Chronos

Survey: 28% of Americans use AI chatbots to get health information quickly, 25% to figure out symptom causes, and 22% to get health information at no cost (Pew Research Center)

Pew Research Center: Survey: 28% of Americans use AI chatbots to get health information quickly, 25% to figure out symptom causes, and 22% to get health information at no cost — Reasons include making diagnoses and learning more about lab results or treatments. Nearly all chatbot health users find this AI information helpful

A look at China's push to automate manufacturing, which employs 120 million people, amid a shrinking population and aging workforce, raising job loss concerns (Laura Bicker/BBC)

Laura Bicker / BBC: A look at China's push to automate manufacturing, which employs 120 million people, amid a shrinking population and aging workforce, raising job loss concerns — “I take a nap and the world changes,” says Chen Tianyu. — His world certainly does. The 28-year-old keeps up with the latest technology …

Source: Transport for London's delay in producing robotaxi guidance has frustrated some prospective operators, who play down the chances of starting this year (Financial Times)

Transport for London's delayed regulatory guidance on robotaxi operations is creating uncertainty for autonomous vehicle operators and pushing service launches beyond 2024, signaling that organizations should expect prolonged timelines for emerging mobility technology deployments. This regulatory slowdown demonstrates how policy gaps can impact technology adoption rates and market entry strategies, requiring IT leaders to build flexibility into their digital transformation roadmaps for emerging technologies. For organizations planning autonomous vehicle integrations or smart city initiatives, this underscores the importance of engaging with regulatory bodies early and preparing contingency plans for extended implementation timelines.

Intel reveals that Xeon 7, aimed at HPC and debuting in 2027, will support up to 256 cores and 22 chiplets, with 16 built on its bleeding-edge 18A-P process (Tobias Mann/The Register)

Intel's upcoming Xeon 7 processor (launching in 2027) will deliver unprecedented computational power with up to 256 cores across 22 chiplets, positioning the company to reclaim competitiveness in the high-performance computing market against AMD's recent advances. This represents a significant strategic bet on advanced process technology (18A-P), which carries execution risk but could offer substantial performance and efficiency gains for organizations running demanding workloads in AI, scientific computing, and data analytics. IT leaders managing HPC infrastructure should begin planning upgrade cycles and evaluating whether this timeline aligns with their roadmaps, as early adoption could provide competitive advantages in compute-intensive applications.

More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

Sources: YMTC, which seeks to raise $5B in an IPO, told investors in IPO prep meetings that it aims to become the largest NAND flash supplier by the end of 2027 (Financial Times)

Chinese chipmaker YMTC's $5B IPO signals aggressive expansion plans to become the world's largest NAND flash supplier by 2027, potentially disrupting global semiconductor supply chains currently dominated by Samsung and SK Hynix. This development carries significant implications for IT organizations' procurement strategies, storage costs, and geopolitical supply chain dependencies, while intensifying competition that could reshape data center economics and technology vendor relationships. Technology leaders must reassess their semiconductor sourcing strategies and prepare for potential supply chain shifts driven by China's growing dominance in critical memory components.

Digs, which is building AI software for residential construction, raised a $25.3M Series A led by building materials giant Builders FirstSource (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)

Digs, an AI software platform for residential construction, has secured $25.3M in Series A funding led by Builders FirstSource, signaling strong industry validation and potential market consolidation in construction tech. This investment highlights the growing strategic importance of AI-driven solutions in traditionally non-tech industries, suggesting that IT leaders must prepare their organizations for increased digitization and automation across the built environment sector. For technology organizations serving construction, this represents both competitive pressure and partnership opportunities as enterprise software increasingly becomes mission-critical infrastructure in this space.

India’s Ringg gets backing from Peak XV as it pushes voice AI past the phone call

Ringg, an India-based voice AI startup, secured $10 million in Series A extension funding to expand beyond simple phone automation into complex enterprise workflows like healthcare appointment booking, e-commerce cart recovery, and fintech KYC processes. The company is positioning itself as a multi-channel orchestration platform for autonomous agents rather than a voice-only solution, with plans to scale through partnerships with multinational Global Capability Centers in India. For IT leaders, this signals the maturation of voice AI from cost-reduction tools to strategic customer engagement platforms that can handle complex business outcomes across multiple communication channels.

