A new wave of films and documentaries, including 'The Social Reckoning' and a Musk documentary by Alex Gibney, dramatize and investigate the personal conduct of major tech executives. These productions draw on existing investigative journalism, such as Frances Haugen's whistleblower allegations against Meta, to portray figures like Mark Zuckerberg in a far less flattering light than earlier works like 'The Social Network'.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
Meta has open-sourced Muse Spark Open, an 800-billion-parameter model it calls the most capable US open-weight model yet. Running it locally requires roughly 1TB of unified memory, achievable by pairing two of Apple's upcoming M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 512GB each, or four 256GB units costing about $38,000. The weights are now downloadable from Hugging Face, and Meta says the model was built in collaboration with Apple to run on its new hardware.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-15
Fast Company reports that tech-industry-backed super PACs are spending tens of millions of dollars to influence midterm elections, yet their political advertisements largely avoid discussing artificial intelligence. The PACs are funded by donors with a stake in favorable AI policy, but their messaging focuses elsewhere.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-15
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter multimodal AI model it calls the most capable US open-weight model available, and said it can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Apple published its own technical post on MLX and the new model, and executives from both companies publicly praised the collaboration, which Axios reported had been months in the making.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
Reports indicate that technology companies in Silicon Valley had already been increasing security measures against foreign spying before an arrest linked to OpenAI came to light. Separately, questions are being raised about restrictions placed on Ukraine's access to Starlink, and UBS is reportedly preparing for a significant strategic shift.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-15
Federal authorities have accused Abdulrahman Alfozan, an engineer who worked at OpenAI, of concealing an audio recorder behind a television in a conference room used for sensitive meetings. Alfozan reportedly maintained connections in Saudi Arabia throughout his career in Silicon Valley, a detail investigators have highlighted in the case against him.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-15
The FBI has arrested an OpenAI employee in connection with an espionage-related case, according to reporting on the matter. The arrest comes as AI companies in Silicon Valley have already been tightening security measures against spying, including the use of 'honey pots' and monitoring for insider threats.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-15
Apple researchers detailed a system called Minions in an arXiv paper, which harnesses idle Apple Silicon Macs across the company's network to process AI inference workloads. The system splits jobs—embedding tasks and LLM text generation via Ollama—into subtasks that idle Macs pull and execute, cutting wait times from over 10 hours in GPU queues to minutes.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-14
A new paper describes Minions, a distributed system that aggregates spare GPU capacity from macOS devices running Apple Silicon chips to run large-scale machine learning inference workloads. The authors say the system handles task scheduling, fault tolerance, and resource utilization across these devices without requiring teams to buy additional GPU hardware.
machinelearning.apple.com
· 2026-10-13
A developer has released a free macOS app that converts Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 multimodal embedding model into a speech-to-text tool, transcribing an hour of audio in about 13 seconds on a base MacBook Air. The system keeps the original audio encoder untouched and instead trains a small 'reader' model to map audio slices into the text embedding space, matching them to the closest of roughly 229,000 English words, with a separate model adding punctuation. The app, EmbeddingGemma Transcribe, runs entirely on-device using the Mac's Neural Engine and currently has a word error rate of about 5%, compared with 2-3% for leading dedicated speech models.
eg2.haku.sh
· 2026-10-13
Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone Duo and the iPhone 18 Pro line will both use the new A20 Pro chip, built with an 'M-class-inspired' packaging design borrowed from Mac processors. To manage heat in the foldable's tight, hinge-divided chassis, Apple engineered a graphite thermal pathway that runs through the hinge itself to spread heat away from the chip. Apple silicon engineering VP Dan Murray and thermal design manager Banafsheh Barabadi described the design choices to accommodate one chip across two very different phone shapes.
pcmag.com
· 2026-10-13
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar claimed on CBS's Face the Nation that some AI researchers have taken up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer. He described this as a kind of 'mass psychosis' or social delusion within Silicon Valley's AI community, comparing faith in AGI to a substitute for religious belief.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-13
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