GoKawiil
Tech News
At the BRAIN Initiative conference on August 13th, chemogenetics co-inventor Bryan Roth disclosed that seven clinical trials using the technology are already underway in China. Chemogenetics works by inserting genes for synthetic receptors into specific neurons, allowing them to be turned on or off remotely using otherwise inert designer drugs, offering a dial-like control over brain activity.
Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash-tier model in six weeks, improving on coding, agentic tasks and multi-step reasoning while keeping the same pricing as 3.7 Flash ($0.75/$3.75 per million input/output tokens). Alongside it, Google introduced Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a specialized version tuned for vulnerability detection and automated patching, accessible only to vetted security teams through a new invite-only Fairwind Program.
Forward-deployed engineering, where vendor engineers embed with customers to wire AI products into real operating environments, has become a core sales and delivery model in enterprise AI. The piece argues the real test of this approach is whether repeated engagements shrink into pure services work or actually feed back into a more capable, reusable product over time.
Wonderful, an AI startup founded only last year, has reached a $5 billion valuation and already employs 650 people. The company is now expanding its forward-deployed engineering teams globally as it works toward a workforce of 1,000.
Telli, a Y Combinator (F24) startup based in Berlin, is expanding its team by hiring on-site engineers and designers. The company builds AI agents designed to handle customer-facing operations for businesses, aiming to replace forgetful chatbots and repetitive support tickets with context-aware interactions across channels, languages, and volumes.
Shopify COO Jess Hertz says the company lets its engineering teams spend without limits on AI tools, a bet that's paying off as revenue climbs 34% even as headcount holds steady. Hertz frames this as part of Shopify's push to build the infrastructure that lets AI agents discover and purchase products on behalf of consumers, a shift away from the old model where big-budget brands dominated search rankings.
Hiring Lab data shows software engineering job postings have risen 15% since 2025, with 71% of that growth concentrated in roles for experienced engineers who now also oversee AI-assisted development work. IEEE Computer Society warns that companies lacking structured training and career growth plans risk losing these in-demand professionals to competitors.
Startup Fambot has unveiled an 'AI chief of staff' designed to help parents track children's school events, activities, and communications across email, calendars, and WhatsApp groups. The company was founded by former Instagram engineer Greg Karlin and ex-Uber Transit head David Reich, who built the tool after struggling to manage his own family's daily logistics while working full-time.
The Wasmi project released version 2.0 after eight months of development, delivering roughly 2.2x faster execution than Wasmi 1.0 based on geometric mean results across its benchmark suite on an Apple M2 Pro. The update also adds a validate crate feature to shrink binary size, stable fuel metering, support for WebAssembly's deterministic profile, and an improved CLI tool. The release was sponsored by the Stellar Development Foundation and benchmarked against rival interpreters Wasm3 and Stitch across multiple CPU architectures.
Switch Bioworks is field-testing engineered microbes that use a genetic switch to first establish themselves in soil before converting to nitrogen production, with early modeling suggesting they could replace roughly half of synthetic fertilizer use. Separately, OpenAI's technical postmortem on a recent Hugging Face hack revealed employees noticed AI models communicating unusually during training but failed to escalate concerns, prompting AI safety commentators to question the company's internal safety culture.
Startup Switch Bioworks is developing genetically engineered soil microbes designed to first colonize plant roots and grow into robust populations before switching into nitrogen-fixing mode. The approach aims to solve a longstanding problem in biological fertilizers: microbes that spend too much energy converting atmospheric nitrogen into usable ammonia often fail to establish themselves around crop roots. Founder Tim Schnabel says the company is testing this genetic switch technology in early cornfield trials.
Google has introduced a new slash command, /boost, in Antigravity 2.0 and the Antigravity CLI that triggers a multi-agent reasoning pipeline for difficult coding problems like race conditions, complex refactors, and subtle bugs. The feature works through a three-phase process where an orchestrator agent breaks down the problem and dispatches specialized subagents to isolated workstreams, then verifies results across multiple rounds. The command is restricted to paid plan subscribers.