AI Weekly Malaysia

Grab Malaysia launched a Women Only Rides Beta in March 2026, officially requiring Advance Booking with a 75-minute lead time, but SoyaCincau's hands-on test found the toggle also works for on-demand rides with sub-minute driver matching in Klang Valley. The feature pairs verified female passengers with female drivers, and also allows women travelling with boys aged 12 and under.

Two unauthenticated authentication bypass vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-15981 CVSS 9.8 and CVE-2026-61979 CVSS 8.1) in the Xecurify miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On WordPress plugin allow attackers to log in as any user, including admins. The root cause is a loose boolean check on PHP's openssl_verify(), which returns -1 on error but was treated as truthy (valid). Both are fixed in plugin versions 17.0.5 and 17.0.6 respectively, and active opportunistic scanning from six IP addresses is already underway.

HMRC is inviting suppliers to bid for a contract worth up to £500M to run and modernize the UK's National Insurance and PAYE System (NPS), a legacy estate with limited modularity that collects 40% of UK Treasury revenues. The contract could last up to seven years, with a tender notice expected in September 2026 and a start date of June 2027. NPS was first introduced in 2009 under the £10B Aspire contract with Accenture, Capgemini, Fujitsu, and BT.

This is a sponsored explainer arguing that organizations should rethink their virtualization operating model—workload placement, management, security, and governance across hybrid environments—rather than simply swapping hypervisors. It warns that lift-and-shift migrations preserve the same operational problems (provisioning, ticket queues, configuration drift, integration debt) without reducing complexity.

ARIA will exclude AI-generated music from its charts effective this week, adopting IFPI principles requiring that charted recordings be substantially human-made, use properly licensed AI tools, and carry consumer-facing AI disclosure labels. The move follows an AI-assisted cover of Madonna's 'Like a Prayer' reaching Australia's top ten, and was co-developed with Sony, Universal, and Warner Music Group.

OpenAI published first benchmark results for Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip, claiming it widens the lead over previous-best TBT (time between tokens) on the InferenceX public benchmark. Written by Sarah Friar, the piece frames OpenAI's strategy as a vertically integrated stack spanning data centers, chips, frontier models, developer platform, and consumer/enterprise products, where each layer reinforces the others.

OpenAI reports first benchmark results for 'Jalapeño,' its custom AI inference chip, claiming it sits on the Pareto frontier for both GPT-OSS 120B and DeepSeek R1 670B across multiple operating points. The post highlights improvements in tokens per user, throughput per kilowatt, and time-between-tokens, and notes the chip was designed using AI and architected so AI could program it.

MG Malaysia is offering an RM11,000 Merdeka rebate on the MGS5 EV CKD LUX, dropping the price from RM116,900 to RM105,900—only RM5,000 more than the base COM variant at RM100,900. The locally-assembled (EPMB Melaka) RWD SUV offers 203hp, 446km WLTP range, 150kW DC charging, and V2L, with 7-year/150,000km vehicle and 8-year battery warranties.

CISA added CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS 10.0), an unauthenticated improper access control flaw in Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog due to active exploitation. Oracle patched the flaw in January 2026, but GreyNoise and CloudSEK reported exploitation attempts as recently as March 2026, including against honeypots, alongside older WebLogic RCE flaws like CVE-2020-14882.

Shein is targeting a $27 billion valuation in its Hong Kong IPO, raising up to HK$13.86 billion ($1.77 billion) through 280 million class B shares priced at HK$47.60–49.50. Final pricing is Aug 31 with trading expected Sep 1, marking a steep drop from its $98.2 billion peak valuation in 2022 and $64 billion in 2023–2024.

Revealtek Sdn Bhd's AI-powered badminton Instant Review System, Reveal Lens, made its international debut at the Antica Singapore International Challenge 2026 (Aug 18-23). The system uses 12 synchronized 240fps cameras and computer vision to track shuttlecock trajectory and landing point, processing disputed line calls in seconds. It is one of only five BWF-approved IRS systems globally, and targets a cost gap where traditional setups run ~USD100,000 (~RM404,700) per event, with a wireless configuration installable in ~2 hours.

Elon Musk claimed on X that SpaceX, partnered with Nvidia, will launch a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system into orbit in Q4 2027, with 'significant scale' in 2028. Each NVL72 rack packs 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs across 18 compute trays, weighs ~1,800kg, draws 120kW with liquid cooling, and SpaceX's satellite design specifies a 210kW solar array with radiators that reject heat into the vacuum of space. The article notes SpaceX has not yet built such a satellite and that 'space is hard,' making the 2028 timeline speculative.

