AI Weekly Malaysia

Eka Robotics raised a $150M Series A led by a16z and F-Prime at a $1.45B post-money valuation for a physical-AI manipulation stack: a force-sensitive gripper plus a new deep-learning model. TechCrunch reports it can pick up about 1,500 objects weighing up to 1 kg per hour, versus about 600 for a human, with >95% reliability, and adapt to many objects without retraining; roboticists quoted call the demo unusually impressive.

The Hacker News headline reports that a Pegasus spyware infection was confirmed on a Serbian university rector's iPhone in the days before an election. The supplied article text is almost entirely site navigation and boilerplate, so no technical detail is available: no iOS version, no infection vector, no forensic method, no timeline beyond the headline, and no named sources or quotes.

Tom's Hardware reports that the US has restarted three previously shut-down nuclear reactors, bringing 2.25 GW of capacity online, with backing from Microsoft and Google. The article frames the recommissioning as a response to power demand from AI data centers. The excerpt gives no plant names, locations, commissioning dates, or pricing details.

The supplied page text is almost entirely Ars Technica/Condé Nast cookie-consent boilerplate — opt-out toggles, state privacy rights, and cookie categories — with no article body. The only substantive information available is the headline, which claims Meta's "Muse" exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversations; no version, date, number of affected users, disclosure timeline, or technical mechanism appears in the text.

Tom's Hardware reports that an Oblivion gamer used Claude AI in a performance mod claiming up to 48% higher average FPS and a 90% reduction in stutters, without changing game assets or altering visuals. The supplied text contains only the headline and page boilerplate, so it does not name the mod, Claude model, prompts, benchmark hardware, game build, or testing methodology.

Apple said it will commit up to $100 million over three years to Perryman Company, a Houston, Pennsylvania-based titanium supplier, to produce titanium used in Apple products including the $1,999 foldable iPhone Duo. Apple is also expanding U.S. production of camera components for the iPhone 18 Pro as part of a broader push to make more critical components domestically. The article is a supply-chain and manufacturing announcement with no pricing, availability, or developer-platform details beyond the $1,999 Duo price.

Workers were on-site at Denza Balakong where BYD's Flash Charger T-shaped overhead connector structure and Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) enclosures are already installed, putting it further along than the Denza Glenmarie site spotted a day earlier. BYD Malaysia has not announced a launch date, though managing director Jacob Ma said in May that Denza showrooms would be among the first Flash Charge locations and that the chargers will be open to all EV brands. Each station peaks at 1.5MW (10–70% in 5 minutes, 10–97% in 9 minutes on supported cars), buffered by two 185kWh cabinets for 370kWh total, recharging from the grid at 100–560kW.

ShopeePay's Money+ invests your wallet balance into the Eastspring Investments Islamic E-Duit Fund, a Shariah-compliant money market fund distributed via iFAST Capital and regulated by the Securities Commission Malaysia, and the balance stays spendable via DuitNow QR, Shopee checkout, or transfers without withdrawing first. The advertised 5% p.a. is a promotional top-up, not the fund's return: it requires a registered Money+ account and a RM200 minimum daily balance, the bonus applies only to the first RM10,000 (above that you get roughly the normal 3% p.a.), and it runs until 30 November 2026 or until a RM1.7 million first-come-first-served budget quota is exhausted. Money+ is not a bank account and is not PIDM-protected, so capital fluctuates with market movements.

A blog post documents a regression in iPadOS 27: while AirPlaying to an external display, tapping any app other than the one presenting causes the external screen to mirror the entire iPad, exposing private notes and poll results to the audience. The author notes that returning to the presenting app behaves differently per app — GoodNotes restores presenter view, Keynote exits the presentation entirely, and PowerPoint lands in a limbo requiring a restart. The behavior had not changed as of October 19, 2026, including in the latest betas, and the author links a Mac Power Users episode from early September where the issue was raised.

Newegg is selling a complete gaming PC with an RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GPU, Intel Core i9-14900KF, 32GB RAM, and a 2TB SSD for $2,549, advertised as $450 off. Tom's Hardware presents it as a full-build deal rather than a benchmarked or independently tested system.

A Tom's Hardware report cites The Data Drop's review of 23 critical open-source projects and says 11 have only one or two maintainers, with funding scarce or nonexistent. The article frames this maintainer concentration as a supply-chain risk for software that modern systems depend on. The excerpt is truncated and does not name the affected projects or quantify exposure.

ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent reportedly placed orders for 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs, worth about $35 billion, using an export-compliant model. Reports warn that only 10% of those orders are fulfillable.

