AI Weekly Malaysia

JomCharge has switched on a 50kW DC charger with two CCS2 nozzles at Sunway Pyramid Mall's B1 Preferred Parking area, priced at RM1.40 per kWh and activatable through the JomCharge, ChargEV and Gentari Go apps. A launch promo cuts the rate to RM0.70 per kWh for 24–25 October, and JomCharge Elite/Platinum members can stack up to 25% additional savings. The same weekend, a Zus Coffee code (ZJOMCHARGE15) gives 15% off handcrafted drinks at the Sunway Pyramid outlets.

AiSEM@Selangor 2026 closed on 17 October with 23,333 recorded visits, 150 booths from 120 companies, an estimated US$105 million (RM430 million) in potential GMV, six locally developed chips on show, and companies offering more than 1,500 job opportunities. The two-day AI & Semiconductor Conference drew 40 speakers including former TSMC EVP/co-COO Chiang Shang Yi, Synopsys' Robert Li, FuriosaAI's Jeehoon Kang and AWS's Umar Shah, and the opening saw 12 MOUs/MoCs with an estimated potential value of US$16 million (RM65 million).

Hong Leong Capital Bhd announced that former Bursa Malaysia CEO Umar Swift will become group managing director and CEO of Hong Leong Investment Bank on Jan 1, 2027, succeeding Lee Jim Leng, who retires after leading HLIB since 2009. Under Lee, HLIB's profit before tax grew from RM18.9 million in FY2010 to RM58.8 million in FY2025, roughly 211% over 15 years. The article is a leadership-succession announcement plus a career retrospective; it names no products, platforms, pricing, or technical changes.

SK Hynix halted its review of a potential U.S. IPO/pre-IPO for subsidiary Solidigm after South Korean regulatory scrutiny; the Korean financial regulator reportedly said a U.S. listing could violate dual-listing rules. CNBC's headline says the stock reversed early losses to jump over 4%, while the article text reports it initially fell as much as 3% in Seoul. SK Hynix said Solidigm's investment needs are unchanged and it will keep exploring alternative financing, including for a new U.S. semiconductor fab tied to AI memory demand.

DC Handal has added EV charging at Zenith Suites Cameron in Tanah Rata: one 120kW DC charger with two CCS2 nozzles on the outdoor G level, plus two 22kW AC points in the indoor LG carpark. Pricing is RM1.40 per kWh for DC and RM1.00 per kWh for AC. Charging can be started without an app via a contactless card terminal that also accepts TNG eWallet QR, or through ChargEV, JomCharge and Gentari Go.

Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, launched in Malaysia on 23 October 2026 with local pricing of RM9,499 (256GB), RM10,499 (512GB), RM12,499 (1TB) and RM15,499 (2TB). Apple Store TRX drew a queue from around 6:00 AM but had no walk-in stock allocated, so online orders placed on launch day were quoted delivery in late January 2027; the queue had mostly cleared by 9:45 AM. AppleCare+ is RM1,499 and cuts the inner-display repair fee from RM4,749 to a flat RM469.

Oura filed a new patent-infringement suit against Ultrahuman in a federal court in Texas on Oct. 22, 2026, seeking damages and a permanent injunction to block U.S. sales of Ultrahuman’s Ring Pro. Oura alleges Ring Pro infringes patents D804,471 and 12,769,363 covering design and internal components including battery and sensors; the latter patent was issued Oct. 20, two days before the complaint. Ultrahuman’s redesigned Ring Pro launched in February and received a favorable U.S. Customs and Border Protection ruling in March after an earlier Ring Air import ban tied to an August last year ITC ruling for Oura.

inDrive signed a memorandum of understanding with Pony.ai and Nvidia to test robotaxis in Astana, Kazakhstan, starting in the first half of 2027. The tests would initially use a safety operator, with fully driverless rides as the eventual goal; Pony.ai would supply Gen-7 robotaxis, inDrive would offer them through its app, and Nvidia would provide its Hyperion platform and Halos safety system. inDrive CTO Yuri Misnik described the approach as “capital-light by design,” relying on partners rather than building the stack itself.