Students prefer Gemini over ChatGPT and Claude for AI essays in blind tests

Apple renews push for expedited discovery in OpenAI trade secret misappropriation lawsuit

Apple is escalating its trade secret misappropriation lawsuit against OpenAI by pushing for expedited discovery, arguing that delayed access to evidence allows OpenAI to embed stolen information into hardware development, causing irreversible competitive damage. This litigation highlights critical IP protection risks for technology organizations when employees transition between companies and underscores the importance of robust trade secret safeguards and exit protocols. IT leaders must recognize that extended discovery timelines can enable ongoing misuse of proprietary assets, making rapid legal remedies a strategic business necessity in high-stakes IP disputes.

Agentic Context Management: Memory and Cost as Architecture Problems

Production AI agents fail primarily due to poor context management—accumulating conversation histories, prompts, and tool outputs that degrade performance and drive token costs up quadratically. The paper introduces Agentic Context Management (ACM) as an architectural discipline with five key primitives (architecting, ingesting, scoping, anticipating, and compacting) that can achieve linear cost scaling while preserving accuracy, fundamentally changing how enterprises must design and operate AI agent infrastructure. IT organizations must shift from treating agent memory as a simple storage problem to architecting it as a lifecycle management challenge across organizational scope, with significant implications for AI investment ROI and operational costs.

Sources: Meta and state AGs have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement of the social media addiction lawsuit, which is currently in its second week of trial (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg: Sources: Meta and state AGs have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement of the social media addiction lawsuit, which is currently in its second week of trial — Meta Platforms Inc. and state attorneys general have discussed a possible mid-trial settlement of a blockbuster case accusing …

Risky Business #850 -- Widespread AI-enabled attacks target Siemens PLCs

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by guest co-host Ollie Whitehouse, the CTO of the UK’s NCSC, to talk through the week’s news, including: Iranian hackers take down a small-scale power generator in the UK Siemens PLCs in critical US sectors are also being targeted… We’re stumped on who could be behind that one, too. Microsoft fixed a CVSS 10 deserialisation bug in Entra before someone else found it and owned the planet Prompt injection isn’t going away LLMs are deceivi

This is the $129 Garmin smartwatch to get

Perfect price with tons of features

AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, following an assessment; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to humans (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

AWS will discontinue Mechanical Turk by September 30, 2026, marking the end of a 21-year-old crowdsourcing platform that managed distributed human task execution. This shutdown signals AWS's strategic shift away from human-in-the-loop workflow services, requiring IT organizations to identify alternative solutions for any dependent processes and reassess their crowdsourcing strategies. Technology leaders should evaluate whether their operations rely on this service and plan migration strategies to competing platforms or internal automation solutions.

Robotics startup Generalist reaches $3B valuation, sources say

Generalist, a robotics startup founded by former Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics engineers, has reached a $3 billion valuation after raising $200 million in new funding, bringing its Series B round to $600 million total. The company is developing an AI foundation model that enables robots to learn new tasks from minimal video demonstrations (3-12 seconds), positioning robotics at a potential inflection point similar to generative AI's breakthrough moment. CIOs should prepare for significant operational disruption as this technology matures—enterprise automation capabilities could fundamentally reshape workforce planning, supply chain operations, and manufacturing processes within 18-36 months.

The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment

South Korean AI services platform Wrtn raised a ~$72.2M Series C at a $722M+ valuation, bringing its total funding to ~$166M (Joyce Lee/Reuters)

South Korean AI platform Wrtn Technologies secured $72.2M in Series C funding at a $722M+ valuation, demonstrating strong investor confidence in Asian AI services markets and the viability of AI-native productivity platforms. This funding milestone signals accelerating consolidation and maturation in the AI services space, with implications for IT leaders evaluating build-vs-buy decisions for AI capabilities and considering international partnerships. Organizations should monitor how well-funded regional AI platforms integrate with enterprise infrastructure and assess whether similar platforms in their markets pose competitive threats or partnership opportunities.

Queryable Executables

OpenAI loses a top data center exec, as stream of high-profile departures continues

OpenAI's departure of its head of data centers amid a broader wave of 13+ executive departures in 2026 signals potential instability in critical infrastructure leadership during a period of massive AI investment and the company's delayed IPO push. The loss of seasoned talent across infrastructure, product, revenue, and safety functions—combined with organizational restructuring and deferred public listing plans—raises questions about execution capability and organizational health that could impact competitive positioning in the high-stakes AI infrastructure race. CIOs and tech leaders should monitor whether similar talent attrition and infrastructure reorganization challenges emerge across their AI vendor relationships and partnerships.

