AI Weekly Malaysia

Two members of the Scattered Spider hacking group, Owen Flowers and Thalha Jubair, were sentenced to five years and six months in prison after pleading guilty to hacking London's metropolitan transit system. UK police report that these arrests have disrupted the operations of the prolific hacking group.

Thinking Machines Lab released Inkling, a 975B parameter Apache-2.0 licensed multimodal open-weights model. While not a frontier model, it is designed as a strong base for fine-tuning and is competitive with other open-weight options. Simon Willison tested its multimodal capabilities, including image generation and description via their Tinker API.

Mozilla research found that period tracker app Stardust shares users' health data with an analytics company, while another tested app had strong privacy practices. The findings highlight stark differences in how sensitive health data is handled across similar apps.

OpenAI quietly released a ChatGPT-branded basketball alongside its first hardware product this week, raising questions about the company's merchandising strategy and brand positioning. The article highlights the oddity of an AI lab selling sports merchandise.

Andrew Dai, a former DeepMind researcher, raised a $300M pre-seed valuation before launching a product, betting on visual AI as a major frontier. He draws on over a decade of work on influential AI systems, including research that informed ChatGPT's development.

Sheryl Sandberg led a $10 million investment in an AI-powered vehicle inspection startup founded in 2021. The service enables enterprise customers to use smartphones to scan and detect vehicle damage, applying computer vision to a practical industry use case.

Simon Willison shares a Mermaid-to-ASCII-art tool compiled from a Go library (AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii) to WebAssembly, adding color support and comparing it to a Rust-based alternative. The tool lets developers render Mermaid diagrams as ASCII art directly in environments that can't display images.

Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of AMI Labs—a world model startup associated with Yann LeCun—rejects the terms 'AGI' and 'superintelligence' for describing his company's AI work. The article frames this as a contrarian stance amid an industry broadly pursuing superintelligence narratives.

Moonshot is preparing to release Kimi K3, an open AI model with 2 to 3 trillion parameters, aiming to rival Anthropic's Opus 4.8. It is expected to be the largest open AI model from China to date.

Lila Sciences is betting that scientific experimentation, rather than the internet, is the next major frontier for AI training data. They are building automated, robot-filled labs that operate like data centers to generate proprietary data at scale.

Apple has secured approval to launch Apple Intelligence in China by partnering with Alibaba's Qwen AI and Baidu, navigating the country's regulatory requirements for AI services. The deal had been rumored since last year and represents a significant step for Apple's AI strategy in a major market.

Xiaomi appears to be preparing to enter the Malaysian EV market, with a LinkedIn job posting for a Government Relations Manager of Automotive in Malaysia serving as the first concrete signal. The role suggests Xiaomi Auto is laying groundwork for regulatory engagement and potential vehicle sales in the country.

A Hugging Face blog post titled 'Newer Models, Same Advantage' likely explores how certain advantages or techniques persist even as newer AI models are released. The post appears to be authored under the handle 'Dharma-AI' and was published on the Hugging Face Blog.

A former Ultrahuman hardware VP has raised $5.5M for a new hardware startup called Aina, which is building devices designed to control AI agents rather than just passively record users. A pilot of the device is expected in the coming weeks.

Meta will now notify parents if their teenage children discuss suicide or self-harm with its AI chatbot, responding to mounting regulatory and parental scrutiny over how AI systems handle users in crisis. The move signals a shift toward built-in safety guardrails and parental oversight for consumer AI products.

OnePlus reportedly plans to stop releasing new phones in the US and Europe, and may also wind down its India operations by 2027. The move signals a significant contraction of the brand's global footprint.

JomCharge and DBKL have activated four new EV charge points at Laman Rimbunan Kepong, in front of Aftermeal Desserts, continuing their weekly street-level EV charger rollout across Kuala Lumpur.

How OpenAI’s creative team uses Codex to build custom creative tools, accelerate ideation, and prototype faster with context-aware AI.

DC Handal has installed 9 EV charge points at Sunway Putra Mall in Kuala Lumpur, comprising 7 AC charge points and a DC charger with two CCS2 nozzles. This brings the total to 18 EV charge points across Sunway premises.

Thinky has released its first full LLM, Inkling, a 975B parameter (41B active) multimodal model under Apache 2.0 open weights, along with a smaller Inkling-Small variant at 276B parameters (12B active). The model is positioned as a new best-in-class American Apache 2.0 open model.

Gentari has activated new DC fast chargers at the BYD Ipoh dealership on Jalan Kuala Kangsar, offering 240kW and 180kW DC charging. This adds to the growing EV charging infrastructure in Perak and marks another dealership-based charging deployment.

Applied Computing has raised a $20M Series A to build a foundation AI model specifically for oil, gas, and petrochemical plants. The startup aims to give operators a plant-wide AI model rather than narrow point solutions. This is a vertical-specific foundation model play targeting heavy industry workflows.

French startup Syntetica raised a $30M Series A with backing from Lululemon for its novel nylon-recycling technology. The company has already secured big-name partners and investors around its approach to recycling nylon.

Singapore's Ministry of Manpower published salary data showing 57 common occupations with a median pay of S$100,000 per year or more, drawn from over 420 listed roles. The data covers Singapore's domestic economy and serves as a benchmark for compensation trends across the region.

SoyaCincau tested dedicated indoor ULTRA5G infrastructure inside KL malls to see if it solves the common problem of 5G signal degradation once you step inside buildings. The article explores why standard high-frequency 5G signals struggle indoors and what dedicated in-building infrastructure can deliver in real-world conditions.