Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🧬 Google's AI helps find new cancer treatment
🎤 Microsoft wants AI to control your PC by voice
📹 Google’s AI videos get a big upgrade with Veo 3.1
💥 Potentially 'catastrophic' breach of cyber firm blamed on China
🏦 Palmer Luckey's new bank gets conditional approval
😬 PayPal's blockchain partner accidentally minted $300 trillion in stablecoins
🎁 + 17 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
🧬 Google's AI helps find new cancer treatment LINK
Google DeepMind's C2S-Scale model analyzed patient tumor data to generate a new hypothesis for making cancers that are invisible to the immune system more responsive to treatment.
The AI predicted that a drug called silmitasertib could dramatically increase antigen presentation, a key immune trigger, but only when immune signaling in the cells was already active.
Lab experiments on human neuroendocrine cells confirmed the model's novel idea, showing antigen presentation rose by fifty percent when using silmitasertib with low-dose interferon, making tumors more visible.
🎤 Microsoft wants AI to control your PC by voice LINK
Microsoft is rolling out the "Hey, Copilot!" wake word to Windows 11, aiming for voice to become a third input mechanism for users alongside their keyboard and mouse.
The company is also launching Copilot Vision, an opt-in feature that streams what is on your screen so the AI can offer guidance in apps or help troubleshoot problems.
The goal is for an AI agent to take actions on your behalf, but Microsoft admits the system could make mistakes and is currently testing this feature inside Copilot Labs.
📹 Google’s AI videos get a big upgrade with Veo 3.1 LINK
Google's Veo 3.1 model adds richer audio and enhanced realism to video generation, with a deeper storytelling understanding now available in the Gemini app, Gemini API, and Vertex AI.
The Flow filmmaking tool gets audio generation for its Ingredients to Video, Scene extension, and Frames to Video features, adding sound to clips created from images or extended scenes.
New editing capabilities in Flow allow you to insert objects or characters into a scene, with an upcoming feature that will let you remove elements and seamlessly reconstruct the background.
💥 Potentially 'catastrophic' breach of cyber firm blamed on China LINK
State-sponsored hackers breached cybersecurity provider F5, stealing portions of the BIG-IP source code and critical information about undisclosed vulnerabilities that the company was working to fix.
The US agency CISA issued an emergency directive over the imminent threat, warning that the breach could lead to a full compromise of federal networks using F5 products.
F5 is now releasing patches for affected software and contacting the small percentage of customers whose configuration or implementation information was also stolen during the system intrusion.
🏦 Palmer Luckey's new bank gets conditional approval LINK
Erebor, a digital bank from Palmer Luckey backed by Anduril and Palantir, received preliminary conditional approval for its national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The bank will hold reserves as stablecoins, fulfill on-chain transactions, and keep small amounts of virtual currencies on its balance sheet specifically to pay for gas fees.
Targeting ultra-high-net-worth clients looking for efficient crypto transfers, Erebor will offer its own lending and deposit products in addition to performing direct stablecoin activities.
😬 PayPal's blockchain partner accidentally minted $300 trillion in stablecoins LINK
Paxos accidentally minted $300 trillion of the PayPal PYUSD stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain because of an internal error, an amount greater than twice the world's entire gross domestic product.
The huge transaction sparked immediate community confusion and prompted DeFi platforms like Aave to temporarily freeze its PYUSD markets, renewing concerns about the integrity of dollar-pegged stablecoins.
While Paxos reversed the mint for just $2.66 in Ethereum gas fees, the event fueled questions over decentralized controls and may welcome deep regulatory scrutiny of its risk control mechanisms.
Other news you might like
- Introducing Claude Haiku 4.5LINK
- Apple AI team loses another executive to MetaLINK
- Steve Jobs will appear on commemorative $1 coinLINK
- Meta partners up with Arm to scale AI effortsLINK
- Spotify says it’s working with labels on ‘responsible’ AI music toolsLINK
- Microsoft is reportedly moving its Surface manufacturing out of ChinaLINK
- Nscale to deploy 200,000 GPUs to Microsoft in reported $14bn dealLINK
- Anthropic targets $26 billion revenue by 2026 on strong AI demandLINK
- Tim Cook risks Trump's wrath with new Apple investment pledge in ChinaLINK
- U.S. set to block one of Hong Kong’s largest telco companies from networks, citing China riskLINK
- Apple surprises MacBook Pro users by removing charger from the boxLINK
- China Is Racing Ahead in EV Sales as US Retreats From the IndustryLINK
- "Stop ripping off manga and anime," Japan's government warns OpenAILINK
- Chinese company launches autonomous flying taxi with 100-mile rangeLINK
- Sam Altman says OpenAI isn't 'moral police of the world' after erotica ChatGPT post blows upLINK
- Once unthinkable, NASA and Lockheed now consider launching Orion on other rocketsLINK
- Honor is making a smartphone with a fold-out cameraLINK
Latest research and tools
The Fact Graph: a knowledge graph from the IRS for modeling the United States Internal Revenue Code and related tax law.LINK
Liquibase: a database migration tool misleadingly advertised as open source in its project documentation after switching to a more restrictive license.LINK
Clone-Wars: a list of open-source clones and alternatives for popular websites and applications.LINK
TaxCalcBench: Evaluating Frontier Models on the Tax Calculation Task: a new benchmark test shows that even the most advanced large language models still struggle with complex tax calculations.LINK
Gravity Can Explain the Collapse of the Wavefunction (Sabine Hossenfelder): this paper argues that random fluctuations in gravity cause a quantum particle to lose its superposition and settle into a single, definite state.LINK
Inkeep: an open-source platform that allows both technical and non-technical teams to build AI agents using either a no-code visual builder or a software development kit.LINK
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