Indian drone delivery startup Airbound raised a $37M Series A led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lightspeed, and others, bringing total funding to ~$50M. Its tail-sitter TRT drone weighs 3.3 lbs and carries 2.2 lbs of payload; the next version targets 6.6 lbs weight with 11 lbs payload capacity, aiming for cost parity with trucking.

Andrew Ng relaunched DeepLearning.ai focused on AI Engineering, informed by analysis of 10,000+ job postings and dozens of structured interviews. The framework identifies four core skills: building/deploying AI applications (evals, RAG, agentic workflows), software engineering fundamentals, using coding agents effectively, and a fourth skill cut off in the excerpt. The commentary argues LLMs raise the ceiling for skilled developers more than they raise the floor for vibe coders.

IBM is developing an unnamed 2nm chip whose cores can natively execute both Arm and IBM Z (or LinuxONE) instructions concurrently, with 11 cores above 5.7 GHz, on-chip AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, and a dedicated I/O DPU. The move is effectively an admission that ISVs and open-source projects are targeting Arm, not mainframes, and IBM wants to let that software run on Z without porting.

Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund led by OpenAI alum Leopold Aschenbrenner, lost billions in late July 2026 when AI stocks downturned, and is now being probed by the SEC. The SEC has subpoenaed banks that supervised the fund's trading and channeled funding to it, though no wrongdoing has been alleged.

Researcher Xusheng Li at Vector 35 found that Microsoft Paint and Photos embed a server-issued 16-byte GUID as an invisible watermark in AI-generated images, distinct from the visible watermark option. The user's prompt is sent to Microsoft for moderation, and the returned GUID is encoded into the pixels, potentially linking the image back to the user who created it. Microsoft disclosed this in documentation but did not detail the mechanism until Li's analysis.

Anthropic unified Claude's memory across chat and Claude Cowork, so context built in one surface carries to the other automatically. Memory now updates live during conversations rather than post-hoc, and users can view, edit, or delete individual topic files in Memory settings. Sensitive topics (health, beliefs, identity) are excluded by default but can be opted in.

Anthropic is launching a $5 million grant program to fund independent, open-source research into how AI models affect user wellbeing, particularly in sensitive contexts like mental health crises and companionship-seeking conversations. Grantees get direct funding, model access, and technical support, and must publish open-source evaluations that any developer can use. Anthropic's Safeguards team is also publishing guidance on what makes a wellbeing evaluation rigorous enough to be useful.

OpenAI announced an Admin plugin for ChatGPT Work and Codex that lets workspace admins analyze workspace information, update settings, and take admin actions within a single conversation. The post describes automating recurring admin workflows and scaling administration using existing controls.

Anthropic announced Bain & Company as a Global Premier partner in the Claude Partner Network, building on Bain's internal rollout of Claude to all 19,000 employees. Bain reports 7,000+ active users within weeks of pilot launch, two-thirds pilot adoption of Claude for Excel, and 30-50% productivity gains on client engagements involving complex legacy codebases.

OpenAI banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts used to covertly promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described 'expert community' based in Israel. The operation involved AI-generated social media posts, a website with copied and misattributed academic work, and a 'sovereignty' index that portrayed Russia favourably, with efforts to hide the operators' Russian origins. The campaign reached a relatively small audience.

Hugging Face introduced gr.Workflow, a built-in Gradio feature that lets you define AI pipelines as typed node graphs. Each graph renders as a drag-and-drop canvas where nodes are individually runnable with visible intermediate results, and the same graph auto-generates REST endpoints (e.g. /sticker, /voiceover) and deploys to HF Spaces in one command. Examples include chaining FLUX image generation with background-removal Spaces and LLM calls, fan-out parallel generation, and live HF dataset profiling.

Oura, the smart ring maker with offices in San Francisco and Finland, is reportedly planning a U.S. IPO as soon as September 2026, aiming to raise up to $3 billion at a valuation north of $16 billion. That would be a sharp jump from its $10.9 billion valuation in September 2025, when it closed an $875 million Series E backed by Fidelity, ICONIQ, Whale Rock, Atreides, Dexcom, and Temasek. The wearables space has become crowded, with Samsung's Galaxy Ring and rival Whoop (valued at $10 billion in March) both competing for mainstream health-tracking consumers.

CNBC's Jim Cramer argues that political and community pushback over electricity costs, water use, and other concerns is slowing the unbridled data center buildout in the US, citing governors in Pennsylvania and Texas reversing course on support. He says this could depress valuations for data center beneficiaries like GE Vernova, Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate, while favoring hyperscalers—Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta—who can outlast smaller developers and face less competition for land, labor, and power.