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Tower Semiconductor plans to co-invest $4 billion with the Japanese government to expand its Niigata and Toyama fabs into a major hub for optical-connectivity chips. The plan, dubbed Track One and Track Two, will convert an idle 200mm fab to 300mm production, boost output at an existing 300mm fab, and eventually add a new 300mm fab, raising total capacity to the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month by 2029.
A commentary responds to a New York Times op-ed by Sharon Weinberger, tied to her book 'Valley of Death,' which argues Silicon Valley's countercultural, idealistic image was always a myth and its current embrace of defense contracts and authoritarian-friendly politics is simply market adaptation, not a shift in values. The author counters with a personal anecdote from a 2015 Founders Fund retreat, contrasting computing pioneer Alan Kay's idealistic legacy with venture capitalist Peter Thiel's dismissiveness toward him, suggesting the two cultures have long coexisted rather than one being a false front for the other.
ULTRALOQ has released the Bolt Mission, a smart lock that uses ultra-wideband combined with Bluetooth Low Energy and radar-based presence sensing to detect a user's precise approach to a door, rather than relying on GPS or simple Bluetooth proximity. The company simultaneously introduced the Bolt Pro and Latch 5 Pro, both certified under the Aliro standard for tap-to-unlock via Apple Wallet or Samsung Wallet.
Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 about their startup's AI system for designing computer chips. The company aims to cut chip design time from two to three years down to weeks, building on the pair's earlier work co-leading Google's AlphaChip project, which helped design several generations of Google's Tensor Processing Units.
Brian Chesky said he created an AI 'intelligence corpus' trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other internal materials, paired with dashboards giving him real-time visibility into Airbnb's operations. He said the system has let him cut his meeting load in half by giving him direct access to information that previously required staff briefings.
Researchers Evan Hoffman and Tae Kim probed Meta's Muse AI agent and got it to reveal its infrastructure: each user sandbox runs on AMD EPYC 9D25 Turin CPUs with two dedicated cores and 8GB of memory, using Ubuntu 24.04. Muse's sandboxes have no GPUs, since Meta reportedly routes inference through separate GPU servers, and Hoffman says the agent could be prompted to attempt risky actions like setting up SSH access to its own VM.
Amazon is selling the Hisense FlexBoom portable Bluetooth speaker for $99.99, a $20 cut from its $119.99 list price. Hisense's speaker offers up to 80W of audio power, Bluetooth 5.4 with Auracast and TWS pairing, an IP67 rating, and up to 20 hours of battery life. The retailer's price matches the lowest the speaker has hit since it launched.
Android Authority found hidden code in Snapseed version 4.1.9 pointing to a new collage-creation interface, offering multiple aspect ratios, grid layouts, background customization, and slide management tools. The build also references a feature for sharing collage templates with other users via QR code or link.
Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal issued an opinion criticizing filings by attorney Jaclyn Soroka, calling them 'AI slop' and finding a motion she filed to be legally insufficient, frivolous, and untimely. The three-judge panel warned she could face referral to the Florida bar for discipline, and said AI-generated filings more broadly are overwhelming courts with confusing, scattershot arguments. Soroka told Law.com she does not use artificial intelligence to produce court filings.
Security firm Nisos ran a sting on a suspected North Korean operative who applied for a remote AI engineering job, sending a surveilled laptop to a US 'laptop farm' in Florida. Over subsequent months Nisos tracked the operator communicating with 22 others and four US-based facilitators while connecting from near the North Korea-China border. A joint advisory from US, Japan, Australia and Germany law enforcement says the broader campaign, called WaterPlum or Contagious Interview, has infected over 30,000 devices in 100+ countries and drained more than 7,000 crypto wallets.
Apple has confirmed pre-orders for its first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, open October 16 with units shipping October 23 in over 70 countries and regions, expanding to 28 more by October 30. The device will launch running iOS 27.1, and Apple is also rumored to be preparing new Macs, Home products, and an updated iPad mini for release in October.
Noctua has announced a long-term partnership with Forced Physics DCT to investigate whether JouleForce, a micro-channel air-cooling technology capable of dissipating over 2,000W, could be adapted for desktop PCs and workstations. The companies say the collaboration is not tied to any specific product or launch date. JouleForce currently requires industrial blowers or centrifugal fans to overcome its high pressure-drop, far beyond what standard PC fans can produce.