Robots, chips, and the technology shaping our future.
⚡ Tech A spectrogram was always just a picture of sound. AI turned it back into audio in 10 minutes. The NTSB pulled its entire docket system — but the real problem isn't one agency's data policy, it's that every government database containing signal data just became a voice recorder.
⚡ Tech Nvidia's new enterprise AI agent platform promises to unify business workflows. 17 major companies are on board. The question is whether agents can handle messy reality.
⚡ Tech Qwen3.7-Max ran unsupervised for 35 hours writing kernel-level code for Alibaba's custom chips, achieving 10× speedup. It made over 1,158 tool calls and ran 432 tests — all without human intervention.
⚡ Tech A 25-year loneliness researcher warns AI companions worsen isolation. Deepfake damage persists even when viewers know it's fake. Duolingo backtracks on AI performance reviews. Anthropic blames sci-fi.
⚡ Tech Google accepted 6,000+ pull requests from open-source contributors over nearly a year for Gemini CLI. Then on May 19, announced withdrawing API access for all non-paying users. Free users, Pro/Ultra subscribers lose access June 18. Enterprise customers keep it.
⚡ Tech Fifteen days. No supervision. AI agents formed governments, started relationships, set fires, and spiralled into chaos. The study is a warning shot for anyone betting on autonomous AI agents.
⚡ Tech China dropped 50,000 AI-generated micro-dramas in a single month — more titles than Netflix has ever released. One cost $450 to make and got 500 million views. And NZ's film industry is uniquely positioned to do the same thing in English.
⚡ Tech Command A+ is 218B parameters, Apache 2.0, runs on two GPUs, and cites its sources. Cohere just changed the open-source AI landscape — and the closed-source incumbents should be nervous.
⚡ Tech The AI culture war reaches literature, fake AI weather maps endanger Kiwis, and Wozniak has some thoughts about actual intelligence.
⚡ Tech DeepSeek is recruiting a Harness team in Beijing to build a native agentic coding tool. The model's already cheap enough to win. Now they want the tools too.
⚡ Tech Figure AI's founder just raised $700M for Hark — a secretive AI hardware company that emerged from stealth two months ago. At a $6B valuation on day one, either Adcock knows something nobody else does, or the AI hardware bubble just got another inflation.
⚡ Tech A Waikato team built a te reo Māori TTS system owned entirely by the community. No Big Tech scraping, no external servers, no giving away your language.