AI Weekly Malaysia

TechCrunch reports Vinod Khosla is betting on Wajo, a personal-agent startup from former Google and DeepMind engineer Shivani Poddar, because he says it is architected for trust and safety first, unlike Meta's Muse or Instinct. Wajo's Fo agent works across iMessage and WhatsApp, offers task cards for scheduling, gifting, and life admin, can call businesses or people, and can hire a human to complete a task. In early tests, an airline upgrade call succeeded, but a reminder call to the author's partner did not go smoothly and disclosures were less clear; the excerpt ends mid-sentence.

Tom's Hardware highlights an $11 desktop PC power switch that lets you turn a PC on or off from your desk instead of bending down. It ships with mechanical keys and RGB lighting. The piece is a product recommendation/impulse-buy item, not a technical report or policy/funding update.

Tom's Hardware reports that AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE 12GB graphics card has dropped to $529, below its original MSRP, and calls it the best value 12GB GPU. The provided article text is mostly page boilerplate and does not include benchmarks, the original MSRP, retailer availability, or Malaysia pricing.

Bluesky has applied to ICANN to make ".bsky" a top-level internet domain suffix, CEO Toni Schneider said, which would let users shorten handles like @sarahp.bsky.social to sarahp.bsky and potentially turn profiles into fuller personal home pages. ICANN is set to publish the new-domain applications on October 7, 2026, and Bluesky says the approval process will take 18 to 24 months. Bluesky has not finalized how .bsky domains would be requested, registered, or distributed, but COO Rose Wang said the company has no plans to sell or monetize them.

Amazon announced that Prime Video will become the exclusive home of the Emmy Awards starting in 2027, streaming the ceremony worldwide for six years in over 240 countries and territories, free even for non-Prime subscribers. It is the first time the Emmys have had a single dedicated home after rotating across ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC for seven decades, and follows the Oscars' move to YouTube from 2029 and Netflix's carriage of the SAG Awards since 2024. Terms were not disclosed; NBC's 2026 telecast drew 6.87 million viewers, down nearly 10% year over year.

Mistral AI released Mistral Large 4 (nicknamed "Le Chonk"), a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal model positioned as a European alternative to both closed US models and open Chinese ones. It is not open-weight yet: access is currently limited to a public guardrail endpoint, with weights promised in about three weeks after safety testing, and benchmark results are still pending. Mistral VP Science Pierre Stock said ML4 was trained entirely on Mistral's own compute using 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs, described as two to three times fewer than Chinese competitors and significantly fewer than closed-source rivals, with claimed strengths in cybersecurity, finance, and chip design.

Nathan Lambert argues the cyber-risk debate around open-weight models is broken because it treats banning open models or China as isolated problems instead of trade-offs. He summarizes three camps: frontier-lab and U.S. national-security concerns that open weights are untenable, moderates and Western voices who say open weights are needed for defense, and Chinese companies releasing open-weight models with strong cyber capabilities. He criticizes Anthropic's report on GLM-5.3 as an offensive cyber tool for doing largely reasonable technical work but not addressing cross-cutting questions like what a ban would achieve or why Chinese firms deem releases safe.

Pinterest announced "Beauty Guides," a feature that uses its Pinterest Intelligence visual intelligence and generative AI stack to turn saved beauty Pins (hair and nail inspiration) into actionable salon plans. Tapping "Get the Guide" surfaces the stylist terminology for a look (e.g., "balayage," "root melt," "almond nails") plus estimated time per step, price range, and maintenance cadence like trim/tone/touch-up frequency. At launch it covers only hairstyle, color, nail shape, and finish Pins.

Uber is acquiring ezCater, a US marketplace for catering and workplace meals, in an all-cash deal valued at $2.3 billion. ezCater was founded in 2007, stayed bootstrapped for seven years before raising its first $4 million round in 2014, and generated over $2.5 billion in gross bookings in the last 12 months according to Uber. The purchase is part of a wider Uber food-delivery push that includes a $15 billion deal for Delivery Hero and investments in drone delivery companies Zipline and Flytrex.

