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💻 Apple's first touchscreen MacBook nears
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- Apple will reveal its first touchscreen MacBook Pro at an event called "Pro and tell" in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 28, reversing years of saying it wouldn't blend the iPad and Mac experiences.
- The touchscreen MacBook Pros are expected to add a Dynamic Island interface like the iPhone's, plus a sharper OLED display, both firsts for a Mac, while running the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips as March's models.
- Apple retail stores are set to start selling the new machines on Friday, November 6, following a stretch of recent launches that included the HomePod mini 2 and an updated Apple TV.
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🚫 US bans DeepSeek from federal agencies
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- The Department of Homeland Security has ordered all federal civilian agencies to strip out artificial intelligence technology from the Chinese company DeepSeek, warning the tools could hand the Chinese government access to American government systems.
- The order, posted on the Federal Register today, bars agencies from buying DeepSeek products and forces them to pull any affiliated software, including third-party services built with the app, citing risks like digitally fingerprinting users and sending sensitive data to China.
- The crackdown follows DeepSeek's 2025 R1 model, which was trained on weaker chips far more cheaply yet beat OpenAI and Anthropic on several tests; earlier bans came from the Commerce Department, the U.S. Navy, and New York State.
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🪖 US army builds AI to hack enemy networks
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- The U.S. Army is reportedly building a program called ECHOTRIBBLE that would send out self-replicating AI agents to move through enemy networks, find targets, and "neutralize" them before erasing themselves, according to a report by The Intercept.
- Leaked Army Cyber Command documents describe the agents working like computer worms, spreading across different operating systems, operating in cloud and air-gapped systems, acting with little human oversight, and hiding any transmissions to avoid leaving traces behind.
- Security experts warn the agents could stray from their path and damage civilian systems, and the early-stage project recently narrowed 65 vendor whitepapers down to five candidates during a virtual assessment held from October 6 to October 8.
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🇨🇳 China's tech giants order $35B in Nvidia chips
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- ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly placed orders worth over $35 billion for more than 3 million of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs, a card that complies with U.S. export rules for China.
- Priced at around $11,400 each, the RTX Pro 5500 carries the same number of CUDA cores as the flagship RTX 5090 but adds 84GB of memory, making it useful for AI work that Chinese buyers can legally import.
- Nvidia reportedly told partners it can fill only 5% to 10% of the demand, since it expects to make just 3 million of these cards globally in 2027, far short of what the three firms ordered.
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🕵️ FBI finds Saudi gov docs on OpenAI spy
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- A federal court agreed on Monday to keep former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan in custody, after the FBI found a folder named "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone tied to accusations he bugged a secret conference room.
- Prosecutors say Alfozan planted listening devices to steal the lab's secrets, stored photos of a second bug on his phone, and traded WhatsApp messages with a member of the Saudi royal family while seeking to return home.
- The US calls him a flight risk, noting the Saudi government paid for a one-way Riyadh ticket for his family, who left after his arrest on another government-funded flight to Doha, Qatar.
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🚗 Waymo plans to quintuple fleet to 20,000
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- Waymo wants to grow its self-driving fleet fivefold, from 4,000 cars today to 20,000 by the end of 2027, with a stop at 8,000 by the close of this year, people familiar with the plans say.
- The company is paying for the expansion with $5 billion it borrowed from private credit lenders, its first debt raised without a guarantee from parent Google, to grow across the US and internationally.
- Waymo already runs in 15 US cities and is adding Toronto, San Diego, Tampa and San Antonio, and it has ordered thousands of cars from China, including rebranded versions of a Zeekr vehicle made by Geely.
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