AI Weekly Malaysia

Google says Gemini has reached 1 billion users faster than any other product in the company's history, making it their fastest-growing product ever. The article body was not accessible beyond cookie-consent boilerplate, so details on methodology, timeframe, or product breakdown are missing.

Brad Lightcap, who joined OpenAI in 2018 and served as COO for four years, announced his departure to 'start something new.' He had already been moved to a 'special projects' role in April, with Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser taking over most of his responsibilities.

The FBI issued a public alert warning that cybercriminals are hacking social media accounts of adults and children to steal intimate images, relying on social engineering, brute-forcing leaked passwords, fake customer-service impersonation, and phishing pages mimicking social media login screens. Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security, noted the alert likely signals rising incidents, particularly targeting young boys, and described it as a public health issue given victims sometimes self-harm.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered Kimwolf v7, an Android/IoT botnet variant active since mid-2024 that now uses HTTP/2 flood attacks with complete browser fingerprints via the nghttp2 library, making DDoS traffic indistinguishable from legitimate browsing. The botnet targets Android TV boxes with ADB enabled on port 5555, uses Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Tor .onion for resilient C2, and has split propagation into a separate external loader while the core binary handles DDoS and proxy relay.

NVIDIA announced Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts open model designed for high-volume specialized tasks within multi-agent systems, claiming up to 4x faster output speed and 30% faster agentic task completion versus peers in its class. They also released NeMo Switchyard, an open source routing library that directs each request to the most suitable model across a mix of open, proprietary, and NVIDIA models without requiring application rewrites.

OpenAI launched a ChatGPT desktop app for Linux in preview, supporting Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 LTS, Debian 13, and Fedora 43/44, covering ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex. Anthropic beat them to it by about a month with a Claude Linux desktop app supporting Ubuntu 22.04+ and Debian 12+.

Three Zoom annotation-tool flaws allowed any meeting participant to hijack another attendee's client with no victim interaction—no click, download, or prompt required. Patches shipped in June and July 2026 (Zoom Workplace before 7.1.5/7.0.6, VDI Client before 7.0.11/6.6.16, Rooms/SDK before 7.1.0/7.1.5), with no exploitation reported. Researcher 'A Security' claims they went from finding the flaw to a working exploit in under a day using fewer than 20 prompts on unnamed publicly available AI models, exploiting a 128-byte buffer overflow in annotation data parsing and a missing origin check that let one malformed drawing reach the entire room.

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms signed a $9.1 billion, 20-year deal with Anthropic to lease 191 megawatts at its Rockdale, Texas campus, giving Anthropic access to grid-connected power for AI compute. The deal could rise to ~$16.1 billion if extended for two additional five-year periods, and follows Riot's existing AMD agreement, bringing total contracted data center revenue to $9.8 billion.

Together AI signed a $240M deal with IBM Cloud to run its OpenAI-compatible inference platform on a large cluster of Nvidia HGX B300 GPU systems, launching Q1 2027. The B300 is a conventional air-cooled 8-GPU-per-box platform, not Nvidia's top-tier rack systems, but IBM had the capacity Together AI needed. Together AI also runs services on SambaNova's Intel-collaboration platform, showing it is hardware-agnostic so long as price-performance holds.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the Gemini app has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, making it the 14th Google product to hit that mark and roughly matching ChatGPT's 1 billion MAU reached in June 2026. Google also noted 63% of Gemini users interact via voice, the app generates over 150 million images daily, and it has over 100 million active iOS users. The announcement comes ahead of the Made by Google event and follows the Q2 2026 earnings call where Gemini had 950 million monthly users with daily active users tripling year-over-year.

CERT-UA reports that Russian GRU-linked Sandworm subgroup UAC-0145 has been running a fake recruitment campaign since May 2026, targeting Ukrainian IT workers and sysadmins via job sites and Telegram. The attackers impersonate recruiters from legitimate firms like Sopra Steria Bulgaria, conduct real Zoom interviews (possibly with an AI-generated persona), and trick victims into installing a malicious VPN client called 'SopraVPN' hosted on SourceForge after legitimate WireGuard configs fail.