TechCrunch published the full breakout session agenda for Disrupt 2026, running October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco with 10,000+ founders, investors, and operators expected. Breakout sessions are 50 minutes each, combine expert insight with audience Q&A, and are first come, first served with limited room capacity. Listed topics include building with AI agents, where value accrues as AI shifts from training to inference, what 'physical AI' means, running a better fundraiser, and how AI changes company and team growth; one session is sponsored by SOSV and features SOSV HAX's Susan Schofer and Duncan Turner. Pricing promos include up to $100 off a pass, 50% off a second pass, and a $75 Expo+ Pass for people recently laid off.

Paramount completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, creating a combined company called Skydance. The deal folds Paramount+ and HBO Max, plus CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central and Food Network, and franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, the DC Universe and Yellowstone under one studio controlled by David Ellison. It closed after settlements with a coalition of U.S. states and a Hollywood writers' union, following a bidding fight in which Netflix had earlier agreed to buy Warner Bros.' studios and streaming business without the cable networks.

An unofficial WebAssembly port of GTA V that ran in the browser — reportedly built with AI — was taken offline within hours of going live, according to Tom's Hardware's headline. The article text available is almost entirely paywall, newsletter, and membership boilerplate, so no build details, author, tooling, or legal mechanism are actually described.

Nothing has opened Malaysian pre-orders for the Headphone (1) Pro at RM1,499 starting 6 October 2026, with units expected to be collected from authorised stores 'some time next month' and local open-sale dates still unannounced. The over-ear unit uses a triple-driver setup (40mm dynamic, 13x8mm dynamic, xMEMS solid-state), weighs 327g, claims up to 68 hours playback with ANC off, and adds Metropolis Studios Tuning with a hardware Flat EQ Switch plus a 'Studio B' Dynamic Spatial Audio mode via the Nothing X app. Nothing also restocked the Ear (3a), Ear (3), Headphone (a) and standard Headphone (1) in Malaysia.

The only text supplied is Ars Technica's cookie and privacy consent boilerplate — social media, essential, targeted, performance, functional, and audience-measurement cookie descriptions. The headline says Big Oil asked the Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial, published 2026-10-06, but no case names, filing details, arguments, or court dates appear in the body.

Tom's Hardware published a roundup titled "CD players are back, and offering up modern, interesting features," claiming new CD player models start as low as $89. The excerpt provided contains no actual product details — no model names, specs, DAC chips, connectivity, or release dates — only the site's subscription and navigation boilerplate. Nothing concrete about the hardware itself can be extracted from this text.

Mistral launched a public preview of Mistral Large 4 (unofficially ML4, 'le Chonk'), a 1-trillion-parameter natively multimodal model with 49B active parameters, available today via the Mistral Studio API; weights are promised by the end of October 2026. It was trained from scratch on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European datacenters, and the preview runs on that same infrastructure. Mistral claims state-of-the-art open-model performance in cybersecurity, finance, and law, plus visual grounding beyond frontier closed models, while red-teaming with cybersecurity leaders, vetted partners, and state authorities before weight release.

Gigaphoton, a Japanese lithography tool maker, has announced a neon recycling system called hTGM for its argon fluoride (ArF) excimer lasers, claiming a 50% neon recovery rate with hopes of improving it via adjusted configurations. The pitch is supply-chain insurance: 70% of global neon production goes into semiconductor manufacturing, and before 2022 Ukraine supplied up to 50% of industry neon before its producers halted exports after the Russian invasion. The article is a member-exclusive news-analysis that reports the vendor's claim and does not include a deployment date, named customer, or independent measurement.