CISA is running on empty.

Lawmakers request an investigation into cuts at CISA. Threat actors actively exploit a Zimbra Collaboration Suite vulnerability. A Chinese AI lab preps release of a powerful open-weight model. A new phishing toolkit deploys attacker-controlled passkeys. Using audio hardware to fingerprint browsers. A DDoS attack knocks Norwegian government services offline. CISA orders patching of a critical Oracle vulnerability. Taiwanese prosecutors charge nine people over the alleged illegal export of high-en

What the Top AI Users Are Doing Differently

The gap between average AI users and the most advanced has exploded from 2.6x to 8.3x in just months. NLW breaks down new OpenAI data showing how frontier firms are using agents to move beyond writing and research into execution, workflow automation, and systems-level work. In the headlines: Meta’s new agent, major AI price cuts, and Nvidia’s investment spree.Executive Agent Leadership - Returns in September -- Learn how to use agents - ⁠⁠⁠https://training.besuper.ai/⁠⁠⁠Free Webinar - Agentic Lo

Postgres at PlanetScale (Interview)

Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki "do-over" of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.

The New Economics of AI | Martin Casado & Steven Sinofsky

a16z General Partners Martin Casado and Erik Torenberg are joined by Board Partner Steven Sinofsky to explore what recent breakthroughs in AI and mathematics tell us about where the technology is headed, and whether some of the basic assumptions that have governed computing for decades are starting to break. Martin and Steven debate whether AI's progress in mathematics represents a genuine leap in reasoning or simply a new tool for solving problems at a higher level of abstraction. From the four

AI Proficiency: From Users to Builders

As AI continues to reshape how organizations work, companies are increasingly asking what AI proficiency should look like across their workforce, and how they can help employees adapt without simply mandating AI adoption. Our returning guest Mike Lewis, Chief AI Architect at TiER1 Performance, joins Dan and Chris to explore AI proficiency through the L0–L3 framework, with a particular focus on the role of non-technical builders. They discuss AI resistance, identifying the right people to build A

The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value

It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those gains do not seem to be transforming businesses at an organizational level. One of the most important questions in the tech industry today is understanding why AI is not yet delivering returns that match the investment, and what separates the small number of enterprises succeedin

The odds were classified.

Polymarket traders win big on U.S. military insider information. Slovakia deactivates speed cameras with Russian backdoors. TikTok pays $400 million to settle kids' privacy allegations. Hackers infect Android-based car systems with botnet malware. CISA orders quick patching of an actively exploited Zimbra Collaboration Suite vulnerability. SynkLoader malware is built for stealthy access to corporate networks. Dutch authorities fine Uber over $900 million over automated hiring practices. An ATM j

The AI Model Tier List

A viral AI model tier list reveals how much harder it has become to name the “best” model. This episode breaks down where today’s leading models belong, why cost and speed increasingly matter alongside intelligence, and how businesses are assembling model stacks that combine premium and open models. In the headlines: Hugging Face explores a sale, NVIDIA expands its open-model ambitions, and Dr. Dre embraces AI music.Executive Agent Leadership - Returns in September -- Learn how to use agents - ⁠

Why Medical AI Needs a Referee | Protege's Engy Ziedan

Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman are joined by Engy Ziedan, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Protege, to discuss why medical AI has a measurement problem, and why scoring well on a benchmark doesn't necessarily mean a model is ready for the hospital. Engy explains why healthcare AI needs independent evaluations that go beyond static exams and measure how models actually perform in real-world clinical workflows. They explore the risks of subtle bias and misalignment, why the same model can r

Simplify First, Scale AI Next with Vulcan Materials CIO Krzysztof Soltan

Better AI starts with better data, and for Vulcan Materials CIO Krzysztof Soltan that means simplifying first. In this episode of Technovation, Krzysztof Soltan joins Peter High to discuss how Vulcan Materials is modernizing its technology foundation across more than 400 aggregate operations. He explains why reducing system complexity, strengthening master data governance, and investing in talent are foundational to the company’s AI ambitions. The conversation also explores Vulcan’s multi-year d

