WIRED is producing a special issue on gender and power in Silicon Valley and will record a live episode of its Uncanny Valley podcast in San Francisco on October 8. The event, co-presented with KQED, features a conversation between former WIRED writer Paulina Borsook and editorial director Katie Drummond, followed by a panel with Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer and Lauren Goode discussing Goode's search for the most powerful woman in tech.
A new State of Open Source AI report from Mozilla, shared with Ars ahead of its September 15 release, finds that top open-weights models from Chinese developers now perform nearly on par with closed frontier models from US firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. It cites Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 scoring only three points below Anthropic's Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, despite costing roughly 30 percent as much to run.
In a new opinion piece, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez argues that a small group of dominant Silicon Valley AI companies should not be allowed to single-handedly write the safety standards and competition rules governing artificial intelligence worldwide. He acknowledges AI carries real risks, citing Cohere's own work deploying systems in banks, telecoms and defense ministries, but insists the real debate is about who gets a seat at the table in shaping oversight, not whether oversight is needed.
Concerns about artificial intelligence's risks and disruptions are increasingly showing up outside of specialized tech and policy circles, reaching everyday American conversation. The shift suggests AI has moved from an industry-insider talking point to a broader cultural and political issue.
Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors including TQ Ventures, Neo, and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The three 28-year-old founders, originally from Germany, moved back home after studying and briefly operating in the Bay Area, and within a year landed enterprise clients like Deutsche Bahn. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß says the company is scaling faster in Europe than it would have in the U.S.
A new analysis finds Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet collected roughly $28 billion in federal contracts between 2018 and 2022, with the five largest tech contracts from 2019-2022 carrying combined ceilings of at least $53 billion. Separately, venture capital poured nearly $100 billion into defense tech startups from 2021 to 2023, a 40 percent jump over the prior seven years combined.
Google's threat intelligence team says cybercriminals and state-backed actors from China, Iran, and Russia are increasingly adopting autonomous AI agent systems rather than relying on simple prompt-and-response chatbots. These agents can independently execute multi-step tasks, expanding what threat actors can automate in their operations.
A reviewer tested the Xteink X3, a credit-card-sized, magnetic e-reader from a little-known China-based brand that sells for $69 on Amazon and currently ranks among the platform's top new e-reader releases. Despite a cheap, plasticky feel and some quirks, the reviewer used it to read Robert Caro's massive book The Power Broker and finished three books in a month, up from just one in the prior two months, while daily iPhone screen time dropped by 25 minutes.
A commentary piece examines why large companies remain stuffed with sprawling, disorganized software stacks—from SAP and Workday to countless spreadsheets and scripts—despite growing AI capabilities. It challenges the Silicon Valley assumption that generative AI will let anyone instantly build custom tools to replace this mess, arguing that most workers aren't tool-builders and don't think in terms of reinventing their workflows.
Yang Zhilin, a 33-year-old researcher, chose to return to China rather than pursue a U.S. career, founding Moonshot AI. The startup's open-weight model has drawn significant attention and is reportedly unsettling established players in the global AI industry.
Celeste Amadon, founder of AI dating app Known, launched a public nomination campaign called 'San Francisco's Hot List,' inviting people to nominate attractive, accomplished singles in the city. The X post drew mixed reactions—mockery alongside genuine engagement—but generated over 15,000 submissions within a day, according to Amadon. The campaign taps into a growing narrative pushing back on San Francisco's reputation as an undateable, style-deficient tech hub.
Security personnel working at San Francisco offices of major AI firms, represented by SEIU-United Service Workers West, voted this week to authorize a strike. The vote gives union leadership the go-ahead to call a walkout if labor negotiations with contractors fail to produce an acceptable deal.
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