Singapore’s GovTech retrenched 38 employees on Oct 22 in the second of three planned layoff rounds, after cutting 93 in July. It expects 270–350 staff, or 7–9% of its 3,900 workforce, to be affected over two years across 23 government agencies. GovTech says the restructuring reduces vendor reliance and moves accountability for core systems in-house; chairman Chng Kai Fong cited Singpass, Parents Gateway, and CDC vouchers as examples.

Malay Mail reports that AI models were used to identify critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the language it says underpins roughly 70% of the web, prompting organisations and governments to take sites offline after warnings — including from the US National Security Agency — to patch or disconnect affected systems. The article states no widespread exploitation has been reported so far. The excerpt names no CVE identifier, no affected PHP version, and no specific AI model or vendor, so the technical scope cannot be verified from this text alone.

Malay Mail publishes a hands-on video of the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable, described as the company's most exciting redesign but carrying first-gen quirks. The piece notes a custom nano-texture matte finish that reduces how visible the crease is, a tablet-like experience when unfolded, and that app optimisation is still underway with a learning curve for users. It says the device is available in Malaysia and that retail pricing begins at some figure, but the excerpt cuts off before the price.

SpaceX reported a $561 million unrealized gain in Q3 from its stake in The Boring Co., accounting for more than half of its other income and helping push net income to just over $4 billion, according to its SEC quarterly filing. Boring Co., created inside SpaceX in 2017 and spun out a year later, raised $3 billion last month at a $23 billion valuation with backing from the UAE and longtime Musk supporters. The item is a financial filing detail, not a product, policy, or platform change.

MIT researchers placed 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, on a simulated desert island for 30 hours with no assigned task, and the agents began inventing their own challenges — one tried to scale the tallest spire, failed, stacked rocks on a neighbouring summit and declared 'I'M ON THE SPIRE'; another threw a golden ring into the ocean and pivoted to building a heart out of stones. Afterwards, the agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally outperformed identical agents that had never been on the island on set challenges such as getting as many objects as possible onto the tallest rock spire. The work is described in an arXiv preprint (Cloos, Norelli, Durbin, Andreas, Rus, Isola) that has not been peer reviewed.

OpenAI signed an agreement with Poland's NASK National Research Institute on 23 October 2026 to "explore collaboration" on AI safety, security and technical research, with NASK's AI Safety Research Center acting as the Polish AI Safety Institute. The stated scope covers evaluating increasingly capable systems, identifying vulnerabilities, and NASK's existing work on detecting synthetic AI-generated content and multilingual risks. No funding, headcount, timeline, or published deliverables are attached — OpenAI cites prior work with the US CAISSI and UK AISI, and quotes come from NASK director Radosław Nielek and OpenAI VP/Head of EMEA Policy Tom Duff Gordon.

Meta's board approved a new class of non-voting Class C common stock, effective January, which the company says it will use for capital raising, employee pay, and acquisitions — including its AI spending — while preserving Mark Zuckerberg's roughly 60% voting control. The New York Times reported an additional motive: letting Zuckerberg sell shares to cover California's proposed Proposition 40, a one-time 5% wealth tax on the net worth of several hundred California billionaires, drafted by Berkeley tax law professors and sponsored by SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, with backers claiming up to $100 billion over five years for healthcare, food assistance, and education. The Times also reported Zuckerberg told board members in September he would list his Palo Alto property for sale if no agreement was reached.

Etsy announced on Thursday, Oct 22, 2026, that it will ban the sale of AI-generated "functional guides" — patterns, cooking recipes and instructions typically sold as digital downloads — and will require sellers to show an actual item made using those instructions rather than an AI-generated or simulated result. In a separate notice to sellers, Etsy also barred bot-generated listings created without any human involvement. The company said user confusion around AI content has become a "top-three barrier to shopping more often on Etsy."

