AI Weekly Malaysia

Epic Games is making a major AI push in game development, with CEO Tim Sweeney saying the goal is to enable more and better content creation rather than reduce workforce, using Unreal Engine technology. The company is also reportedly delaying a game developed with Disney and adopting an 'AI first' approach, per a Bloomberg report on Monday. The article gives no product names, pricing, API details, or timeline for the AI work.

Malaysia's MCMC will run a pilot test of a Cell Broadcast System (CBS) on 19 November, sending a simulated siren and evacuation-style alert to phones in selected flood-prone areas of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, Kelantan and Pahang. CBS broadcasts a data packet to every compatible handset attached to base stations in a target perimeter, so it needs no phone number, mobile data plan or third-party app, and is designed to punch through network congestion that currently queues the NADMA-and-telco batch SMS alerts. The article notes the limit: CBS still depends on cellular towers staying up, and floods, landslides or power cuts can take out base stations before an alert goes out.

Excavation at Samuha (modern Sivas, central Turkey) this season uncovered 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments, more than tripling the 53 found there last year and making it the largest Hittite-language archive discovered in the 21st century. The texts date to the reign of King Tudhaliya II and are written in Hittite and Hurrian, covering a fever epidemic, military logistics, religious practice and royal daily life roughly 3,400 years ago. One tablet records the fever and death of the king's nursing infant daughter and the funerary ritual that followed.

The Hacker News reports that low-cost Android phones are shipping with preinstalled malware that silently enrolls the devices into a residential proxy network. The published excerpt only contains the headline and site chrome — no affected brands, model numbers, SDK names, sample counts, or removal instructions are present in the text provided.

CNBC reports that a federal antitrust lawsuit filed against McDonald's alleges the chain uses an AI-powered "pricing engine" to set menu prices across U.S. locations and overcharge customers for Big Macs and fries; McDonald's denies using AI to determine what individual customers will pay, saying it gives franchisees "tools, resources, research and recommendations." The piece also notes Kroger said earlier this year it uses an AI platform called FlashFood to mark down perishables, and that experts told CNBC data-driven retail tooling makes individualized pricing easier to deploy. The excerpt is cut off mid-sentence, so the article's own numbers on price changes, retailer results, or named markets beyond the U.S. tickers (MCD, KR, WMT, AMZN, Tesco) are not available.

The IMF's Global Financial Stability Report, released during the IMF-World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok, warns sovereign bond yields could rise in a 'disorderly' fashion as record debt and resurgent inflation make markets vulnerable to fiscal and inflation shocks. It flags AI-related borrowing as an extra strain competing with governments for investor demand, and says hedge-fund Treasury positions—more than doubled to about 9% of the market in 2025—leave Treasuries susceptible to a disorderly unwind.

Sea and OpenAI are bringing the Regional Codex Hackathon Series to Kuala Lumpur on 5 December 2026, with teams of three to four challenged to build practical AI solutions under the theme 'Solving Unmet Needs with AI'. Top teams can receive up to US$30,000 in API credits to continue their projects, and the article says participants will get guidance from Sea and OpenAI experts and work with Codex and frontier models such as GPT-6 Astra. The series launched in Singapore in June 2026, continued in Taiwan, and will visit Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand before Malaysia; listed tracks include Autonomous and Adaptive AI.

Malaysia’s Fifth Madani Budget, following Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s 9 October budget presentation, targets 200,000 skilled AI professionals and AI adoption by 4,000 MSMEs. The Ministry of Digital says MDEC will channel funding for AI integration and automation, with training and certification for 5,000 AI professionals and 100,000 free AI subscriptions including ChatGPT. It also adds 16,000+ free Coursera courses via the Digital Rakyat Platform, extends DE Rantau Nomad Passes by two years for existing holders at the current two-year cap, and supports JAKIM-MDEC digitalisation of 300+ pondok schools, aiming for an AI nation by 2030.

