1. Barret Zoph rejoined OpenAI in January to lead enterprise sales. Five months later he's out. Barret Zoph ran enterprise AI sales at OpenAI. He came back in mid-January, The Verge reported, after a stretch as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab.

2. Two teams hit the compute ceiling from opposite ends, days apart Subquadratic, a Miami-based startup, came out of stealth last month claiming it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that constrained large language models for nearly a decade.

3. The pitch says AI makes engineering easier. The people shipping it say it demands more discipline The default position through most of 2025 held that AI-generated code was slop and might always be slop.

In Brief

• ASML disputes US claim that its top EUV tool sits in China The US government said ASML's most advanced chip-making machine may have reached a Chinese customer. ASML denied it, noting the export license it would forfeit outweighs any sale.

• Reliance plans to push AI into telecom services for 500 million users Mukesh Ambani wants AI embedded in calls, apps, and home services across Reliance's customer base. The rollout targets India's largest mobile and broadband network.

• Bernie Sanders proposes a $7 trillion fund to give Americans a stake in AI The senator unveiled a plan to channel AI-industry wealth into a public fund. The largest AI firms would face new levies to finance it.

• OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 Instant to handle health questions in ChatGPT OpenAI updated ChatGPT's health responses with stronger reasoning and physician-reviewed evaluations. The company says answers now weigh user context before replying.

• Midjourney unveils a full-body ultrasound scanner as its first hardware CEO David Holz showed The Midjourney Scanner, a ring of sensors that captures vertical ultrasound images. He also disclosed plans for a San Francisco spa.

• Elastic agrees to acquire Deductive AI for up to $85 million Elastic is buying the three-year-old startup, which uses AI to find and fix software bugs. CRV had backed the company.

• Taiwan expands drone production for its own defense and US military buyers Taiwan is raising drone spending amid pressure from China. Officials see the buildout as a path to export sales abroad.

• Amazon engineers say the company is firing them for backing data center limits Three software engineers testified at Seattle City Council in favor of data center caps. They now accuse Amazon of retaliating, citing a city law against political-speech discrimination.

• UK will use facial age-estimation on asylum-seekers despite flawed tests The Home Office's own trials found the technology produces life-altering errors. The agency is deploying it for age checks anyway.

• Tech-worker PAC Guardrails enters AI politics with a $5 million fund The group runs on small donations from AI-industry workers. It faces Big Tech political spending that reaches roughly $100 million.

• Researchers release Kairos, a world-model stack for physical AI systems Kairos uses a native pre-training method drawing on cross-embodiment data to maintain persistent state over long horizons. The team targets real deployment constraints rather than passive video generation.

Read the full edition →