Warhound emerged from stealth with $200M in funding at a $1.2B valuation, backed by In-Q-Tel, Sequoia and 8VC. It aims to genetically engineer working dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement and emergency response, using Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd cell lines stored in a biobank and then gene-edited. The company cites that over 80% of U.S. military working dogs come from Europe and fewer than half are fit for service.

Wiz Research used AI models from OpenAI and Google to surface critical security vulnerabilities in PHP, the language the article says underpins roughly 70% of websites, and the PHP Foundation shipped updates in response. No active attacks have been confirmed, but many sites went offline preemptively to patch. The report gives no CVE identifiers, affected PHP versions, or exploitation details.

Andreessen Horowitz renamed its digital asset unit from a16z Crypto to a16z Frontier on Thursday, broadening its mandate beyond blockchain to AI, robotics, and 'new kinds of networks' connecting humans and machines. The practice, led by Chris Dixon, has raised nearly $10 billion across five funds since 2018 and backed Coinbase; GPs now include Dixon, Eddy Lazzarin, and Guy Wuollet, while first crypto investor Ali Yahya has left the firm per The Information. Dixon said blockchain could still 'give new networks native economic capabilities.'

The supplied page contains only Ars Technica's cookie and privacy consent boilerplate — no article body. Beyond the headline ('Switch 2 security takes a hit as hackers unlock homebrew access') and the publication timestamp of 2026-10-22, there are no details on the exploit chain, firmware version affected, what homebrew or mod support was achieved, or whether Nintendo has responded.

Microsoft and Hugging Face describe ThinkingBox, a system that grades an agent by comparing the final database state against the expected outcome, across 507 tasks in ThinkingBox-Bench. They reused those 1/0 executable checks as GRPO reward signals on a separate training pool, filtered by 'offline policy-relative difficulty' — estimating each task's success probability with the base policy once, then keeping the pool fixed. After 50 GRPO steps on Qwen3.8-27B, average success across 10,140 attempts rose from 51.70% to 60.78%, and tasks passing all 20 attempts rose from 38 to 107; ThinkingBox-Training is now on GitHub.

In a Wednesday filing released alongside Meta's Q3 earnings, Meta disclosed a new stock incentive plan under which CEO Mark Zuckerberg commits to staying in California for at least eight years, explicitly framed as offsetting the burden of higher taxes if Proposition 40 — California's billionaires tax — passes on Election Day, Nov. 3. The article notes Zuckerberg is the sixth-richest person in the world and, with Nvidia's Jensen Huang, one of only two centibillionaire tech CEOs still living in California, while Elon Musk and Michael Dell are in Texas and Jeff Bezos' primary residence is elsewhere.

Ars Technica's headline reports that Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine cut death and recurrence by 42% in melanoma. The retrieved page body contains only the site's cookie-consent and privacy boilerplate — no trial size, endpoint definitions, follow-up duration, comparator details, or peer-review status — so the 42% figure cannot be checked from this text.

OpenAI is reportedly raising up to $30B at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, led by Coatue and UAE investors, ahead of a planned IPO. That follows a March round at $852B post-money and confidential IPO paperwork filed in June; CNBC says the UAE funding may be tied to securing more computing capacity for OpenAI. Anthropic is separately reported to be targeting a $1.5T–$2T valuation for its IPO after raising $65B at a $965B valuation in May.

Elon Musk has committed roughly $366 million to the 2026 midterm election, with much of it aimed at preserving or expanding Republican power in Washington. SpaceX has at least $6.78 billion in federal work through Oct. 1, 2026 — nearly twice its total for all of 2024 — and several Musk-backed races could affect oversight, federal contracts, or regulations involving SpaceX, Tesla, and Musk's AI business. Texas is a key overlap, with Tesla, SpaceX, and the planned Terafab chip project.