AI Weekly Malaysia

Otter.ai raised $320 million from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, a non-dilutive structure that takes returns out of the results of marketing spend rather than equity. That dwarfs the roughly $50 million in total funding it had raised across its near-decade history, with its last round in 2021. Otter says it crossed $100 million ARR last year and that 40 million users have used the product to date, up from 25 million a year earlier, but it disclosed no monthly active user or churn figures.

Yelp is rolling out "Check for Me," which appears on restaurant pages in its app: you enter party size and phone number, a Yelp voice agent calls the restaurant to ask about wait times, then texts you the answer. The same update adds an OpenTable booking integration inside Yelp's AI assistant, memory of stated preferences, 30-day chat history, custom recurring reminders, and two starter lists ("Been Here" and "Want to Go") with filters, notes, reordering and sharing. Weekly personalized recommendations from saved items and rankings start next month, and list/collection improvements are slated for later in the year.

The Hacker News reports that ConnectWise reset credentials after a security incident, while its cloud backup service remained offline as of October 20, 2026. The supplied excerpt contains only the headline and site navigation, so it does not identify affected products, root cause, number of customers impacted, or recovery timeline.

A crime ring obtained more than 15,000 gift cards worth over $5 million through Staples' internal customer-service 'Nexus' system, and had spent nearly $500,000 of that value before the cards were deactivated. The reporting gives the scale and the system name but no technical detail on how access was obtained or how the fraud was detected. It is a retail fraud case, not an AI or developer-tooling story.

On 20 October, Google Cloud reported that multiple services in its europe-west2 (London) region were throwing elevated errors and intermittent network failures, with the disruption beginning at 06:08 GMT. UK-facing services including Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Rightmove and Royal Mail reported knock-on problems; Revolut told customers funds and data were safe while Google said it was investigating the cause. The report gives no root cause, duration, or remediation detail.

HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery told CNBC's Dan Murphy on Tuesday that AI is "transformational" and that HSBC is on a journey to adopt it internally, but that investors in data centers need to be selective: "You have to look at the quality of the tenancy agreements. You have to look at the pricing of these contracts." The segment cites McKinsey's estimate that global data center spending could reach $7 trillion by 2030, and notes Mohamed El-Erian's point that hyperscalers' growing bond issuance is adding to competition for financing. The excerpt cuts off before Elhedery explains which contracts fail that test.

Tom's Hardware flagged a deal on the iBuyPower Slate gaming PC at $899, a $300 discount, with DDR5 memory and 10GB of graphics VRAM. The excerpt carries no CPU, GPU model, RAM capacity, or storage details — the listing text is mostly site navigation, so the only hard numbers are the price, the discount, and the VRAM figure.

Tom's Hardware's deal post flags the TP-Link Archer BE9700 Wi-Fi 7 router at $189.98, a $60 discount from its usual price, highlighting six antennas and what the piece calls 'class-leading' 6 GHz performance. The text is largely a retailer-style promo and contains no independent throughput, latency, or range measurements, so the 'class-leading' claim is unverified here.

Apple's Malaysian iPhone Duo product page now states the device is "currently available to buy online only", so there will be no walk-in stock at the Apple Store at The Exchange TRX when the iPhone Duo goes on sale in Malaysia on 23 October 2026. Pre-orders opened the previous Friday at 8pm and most launch allocation across Apple Authorised Retailers and Malaysian telcos sold out within about an hour. New orders on Apple's Malaysian online store currently show estimated delivery from 22 January 2027, and the launch covers more than 70 countries and regions in the first wave, with 28 more from 30 October.

Headline reports a Google Cloud outage that took down online banking and related services across Europe, naming HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Equifax in the title. The linked Neowin article could not be read — the fetch returned a Cloudflare bot-verification page — so there are no confirmed details on duration, affected GCP services, region, or root cause. What is verifiable is the reaction: 373 points and 185 comments on the Hacker News thread.

Google DeepMind claims four Gemini 4 agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours by writing 2,783 of their own programs, with 605 deaths on Easy difficulty and an estimated $520 in token cost. The supplied text is a headline claim from Tom's Hardware and does not include methodology or independent verification.

Bank Negara Malaysia launched SSDS+, an in-house cloud and distributed-ledger platform for issuing, depository and safekeeping tokenised bonds and sukuk, integrated with RENTAS+ for 24/7 settlement. It builds on the existing SSDS and is ready to support tokenised government and retail bonds; Malaysia's bond and sukuk market stood at about US$575.6 billion at end-June 2026, with sukuk over 60% of the market in 2025. BNM soft-launched SSDS+ on 25 Sept and had published an Oct 2025 tokenisation discussion paper with a three-year roadmap.

OpenAI published a customer story about Ted Taylor, an independent franchisee operating three co-branded Schlotzsky’s and Cinnabon restaurants in New Mexico, using ChatGPT Work for menu repricing and cash reconciliation. The post claims repricing dropped from 5 days to 1–2 hours (95%), monthly cash reconciliation time fell 94%, payroll runs saved 4 hours, and an optimized labor workflow could free up up to $100K annually. It provides no independent verification, implementation details, or pricing.

Tom's Hardware reports that a heavy-lift hexacopter drone carried a wounded 176-pound soldier roughly 11 miles out of a minefield in Ukraine, described as the "world's first" UAV evacuation of a human. The excerpt is almost entirely site navigation and subscription copy, so it contains no drone model, payload rating, flight time, autonomy stack, cost, or operator detail. Only the headline claim and the payload/distance figures are usable.

