TECH NEWS
The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter — yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.
TECH NEWS
Every engineering leader has had this conversation at least once. A team is scoping a new performance engineering initiative, and someone floats the obvious first option: why not just use an open-source tool? It’s free to download, there’s a big community behind it, and the team already knows
TECH NEWS
It’s easy for dust and dirt to build up on a floor when you’ve got pets, toddlers and a husband who loves working in the yard. Before you know it, the floor has a layer of muck on it that makes it look like I’ve never cleaned
TECH NEWS
Artificial intelligence is moving deeper into enterprise infrastructure, bringing a broader risk horizon with it. As AI progresses from generating text in isolated environments toward initiating transactions, influencing decisions, and contributing to production code, the consequences of an error may extend across interconnected systems. Splunk’s 2026 research, released by
TECH NEWS
DeepSeek has open-sourced a set of programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend AI chips. They include a version of TileLang, a programming language DeepSeek offers as a simpler alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA. The Chinese AI lab announced the release on Wednesday in a post on its WeChat account. The
TECH NEWS
Meta tells the IRS that its AI data centres are an experiment that could fail, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. That lets Meta claim a research tax credit on the AI chips it buys. The credit cut almost $4bn off its tax bill last year. Kashmir Hill, Jesse
TECH NEWS
A final investment decision on Project Kilby, a huge gas-powered data centre in West Texas, could slip from the end of this year to 2027 because of state politics. Tim McDonnell reported the news for Semafor on Thursday. The project, near Pecos in the Permian Basin, will use about 2.
TECH NEWS
OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, have pulled out of a second $25m donation to Leading the Future, a super PAC that backs pro-AI candidates for Congress. Theodore Schleifer and Mike Isaac reported the move for The New York Times on Wednesday. Leading the Future had said the
TECH NEWS
AI could set off shocks in financial markets, and the UK has to be ready for them, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey told the BBC on Thursday. He said the Bank is watching the money flowing into AI “very carefully”. Mitchell Labiak and Faisal Islam of the BBC asked
TECH NEWS
McDonald’s is using an AI pricing engine to recommend what each of its nearly 14,000 restaurants should charge for every menu item, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The engine covers the US and some markets abroad. One factor the engine weighs is an estimate of how much each store’
TECH NEWS
In 2017, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever proposed auctioning the rights to the company’s future AGI to governments, including the US, China and Russia. Kevin Roose reports the plan in an excerpt from his book, published by The Atlantic on Tuesday. Dario Amodei opposed it. It was
TECH NEWS
I’ve watched engineers lose a week before an audit collecting screenshots no one will ever look at again. I’ve seen incident response plans that exist on paper but have never been tested, and vendor questionnaires completed once and filed away while the risk quietly changed underneath them. Security