Mistral published Mistral Large 4 in Public Preview on October 6, 2026: an open-weight, general-purpose multimodal model with a granular Mixture-of-Experts architecture, 49B active parameters, 1.05T total parameters, a 1.6B vision encoder, and a 1M-token context window. Listed API pricing shows two tiers, with the lower at $0.68 per million input tokens, $0.07 per million cached input tokens, and $2.09 per million output tokens. Supported features include structured outputs, function calling, document QnA, prefix, batching, and the /v1/agents and /v1/conversations endpoints; the Hacker News thread drew 1,592 points and 965 comments.

Glimpse, which sells image-processing software for CT scanners used in hardware quality control, is launching a new product called Explore for labs and development environments in aerospace, automotive, electronics and medical devices. The company says its pipeline, built around deep learning, compresses and cleans scans to inspect battery cells 10 to 30 times faster — tens of thousands of cells per day instead of a handful — and that a partner-built "super scanner" could complete a scan in a second or two. Glimpse reports over 100 customers including Anker, Lucid and the U.S. Navy and revenue in the "mid seven-figure" range, citing the 2017–2022 Chevy Bolt battery recall that cost LG $1.9 billion as the cost of missed defects.

Mistral unveiled Mistral Large 4 (ML4), nicknamed "le Chonk," a 1-trillion-parameter model it claims is the most capable open model outside China, calling it particularly strong at cyber, coding, manufacturing, finance and multimodal tasks. The CNBC report frames this as Western developers racing to close the capability gap with Chinese open-weight models, and notes Mistral raised a 3 billion euro ($3.4 billion) Series D in September at a 21 billion euro valuation. The article contains no benchmark numbers, license terms, weight-release date, pricing, or hardware requirements.

Flai, which builds AI software for car dealerships, says its agents now book 50,000 sales and service appointments per month across more than 10 of the top 50 US dealer groups, up from a three-person team pitching dealerships during its seed raise a year earlier. CEO Ari Polakof told TechCrunch revenue grew 20x over that period, and the company announced a $27 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, with participation from dealer groups Friedkin Group and Findlay Automotive, Toyota's venture arm, Y Combinator, and First Round Capital. Flai describes itself as AI-powered CRM built from scratch for each dealer, handling calls, texts, emails, outbound campaigns, follow-ups, and escalation alerts to leadership.

CNBC reports, citing two unnamed people familiar with the talks, that DeepSeek is considering expanding its current funding round to as much as 100 billion yuan (about $14.9 billion) — double the 50 billion yuan target it initially set. State-backed funds, investment arms of listed Chinese companies, and VC firms have shown strong interest, while DeepSeek is vetting investors closely, turning away private funds raised from individual investors and keeping the pool largely to government and corporate money. The company began taking outside capital for the first time this year and is preparing for a possible Shanghai listing next year; the process is described as fluid and the amount is not final.

Paramount Skydance's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — covering WBD's cable networks, streaming service and film studio — is expected to close today, October 6, 2026, with the combined company renamed Skydance and trading under the ticker 'SKYD'. Mattel's Ynon Kreiz was named co-CEO of the soon-to-be-combined company alongside the David Ellison-run Paramount. The newsletter headline also teases an 'AI researchers' warning' and 'Musk's return to trillionaire', but the excerpt contains no details on either item.

Meta's agentic AI assistant Muse, fronted by an animated avatar named Jolly and pitched for chores like restaurant reservations, bill payments, and grocery orders, launched with a zero-day flaw that Ars Technica reported let attackers spy on Mac users. In one demo, a tech YouTuber who handed Muse control of their Facebook Marketplace listings found it sold items far below acceptable prices (the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence). The Techdirt write-up by Karl Bode, dated Oct 6 2026, frames it as a privacy and security mess despite Meta's repeated public claims that Muse was built with privacy and security as a priority; the Hacker News thread drew 367 points and 258 comments.

An EV charging company plans to deploy 100,000 Nvidia GPUs in "pods" at its roadside charging sites across the US, aiming to offer what it calls the "world's first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity," according to Tom's Hardware (published 2026-10-06). The available text names no company, no per-site GPU count, no power draw, no cost, no launch timeline, and no customers — only the 100,000-GPU figure and the edge-inference pitch.