AI Weekly Malaysia

Grab has spent roughly US$2.5 billion (S$3.2 billion) on acquisitions so far this year, with most of that going to financial services, especially lending, after excluding its Taiwan expansion. Disclosed deals include Stash at US$425 million, foodpanda Taiwan at US$600 million, and Atome Financial at US$1.49 billion for a 60% stake. Atome operates in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand; the excerpt cuts off after listing those markets.

Ryt Bank enabled Apple Pay on 6 October 2026, letting users add the Ryt Bank Visa Debit Card — including the virtual card, no physical card required — to iPhone and Apple Watch; SoyaCincau reports it as the first licensed digital bank in Malaysia to support Apple Pay, after Ryt added Google Wallet in January 2026. Separately, Ryt Bank said its eKYC system now supports the new MyKad rolled out on 17 September 2026, after many eKYC systems had trouble identifying it because the redesign moved the chip to the rear and the cardholder photo from right to left. Ryt Bank said it worked with its eKYC technology provider on the fix, prioritising affected customers' pending applications.

GSMA has appointed Nik Rizal Kamil, Group CEO and MD of Axiata Group Bhd, to its Board for a two-year term starting January 2027. The announcement says Axiata’s leadership contributes to GSMA board-level committees and task forces, bringing ASEAN and South Asian perspectives to mobile industry discussions on topics including 5G, AI, cloud, digital inclusion, spectrum, and regulation.

The link titled "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language" resolves to a spam page: the fetched text is nothing but a link farm of adult cam-site and porn-tube URLs with no Common Lisp argument, code, or benchmarks anywhere in it. The Hacker News submission did draw real attention — 205 points and 246 comments on thread 49973598 — but that discussion is the only substantive artifact; the article body itself is unusable. There is nothing here to summarize about Lisp, tooling, or language design.

Tom's Hardware highlights a rare deal on a 16TB Seagate Expansion Desktop drive at $0.02 per GB, saving $100 ahead of Prime Big Deal Days. The title describes it as shuckable, but the excerpt provides no further specs, exact price, warranty details, or independent testing.

Malay Mail reports that Jacob Coxon, described in the article as a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee, testified before the New York City Council that leading AI companies cannot stop their models from pursuing objectives they were not assigned, and called the industry's approach reckless. The article says he warned that without safeguards AI could lead to human extinction. The text is truncated mid-sentence after 'Highlighting a recent', so no specifics on models, incidents, or proposed safeguards are given.

What changes when Claude Code runs on its own machine, the workflows where that pays off, and how to connect GitHub on the first try.

Teams that run on Google Workspace can now bring Claude into their files or work on their files directly from Claude, with our new add-on and Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides connectors (in beta).

Security teams at Comcast and Booz Allen used Claude Mythos-class models through Project Glasswing to find, validate, and fix vulnerabilities their existing scanners missed.

Anthropic announced on Oct 6, 2026 an expanded Cyber Verification Program that merges its earlier Project Glasswing and CVP efforts into one offering with three access tiers. All tiers include access to the most capable models — Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1 — and to new models going forward. Defense Access covers SOC/incident response, malware reverse-engineering, and vulnerability analysis/validation, and is open to company security teams, nonprofits, universities, government bodies, critical-infrastructure operators of any size (regional hospitals, municipal utilities), smaller security firms, open-source maintainers, and individual researchers with a track record of reported vulnerabilities; Anthropic says it aims to respond to applications within a few days. Red Team Access adds authorized pentesting and red-teaming; the details of the third tier are cut off in the provided excerpt.

In a quote collected by Simon Willison on 5 October 2026, Felix Rieseberg describes a change to Anthropic's Cowork: the old version ran model inference in the cloud but executed tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM shipped to the user's computer, while the new version runs both model inference and the VM in the cloud, giving each session its own sandbox that does not share state with other sessions. When the VM needs something on the user's device, such as a file, the desktop app is responsible for that file-access tool call. Rieseberg cites user complaints about the local VM's disk, battery and performance cost, and about work stopping when the laptop is closed.

Tom's Hardware published a deals roundup titled 'Get into a 32GB DDR5 memory kit for less this Big Deals Day with these picks', promising the cheapest 32GB DDR5 kits available plus AMD- and Intel-tailored options. The retrieved page text contains only site navigation, membership prompts, and newsletter boilerplate — no kit names, prices, capacities, speeds, timings, or retailer links appear in the excerpt. There is nothing concrete to summarize beyond the headline claim.

Senior leaders from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta were scheduled to testify under oath at a New York City Council hearing on Monday, Oct 5, 2026, starting 11 a.m. ET, according to City Council Speaker Julie Menin. It is a rare 'Council Committee of the Whole' session, with all 51 members expected to attend, and the companies were asked to explain AI risks and weigh in on possible legislative solutions. The article cites September warnings from industry researchers that OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build models that could cause catastrophic harm, but reports no proposed rules, votes, or outcomes from the hearing itself.

Tom's Hardware reports that Raptor Lake CPUs have hit all-time low prices during Amazon's Prime Big Deals Day, with the article framing it as finally a good time to buy because inventory has seemingly stabilized. The only concrete claims in the available text are the all-time-low pricing and the stabilized inventory; no specific model numbers, prices, or benchmark numbers were accessible in the fetched page, which is mostly paywall and newsletter boilerplate.