Singapore's IMDA Digital Economy Report says tech salaries rose 14% since 2023 to over S$9,300 gross monthly including employer CPF, with more than half of Singapore's 222,000 tech workers earning S$100,000 per year or more. The digital sector's value added grew over 45% since 2021 to S$144 billion, nearly one-fifth of Singapore's economy, while employment rose by nearly 30,000 including 8,200 in 2025. Most of those new jobs were outside the tech sector: only 1,700 of the 8,200 added in 2025 were in the Information & Communications sector, leaving 6,500 in other industries, and two-thirds of Singapore's digital economy jobs sit outside tech businesses.

A NeurIPS 2026 paper (arXiv:2610.13928, 22 pages, submitted 9 Oct 2026) by Draguns, Motwani, Douglas and Schroeder de Witt shows that model weights can hide arbitrary computations, not just fixed strings, by embedding encrypted neural networks via digital lockers that decrypt and run only on a secret trigger. In a PyTorch proof of concept on a small chemical-reaction prediction task used as a CBRN proxy, the hidden circuit resisted elicitation attempts by fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, with the hiding claimed provably hard under cryptographic assumptions even with full weight access. The authors release their models to support defense work, and the Hacker News thread drew 278 points and 138 comments.

Meta announced two AI models named Wonder and Wonder Full, saying they can match the performance of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, according to Malay Mail's report. The same piece cites Meta's US$14 billion investment in Scale AI, the appointment of Scale AI's co-founder as Meta's chief AI officer, and company spending that could reach US$145 billion this year. No benchmarks, model sizes, context windows, pricing, licensing, or availability details are given.

web-edit 0.1a1 is a web app for editing files in a folder, released by Simon Willison. The post states its performance optimizations were written by Claude Opus 5.5 after Willison fed it a Python 3.15 profiling report generated by GPT-6 Astra. No benchmarks, repo link, install steps, or measured before/after numbers appear in the text.

Smart unveiled the Smart #2, a 2,746mm-long two-seat electric city car, at the Paris Motor Show, reviving the original fortwo formula on a new ECA platform with a 35.8kWh LFP battery, 60kW (80hp) rear motor, 290km WLTP range, 0-100km/h in 11.6s, and up to 65kW DC charging (10-80% in 20 minutes). It launches first in Europe in four variants from EUR19,990 (about RM91,300), with AC charging at 7.4kW single-phase on the Pure or 11kW three-phase on higher trims, and V2L only via a separately sold adapter. No Malaysian launch, pricing, or distributor details appear in the article.

Philip Martin, Uber's Chief Information Security Officer, argues AI agents should get the same kind of insider threat program companies already run for employees, with the emphasis on accidental misuse rather than malice. He says Uber's security team used to assemble threat-modeling context by hand before Claude Code existed, and now lets Claude Fable pull that context from code, design documents and Jira issue history; he also sketches a future where each service has an agent that exchanges threat models with other service agents. The piece is published on claude.com and credits Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards with letting Uber keep its data inaccessible to Anthropic without permission.

CNBC's Jim Cramer points to the S&P 500's roughly 118% gain since its Oct. 12, 2022 bottom as evidence that staying invested beats timing the market. He cites that $10,000 in the S&P 500 at that low would now be worth about $23,061, while the same amount in Nvidia — up roughly 1,875% over the period — would be worth about $197,505. The article notes the rally survived Fed rate hikes, a banking crisis, tariffs, and a war in Iran.

The supplied page content is only Ars Technica's cookie and privacy consent boilerplate — no article body was captured. From the title alone, the item reports that a 39-year-old unvaccinated woman became the sixth measles death in Pennsylvania, published 2026-10-12, but no details, figures, or context from the reporting are present in the text provided.

