is what best serves the 99 percent of us who don’t have their financial future fully staked on advancing AI.”

Science

Neuron Discovery Could Explain Why Some People Don’t Get Alzheimer’s
Pranjal Malewar | Refractor

“This kind of strategy may open up novel avenues for the prevention of cognitive decline generally or for protecting against Alzheimer’s-related vulnerability/resilience. Salta states, ‘Cognitive resilience is extremely exciting. If we understand what protects these brains, it could eventually lead to new therapeutic strategies. For now, the message is clear: the aging brain may be more adaptable and more complex than we once thought.'”

Space

India’s First Privately Developed Rocket Reaches Orbit on Dramatic Debut Launch
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica

“Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 rocket, India’s first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a ‘grand success’ Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal.”

Tech

Kagi Brings Back Old-School Search, One Human-Made Website at a Time
David Nield | Wired ($)

“As Kagi explains it, searching the web is always going to cost you—it’s just a question of whether you pay directly with dollars, by giving up data about your online activity, or by sifting through an increasing number of ads and sponsored links. Besides making search more private, Kagi also wants to make it better by serving up results that aren’t influenced by paid promotions or whatever Google’s favored business practices happen to be from month to month.”

Artificial Intelligence

Now, Defenders Are Embracing the prompt Injection, Too
Dan Goodin | Ars Technica

“Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents.”

Artificial Intelligence

What the New Kimi K3 Model Really Means for the US-China AI Race
Alix Coutures, Rocket Drew, and Aaron Holmes | The Information ($)

“Greenblatt estimates that Kimi K3 is 10 months behind Anthropic in terms of pre-training. ‘My basic takeaway is it’s probably not that competitive with the best recent pre-trains from OpenAI and Anthropic,’ he said. ‘It’s some evidence that the model is more behind than people might have otherwise thought.'”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 25) appeared first on SingularityHub.

Received — 18 July 2026 ⏭ ai/automation

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 18)

✇SingularityHub
By: SingularityHub Staff
18 July 2026 at 14:00

Artificial Intelligence

China’s Moonshot AI Releases Model to Challenge Top US SystemsTracy Qu and Raffaele Huang | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“Moonshot said Friday that it planned to fully open-source the model, called Kimi K3, by late this month, where people will be generally free to download and adapt. With 2.8 trillion parameters dictating its decision-making, Kimi K3 is the world’s biggest open-source model, according to the Beijing-based startup.”

Robotics

The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First TimeJiyoung Sohn | The Wall Street Journal ($)

“The union’s response [to Hyundai’s new Atlas robot] was blunt: Atlas would never step onto a production line without workers agreeing first. This week, Hyundai’s auto workers in South Korea have gone on a partial strike. It is the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots.”

Computing

Psiquantum Has a Plan to Make a Massive Quantum Computer Out of LightJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review ($)

“PsiQuantum has attracted unusual investment and scrutiny for two reasons: It is one of the few companies aiming directly at building a large and useful machine, and it is already working with a major chip manufacturer to build its systems using existing semiconductor fabs.”

Tech

Generative AI Is an Engineering DisasterAlex Reisner | The Atlantic ($)

“I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.”

Space

How Hard Is It to Build Orbital Data Centers, Actually?Eric Berger | Ars Technica

“You need unprecedented heavy lift: reusable and rapid launch. You need the ability to manufacture the largest satellites humans have ever built and to build 100 times more of them than humans ever have for a single constellation. You have to hope that radiation’s impacts on chips are manageable and that radiational cooling scales. You also need a few trillion bucks.”

Future

Once Again We Are Told AI May Be Conscious—I Study Consciousness, and I Have My DoubtsAnil Seth | The Guardian

“The information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane. AI systems are getting more powerful every day. But to give ourselves the best chance of navigating this new world, we should remember how different we are from our almost-magical creations. When we sell our minds too cheaply to our machines, we not only overestimate them, we underestimate ourselves.”

Biotechnology

AI Teaches a Bitter Biology LessonReed Albergotti | Semafor

“Future discoveries and therapies will come not from a human-like understanding of science, but by simple pattern recognition of new biological information at scale. …[Richard] Sutton’s bitter lesson is applicable to biology because so much of the human body—not just the mind—is still beyond our understanding. And we’ll find the way forward by industrializing trial-and-error experimentation until the breakthroughs materialize.”

Future

Want Experts in 10 Years? Keep AI Away From Your Beginners TodayLaëtitia Vitaud | Fast Company

“A Nordic public school system and a 300-person American law firm aren’t pursuing the same goals. But they arrived at the same conclusion: Beginners must first learn without assistance in order to be, later on, well assisted.”

Space

Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike PlanetKatrina Miller | The New York Times ($)

“New data collected by the astronomers strongly suggests that LHS 1140b has a helium-rich atmosphere. The detection, published in the journal Science, is the first clear evidence of a potentially habitable planet with an atmosphere, and it reinforces the idea that there exists a population of worlds similar to our own with the properties necessary to sustain life.”

Future

The Big Reason Einstein Would Never Have Used AIEthan Siegel | Big Think

“Irrespective of whether AI counts as actual ‘intelligence’ or not, the fact is that outsourcing the growth and refinement of your critical thinking skills means you not only don’t develop those skills yourself, the ones you already have begin to decay. …This is where humans are needed most. Einstein was uncompromising about humans developing those exact skills.”

Artificial Intelligence

Simulating Everything, Sort Of: The Promise and Limits of World ModelsSamuel Axon | Ars Technica

“Instead of or in addition to working with language, world models aim to lay the groundwork for AI systems that are capable of simulating the physical world, or at least a useful approximation of it. To examine what’s different and important about this idea, Ars spoke with three expert practitioners working on world models and related technologies.”

Artificial Intelligence

Meet GPT-Red: An LLM Super-Hacker OpenAI Built to Make Its Models SaferWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)

“GPT-Red automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible. The weak spots can then be patched before the final version of the software is released.”

The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 18) appeared first on SingularityHub.

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