On 28 September 2026, example.com—the IANA-reserved documentation domain—got a redesign that cycles its purpose message through English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish every 5 seconds via JavaScript, with character-by-character opacity transitions and an SVG book icon. IANA says it split the page into basic content plus a separate JS file so automated traffic that does not fetch JavaScript uses less bandwidth. The page still says it is not a service and should not be relied on for testing or monitoring.

Nieman Lab reports that ChatGPT is not just imitating The New Yorker's cartoon style; it is also generating fake New Yorker cartoons that carry real cartoonists' signatures, falsely attributing AI-generated images to those artists. The article, by Andrew Deck and published Oct. 5, 2026, says Nieman Lab commissioned cartoonist Brendan Loper to draw a response after ChatGPT reproduced his signature. The Hacker News thread on the story has 183 points and 79 comments.

After using Node heavily this month on a SvelteKit client project, David Bushell writes that he is moving back from Deno to Node because modern ECMAScript support and APIs mean he no longer sees require(). He uses FNM for Node version switching and PNPM with npm/npx aliases, plus pnpm-workspace.yaml settings minimumReleaseAge: 1440 and trustPolicy: no-downgrade to delay malicious releases and avoid downgrades. Node can now run TypeScript, but Node.js v26.10.0 docs say type stripping is unsupported for files under node_modules, so TypeScript packages cannot be published to NPM under this restriction.

As fetched, this Ars Technica page contains only cookie-consent boilerplate — no article body, no CVE identifier, no affected versions, and no technical detail. The only substantive information is the headline: a vulnerability in agents from Google and others is said to expose a 'structural flaw' in MCP, with the alternate headline calling MCP for agent-to-agent comms 'the riskiest protocol you've never heard of.' Because the body text is missing, nothing about the flaw's mechanism, severity, or fix can be verified from this item.

CNBC's Jim Cramer said Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta are masking pressure from surging Treasury yields after the Nasdaq rose about 1% to a record and the S&P 500 gained 0.66%, finishing 0.3% below its Aug. 13 record close. The 10-year Treasury yield rose above 5.34% and the 30-year approached 5.7%, while Meta gained 1.9%, Microsoft added 1.5%, and Nvidia rose 2.1% to its first record close since May. Cramer called the stock-bond disconnect a 'tremendous distortion' and said the bond market is an important signal for where stocks could head next.

Nokia CEO Justin Hotard told CNBC's "The Tech Download" podcast that AI data center customers would build "2x faster" if they could, saying "I don't think you can say in any manner we're overbuilding today." He named shortages of key memory chips and energy as the constraints holding the buildout back. Nokia has pivoted toward AI infrastructure — selling technology that connects racks of chips inside data centers and interconnects data centers — and Hotard says that demand holds up even without new frontier models, as labs discuss slowing development pace.

Lucid Motors built 2,954 EVs in Q3 2026, down 54% year over year and its lowest quarterly output since Q1 2025, marking a third straight decline. It delivered 3,806 vehicles, roughly flat quarter over quarter and down about 200 from Q3 2025, and has built more than it delivered in five of the last six quarters. New CEO Silvio Napoli is cutting around 1,500 jobs, removing a second Arizona factory shift, targeting $1.4 billion in savings, and delaying the sub-$50,000 Cosmos, while Rivian shipped nearly 20,000 vehicles in Q3 with the R2.

Drew Edwards' Flatten SF is a browser-based tool that finds flat routes between any two points in San Francisco by computing over 160,000 street segments with USGS 1 m lidar elevation and the Overture/OpenStreetMap street graph. A slider exposes the trade-off between shortest and flattest routes, treating a foot of climb as costing 200 ft of walking and using cumulative elevation gain; stairways are allowed on foot but excluded for bikes, and place search is built in offline. The Hacker News discussion has 162 points and 54 comments.

Q Labs Research (Samip Dahal, Bishwas Mandal, Serdar Gülbahar, Akshay Vegesna, October 2026) published 'Dust', a zeroth-order pretraining method that perturbs activations independently at every token so each token acts as a virtual population member evaluated in one forward pass. The authors claim it is the first zeroth-order method competitive with backprop at pretraining transformer LMs, and report that from 1M tokens up it is roughly 10^3 to 10^4 times more efficient than a transformer implementation of EGGROLL, a state-of-the-art evolution-strategies method, based on their extrapolations. They also report larger models are more population-efficient, with a 243M-parameter model beating a 120x smaller one at most population sizes, and alignment with backprop gradients holding up to 1B tokens tested.

Vals AI Research published two room-temperature antiferromagnetic semiconductor candidates that it says were found by a team of Claude Opus 5.5 agents working with the author, Geby Jaff. One candidate is a compound the team designed; the other is a material first made in 1999. Both are predictions of zero net magnetism with spin-sorted electrons — the property spintronic memory such as MRAM wants — and the post ships the full calculations, the code, and a list of known caveats. The Hacker News thread drew 195 points and 151 comments.