A yyhh.org post published 2026-10-12 responds to Rich Hickey's October 11, 2026 essay "'AI' is Not a Tool," which argued LLMs are automation rather than tools because they cannot be wielded. The author counters that automation can be a feature of a tool — a compiler translates code and a spreadsheet recalculates without step-by-step direction — so automatic text generation doesn't disqualify an LLM from being a tool, and that the real variable is operator skill: asking good questions, judging evidence, and correcting output. The post also criticises the AI industry's anthropomorphic vocabulary, and the Hacker News thread drew 322 points and 269 comments.

Intel's product page lists the Intel Data Center GPU D270 as an inference-optimized data center GPU, with the Hacker News title noting up to 480 GB LPDDR5X. The HN submission drew 274 points and 148 comments. The excerpted page content is mostly navigation and does not include pricing, benchmarks, availability, or software-support details.

Elon Musk gave more than $276 million to Republican groups since July, making him the biggest known donor of the 2026 US midterm cycle, according to figures his representatives gave The New York Times and which an America PAC spokesperson confirmed to CNBC. The largest slice was $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, plus more than $76 million to America PAC, bringing his known federal giving this cycle to roughly $366 million — already above the roughly $290 million he spent in 2024, despite saying last year he planned to spend "a lot less" on politics.

A blog post investigates vfmaddrnd231pd, an FMA instruction documented in the 2024 Intel Software Development Manual that allows per-instruction rounding control without AVX-512 — but which does not actually exist. GNU assembler rejects it, the _mm_fmaddround_pd/_mm256_fmaddround_pd intrinsics are missing from Clang and even Intel's own ICC, its VEX opcode notation references a 'DDS' token that appears nowhere else in the SDM, and executing it on a Haswell CPU raises #UD. The author notes the instruction is simply absent from the 2026 edition of the SDM, and an update credits commenters with tracing the story back to AVX10, which Intel introduced after failing to bring AVX-512 to consumer CPUs in 2023.

Ars Technica published a report on 2026-10-12 headlined "Epic Games goes all-in on AI for Disney collaboration," describing Epic as pivoting to an "AI first" game development model. The article body as retrieved contains only Condé Nast cookie-consent and privacy-opt-out boilerplate — no quotes, numbers, timelines, tool names, or named sources about the alleged pivot are present in the text. Everything beyond the headline claim is unsupported here.

The text supplied here is only Ars Technica's cookie-consent and privacy boilerplate, not the article body. The only substantive claim available is the headline: No Man's Sky, a game whose 2016 launch was heavily criticized before a long series of updates rebuilt its reputation, is coming to iPhone and iPad. No release date, price, device requirements, engine details, or technical explanation appears in the text.

Intel's Crescent Island AI accelerator is now officially powering new GPU D-Series products, with the chip listed at 1.3 peak PFLOPS of FP8 compute and 1.5 TB/s of memory bandwidth. Beyond those two specs, the supplied article text is almost entirely Tom's Hardware navigation and premium-subscription boilerplate, so pricing, SKUs, availability dates, memory capacity, and software support are not in the text. No independent benchmarks, power figures, or comparisons are provided.

A TIL post by Olivia reports that Firefox 28 and newer ship with network.http.response.timeout defaulting to 300 seconds, which appears to break resuming large downloads; setting it to 0 in about:config reportedly makes big downloads resumable and more stable. The author says Firefox seems to ignore existing .part files without this change, notes the issue has been reported since around 2005, and offers wget -c -O "$filename" "$url" as a non-Firefox workaround. The author explicitly says they do not understand why it works and have not confirmed the theory against Firefox source code; the HN thread drew 277 points and 132 comments.

IonQ said Monday it will acquire cybersecurity company Elisity in an all-stock deal worth up to $1.3 billion, including up to $150 million in performance-based earnouts, with closing expected in Q4 subject to regulatory approval. The companies say the combination targets attackers hitting generative AI large language models and AI agents, plus emerging quantum threats, and Elisity will retain its leadership including CEO James. IonQ shares fell more than 9% on the news, and other quantum names Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum also traded lower.