HEIST Berlin reports that 281 GB of hacked AfD internal email — 421,179 messages — was published online on Monday and presented as AI summaries. The lede describes racist slurs, antisemitic conspiracy theories, jokes about turning refugees into handbags and boots, a swastika Christmas card reading "Heil Hitler", a thread signed "Heil und Sieg", and alleged financial misconduct. The rest of the article sits behind an email signup wall, so no method, model, tooling, or verification detail is available in the text.

Microsoft has launched a security suite under Microsoft 365 E7 that includes Project Perception and Agent 365, aimed at monitoring internal AI agents that hold broad system access. The discovery layer reportedly identifies 60 local agent types — including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot — and registers them centrally alongside Agent 365. The controls include Entra Agent ID (a separate digital identity per bot instead of borrowed employee credentials), sandboxing via Microsoft Execution Container, and Dynamic Permissions that start agents at zero authority and expire access when a task ends.

DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework it says powers its large-scale production services, under Apache-2.0. The release supports exactly one model (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash) and offers offline inference only, bundling FlashMLA, DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, DeepSelect and custom TileLang kernels, plus DSpark/confidence-scheduled speculative decoding (DEEPINFER_ENABLE_MTP_VARLEN=1, DEEPINFER_USE_NEXTN_DECODE default 5), SWA bounded replay (DEEPINFER_YOCO_PREFILL_TRUNCATION_MODE=compact, DEEPINFER_YOCO_PREFILL_KEEP_TOKENS=140), zero-overhead async batch scheduling on by default, batch-invariant inference and deterministic sampling. The repo shows 5.4k stars, 405 forks and only 3 commits, and the HN thread drew 1,962 points and 760 comments.

Singtel and Ericsson signed a five-year strategic partnership (announced 20 October 2026) to scale 5G Advanced and "AI-native" network operations in Singapore, extending a collaboration announced in March 2026. The companies cite a live-network trial of AI-powered radio access network capabilities that improved throughput by 19%, and point to earlier work on nationwide 5G standalone plus network slicing and differentiated connectivity services for enterprises. Quotes come from Ng Tian Chong (CEO, Singtel Singapore) and Daniel Ode (Ericsson Singapore, Brunei and Philippines and Global Customer Unit Singtel); no pricing, product names, launch dates, or commercial terms are disclosed.

Malaysia's Ministry of Digital has added MyKad replacement applications to the MyGOV Malaysia app, logged in via MyDigitalID, covering lost cards, damaged cards, defective chips and chip upgrades, with online payment and collection at a chosen JPN branch or UTC outlet. The backend is described as a direct port of JPN's legacy web portal: submissions only work 8.00am–4.30pm Monday to Friday and are disabled on weekends and public holidays. The article also reports that 'Gantian Biasa' (normal replacement) is displayed as an option but returns an error after submission, and that any change to personal records still requires a physical JPN visit.

The Hacker News reports that five OVHcloud CLI releases were hijacked to distribute secret-stealing malware. The text supplied here is cut off after the headline, so the affected version numbers, the distribution channel (package registry, GitHub releases, or install script), the malware family, and any remediation guidance are not available.

A Department of Homeland Security order, issued July 24 and made public Monday, bans DeepSeek-related technology from U.S. federal civilian agency IT systems and bars those agencies from procuring DeepSeek products and services. The ban explicitly extends to third-party products and services built using DeepSeek's models, not just DeepSeek's own offerings. DHS cited possible transfers of sensitive government data to China and security vulnerabilities in the models.

CelcomDigi partnered with RTM's Junior Innovathon 2026 as official telco partner, hosting 200 primary and secondary school students for an AI workshop plus a tour of its AI Experience Centre (AiX). It also launched a 'Tech for Impact Award', giving one primary and one secondary winning school CelcomDigi Essential 5G Home WiFi (100Mbps) for two years, with CelcomDigi sitting on the judging panel on 1 November 2026. The piece quotes Kugan Thirunavakarasu, acting chief innovation officer of CelcomDigi, on sparking early interest in creating with technology.

Vulcan Post checks the "Chinese brands are taking over Singapore malls" narrative against the numbers. Official figures from a Jan 2026 parliamentary reply put Chinese-owned (incl. Hong Kong) retail entities at 1,390 of 45,631 registered retail businesses (3%), versus 89.7% Singapore-owned, with Malaysia at 432 (0.9%) and India at 427 (0.9%). The catch: those are registered entities, not outlets — Luckin Coffee alone had 103 Singapore stores as of September, roughly three years after entering with two — and MTI said in a Feb reply it does not collect mall tenant-mix data, so the outlet-level picture comes from Mothership hand-comparing 26 malls' 2023 and 2026 directories.

The Hacker News headline reports that attackers using the ClickFix technique exploited a flaw in Siemens Software Center to deliver a remote access Trojan. The article body available here is truncated after the page boilerplate, so no CVE identifier, affected versions, patch status, campaign scale, or technical chain is present in the supplied text.

Estonia-based Blackwall raised a $100M Series C at a $2.2B valuation, roughly 4x its 2025 valuation, led by AVP with Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures participating. Blackwall sells web traffic security — DDoS, scraping, botnets and AI agent traffic — but not directly to websites: it bundles tools for hosting, managed service and cloud providers to white-label, price and resell, sharing revenue with Blackwall. It offers those providers a free tier showing the traffic and threats hitting their network.