NVIDIA's Pivot from Chipmaker to Financier

The Real Future of AI and Work

AI’s impact on work goes far beyond job losses. Drawing on Every’s new Thesis Statements project, NLW explores how AI could transform what individuals do, how companies operate, which skills become valuable and what becomes possible when intelligence is abundant.Thesis Statements: https://every.to/thesis-statementsExecutive Agent Leadership - Returns in September -- Learn how to use agents - ⁠https://training.besuper.ai/⁠Free Webinar - Agentic Loops for Knowledge Workers - 8/26/26 26pm ⁠https://

Building a secure space internet. [T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing]

As space infrastructure has continued to expand, developing secure space systems has become just as important as launching the spacecraft themselves. In this week's episode, host Maria Varmazis sits down with Filip Rezabek, co-founder and CTO of Space Computer, to talk about some of the technologies being created to secure space infrastructure in orbit. The two discuss the importance of establishing a chain of trust in space and the challenges of securing hardware against supply chain attacks. L

Martin Casado on Where the Value Is Going in AI

Martin Casado joins MTS hosts Theo Jaffee and Sophia Dew to unpack where value is actually accruing in AI, why this technology cycle looks fundamentally different from previous waves, and whether the frontier labs will ultimately capture most of the market. Martin explains why AI has turned venture into a scale-up capital game, where small teams can productively deploy extraordinary amounts of money, and why the relationship between capital, innovation, and growth has never been tighter. He lays

A RAT in the spreadsheet. [Research Saturday]

Today we are joined by Aaron Beardslee, Manager of Threat Research at Securonix, discussing "Analyzing SHEET#CREEP: SHEETCREEP is up again with different config obfuscation." Securonix researchers have identified an evolved version of the SHEETCREEP espionage campaign, using a diplomatic-themed ISO phishing lure to deliver a C# remote access trojan targeting Indian diplomatic interests. The malware abuses the Google Sheets API as a stealthy command-and-control channel, with researchers identifyi

Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll [video]

This appears to be a reference to Cliff Stoll's classic cybersecurity narrative from the 1980s about tracking an early computer hacker, which remains relevant for understanding foundational security principles and the evolving threat landscape over four decades. For modern IT leaders, Stoll's work underscores the importance of vigilant monitoring, forensic investigation capabilities, and the human element in cybersecurity—lessons that remain critical as organizations face increasingly sophisticated threats. The historical perspective provides valuable context for building institutional security cultures that balance automation with investigative rigor and emphasize the detective work required to identify and respond to breaches.

The guest nobody invited.

CISA orders patching of TrueConf Server vulnerabilities. LockBit threatens release of stolen banking data. Researchers disclose a critical type confusion vulnerability in a Node.js library. A new Agent Tesla v4 campaign introduces enhanced evasion techniques. A novel malware delivery technique abuses FTP server banners to hide commands. Apple patches a critical image-processing flaw. A North Korean software supply chain attack targets the Rust ecosystem. Latvian officials resign following a majo

Why Everyone Suddenly Hates AI Data Centers

Opposition to AI data centers has become one of America’s fastest-moving bipartisan political issues, driven by concerns about electricity, water, noise, property values, jobs, and a deeper mistrust of Big Tech. NLW provides an end-to-end primer on what data centers actually do, why public sentiment has turned so sharply, where the loudest claims fall apart, and how transparency, community control, and direct local benefits could offer a path forward.Executive Agent Leadership - Returns in Septe

How Microsoft Is Securing the Agentic Enterprise | Aaron Zollman

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Aaron Zollman, Deputy CISO at Microsoft Gaming, to discuss how security teams can embrace AI agents without losing control. Aaron shares Microsoft's experience with OpenClaw, from the initial instinct to ban it to figuring out how to make it safe to use. They unpack what agents mean for identity, permissions, containerization, and monitoring, as well as how AI is shifting the CISO's role from saying "no" to safely enabling new technology. They also explore wh

9 AI Techniques You Probably Haven't Tried

Even experienced AI users can fall behind as new features and working methods arrive. NLW breaks down nine techniques worth trying now—from live voice mode, workflow teaching, custom skills, and Claude’s /design command to team agents, GrokBot, local models, and deceptively useful two-word prompts. In the headlines: an AI-assisted personalized cancer vaccine clears a Phase III trial; OpenAI introduces private safety processing; and Replit launches Free Mode with GPT-5.6 Luna.Free Webinar - Agent