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Bluesky's mobile monthly active users fell to 10.4 million in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year, with daily active users dropping 25.6% to ~3 million in July. The app has lost roughly 52% of MAUs since its late-2024 post-election peak of ~22.1 million, though its new CEO Toni Schneider is pivoting focus toward the underlying AT Protocol powering third-party apps like BlackSky and Eurosky rather than the Bluesky app itself.

The European Commission announced the Scaleup Europe Fund is fully operational, with €5 billion ($5.7 billion) to deploy into growth-stage startups in the EU or partnering countries operating in strategic sectors. Its first deal was co-leading the Series F of ICEYE, a Finnish satellite intelligence company now valued above $11 billion. The fund is public-private, run by Swedish asset manager EQT (selected over Eurazeo, Northzone, Vitruvian, and finalist Atomico) rather than managed directly by EU institutions.

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's COO since 2022 and a member of the company since 2018, is leaving to 'start something new,' with no details yet on what that venture is. His departure follows a broader executive shakeup ahead of OpenAI's anticipated IPO, including the July exit of Fidji Simo, who led AGI development, and Bill Peebles, who headed the now-discontinued Sora video generator.

River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1B in a seed/Series A led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek participating. The company, which exited stealth in June 2026, already offers an API billed per million tokens that supports RL and LoRA fine-tuning on open models, positioning itself as an alternative to prompt engineering by letting developers train models they own rather than steer ones they don't.

xAI launched Grok Bot in early beta, an AI agent product that can log into your tools, use websites and apps like a human would, and complete multi-step work autonomously. Bots can be taught workflows by demonstration (you do it once, it records and repeats), run in parallel on different tasks, share context with each other, and retain memory over time. The macOS download link points to cursor.com, indicating a Cursor partnership.

A woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice after Flock's automated license plate recognition software incorrectly linked her vehicle to a homicide investigation. The article describes the real-world consequences of a false positive match from an automated surveillance system, with the woman stating 'Y'all failed me' in response to the repeated stops.

Google announced that AMIE, its research medical AI system, demonstrated real-time clinical video consultation capabilities in what it calls a first-of-its-kind study. The blog post is primarily navigation boilerplate with minimal substantive detail about the study's methodology, results, or limitations.

Google's Cameron Balahan and Richard Seroter argue that Go is well-suited for AI-assisted software engineering because the bottleneck has shifted from writing code to reviewing and maintaining AI-generated code. They claim Go's opinionated simplicity, standardized formatting, strong compatibility guarantees, and end-to-end tooling make it easier for teams to verify and maintain code that agents produce at scale.

Modular has released Mojo 1.0, marking the language as stable and production-ready after development since 2023. The release consolidates syntax (unified `var` declarations, single `Pointer` type, Python-style lambdas), and Modular now uses Mojo internally as the foundation of its commercial MAX and Modular Cloud products. The open-source standard library has attracted nearly 200 contributors with over 1,100 merged PRs.

Rapid7 researchers disclosed an unauthenticated RCE chain in on-premises Microsoft SharePoint (CVE-2026-55040 CVSS 9.1 for identity bypass, CVE-2026-63520 CVSS 8.1 for RCE via unsafe .NET type instantiation in Business Connectivity Services), affecting SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016, plus Project Server 2013 SP1 and Office Web Apps 2013 SP1. A significant portion of the vulnerability research was performed by an AI agent. SharePoint Online is not affected, and the July update breaks the chain while the August fix build numbers are not yet public.

SK hynix is reportedly expanding its China fab capacity, with a second phase that could boost local production by 50%, while also considering an IPO for its Solidigm SSD subsidiary. The article text itself is largely inaccessible behind a membership wall, so details beyond the headline are limited.

DeadLock ransomware, active since July 2025 with 96 claimed victims across Italy, Spain, Poland, Türkiye, and the U.S., uses Polygon smart contracts and the Session messaging network to decentralize its extortion infrastructure, making takedown harder. The group employs double extortion, selective encryption using Curve25519 and XChaCha20, and communicates via Session with Bitcoin or Monero payments.