Oura announced on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, two new workout metrics: Cardio Effort and VO₂ max. Cardio Effort scores how much a session taxes the cardiovascular system using elevated heart rate measured against each member's long-term resting heart rate rather than max-heart-rate estimates, and it aggregates into a weekly total bucketed as Light, Fair, Maintaining, Building, or Reaching. Cardio Effort rolls out to Oura Ring Gen3 and later models; the excerpt does not give pricing, a VO₂ max device list, or a full rollout date.

Spotify launched paid podcast memberships on Tuesday, rolling out in 34 markets including the U.S. Creators choose perks such as bonus audio/video, fewer ads, early access, or combinations across multiple tiers, and keep 90% of membership revenue. Eligibility requires hosting on Spotify for Creators or Megaphone, 100 consumption hours, 100 listeners/viewers, and at least three published episodes; purchases happen on the web, not via in-app purchases.

Tom's Hardware reports that mods using Foveation can almost double DLSS 5 performance by reducing resolution at the edges of frames. The technique is framed as making DLSS 5 possible on high-resolution ultrawide monitors. The excerpt provides no benchmark numbers, mod names, or compatibility details.

Modal has deployed Nvidia Vera CPUs alongside its existing x86 fleet after internal tests showed 2x throughput versus Intel and AMD chips. The report says AI agentic workflows are said to favor Arm chips, but Modal will keep x86 chips in a heterogeneous server fleet.

Tom's Hardware reports that Intel has asked the FCC for a waiver to buy foreign robots, because the chipmaker's automated guided vehicles could conflict with an FCC robot ban. The supplied text contains only the headline and subtitle plus site boilerplate, so it does not include waiver terms, robot types, quantities, dates, or the scope of the ban.

The Hacker News reports, per its headline, that WhatsApp placed instructions inside its help-center pages telling its AI chatbot not to recommend privacy regulators. The supplied excerpt is almost entirely site navigation and cuts off before the body, so no regulator names, dates, prompt text, or WhatsApp/Meta response are available to verify. Treat the claim as a headline-level allegation rather than a detailed report until the full article is read.

CNBC reported on Oct 20, 2026 that the AI relief rally faded in Asia and Europe, with South Korea's Kospi closing in bear market territory and CoreWeave finishing negative. South Korean AI data-center firm Elice debuted on the country's secondary market and fell over 30% on its first trading day, while Nvidia-backed Firmus, Blackstone-backed AirTrunk, and SoftBank unit SB Energy have cancelled IPO plans.

The supplied text contains no article body — only The Hacker News site chrome (navigation links, social follow prompts, newsletter/webinar links, ad slots) under the headline "What Security Teams Can Do To Tame Wild Code," dated 2026-10-20 and filed under security. The only content-adjacent signal is a banner image asset whose filename contains "prompt-injection-response," which hints at an AI/prompt-injection theme but is an advertisement placement, not reporting. No claims, numbers, vendors, versions, or recommendations from the actual piece are present.

The Hacker News headline reports that Go has shipped an emergency update that blocks eight certificate authority (CA) keys, citing security concerns the report describes as undisclosed. The supplied text contains only the site navigation and headline — the article body is truncated before any version numbers, key identities, CVE identifiers, or maintainer statements, so the specific Go release, the affected CAs, and the stated rationale are not available here.

Tom's Hardware reports an AI-assisted, "vibe-coded" driver called xHCI98 that lets Windows 98 SE systems use Thunderbolt 4 hardware, and the driver is said to work on Microsoft OSes up to Windows 7. The excerpt gives no details on how it was built, tested, its performance, or its safety.

A Tom's Hardware headline reports that an electronics hobbyist turned a $120 DDR5 SODIMM kit into desktop memory sticks described as worth '$1000', using SK hynix DDR5-5600 16GB modules and reaching DDR5-7800. The supplied text gives no build steps, stability testing, compatibility details, or independent pricing evidence.

The Hacker News reports that Russian APT28 breached a NATO naval shipbuilder in a NATO country and deployed a new reflective loader. The provided excerpt gives no affected systems, malware indicators, software versions, dates beyond publication, or remediation details.

The only substantive information available is the headline: Ars Technica visited Slate's first showroom as the company's $25,000 electric truck approaches production. The article body captured here is entirely a Condé Nast cookie-consent and privacy-preferences page, so there are no specs, range figures, production dates, showroom locations, or build details to report. Nothing in the text connects to AI/ML, developer tooling, databases, agents, SaaS, or Malaysia/Southeast Asia.