Tootfinder

Anthropic details an experiment on whether AI coding tools shape developer skills, finding that the biggest performance gap appears in debugging tasks (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills

How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

UKRI fellowship funding for exceptional AI researchers currently based outside of the UK - funding to relocate to the UK, establish a highly skilled team and undertake transformational AI research
More info: https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/turing-ai-global-fellowsh…

Turing AI Global Fellowships
This fellowship funding opportunity is for exceptional Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers currently based outside of the UK.

Apple kauft KI-Start-up Q.AI für Milliarden
Apple hat eine neue Firma im Portfolio: Für zwei Milliarden US-Dollar wechselt das KI-Start-up Q.AI den Besitzer. Sein Geschäftsmodell ist spannend.
https://www.

“ Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the U.S”
#ai #adoption

Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the U.S.
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Each week, Metacurity offers our free and premium subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush,
This week's selection covers
--Scam compound captive risks it all to expose its inner workings,
--AI is a core source of geopolitical power and security,
--Regulators should jettison checkbox cyber compliance with innovations,
--AI-led cybersecurity superintelligence i…

Best infosec-related long reads for the week of 1/24/26
Scam compound captive risks it all to expose its inner workings, AI is a core source of geopolitical power and security, Regulators should jettison checkbox cyber compliance with innovations, AI-led cybersecurity superintelligence is coming, AI's dual-use capabilities are transforming cybersecurity

🌳 AI helps find trees in a forest: Researchers achieve 3D forest reconstruction from remote sensing data
#trees

AI helps find trees in a forest: Researchers achieve 3D forest reconstruction from remote sensing data
Existing algorithms can partially reconstruct the shape of a single tree from a clean point-cloud dataset acquired by laser-scanning technologies. Doing the same with forest data has proven far more difficult. But now a team from Purdue University's Department of Computer Science and Institute for Digital Forestry and Germany's Kiel University has introduced a new AI method for isolating and reconstructing forest trees that they call TreeStructor.

Memory chipmakers around the world shed close to $100bn in market value last week, after new research suggested AI systems may require far less hardware than previously expected.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/memory-chip-stocks-slide-af…

Memory chip stocks slide as AI efficiency breakthrough rattles investors
Memory chipmakers around the world shed close to $100bn in market value last week, after new research suggested AI systems may require far less hardware ...

State of AI safety: as capabilities grow and models can monitor other models, issues like adversarial robustness persist and society is still not ready for AI (Boaz Barak/Windows On Theory)
https://windowsontheory.org/2026/03/30/the-state-of-ai-safety-in-fo…

The state of AI safety in four fake graphs
Here is a quick overview of my intuitions on where we are with AI safety in early 2026: So far, we continue to see exponential improvements in capabilities. This is most visible in the famous “METR…

Wer beim Lesen der #KI-Analysen von Ed Zitron an deren Länge scheitert, findet hier dasselbe in kurz und bündig.
How the AI bubble bursts https://martinvol.pe/blog/2026/03/30/how-the-ai-bubbl…

Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Agent Has Serious Security Flaws https://www.404media.co/silicon-valleys-favorite-new-ai-agent-has-serious-security-flaws/

Scott Mabe will speak on 'Gen AI for the Gen X Guy' as part of our DevOpsDay LA track at SCaLE 23x. Full details: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/23x/presentations/gen-ai-gen-x-guy

"Etwa 80 % der Amerikaner sind der Meinung, dass #KI stark reguliert werden sollte, und weniger als 20 % der Amerikaner glauben, dass KI in den nächsten 20 Jahren einen positiven Einfluss auf Amerika haben wird. Das sind schockierende Zahlen, um es gelinde auszudrücken. KI liegt in der öffentlichen Vorstellung nur knapp vor Kinderschändern. Und doch besteht die wichtigste KI-Politik des Weißen H…

The Grand AI Disconnect
It’s coming to the surface now. But it’s a marvel in itself...

The Pope's relationship to God, in Catholic teaching, is as God's chief representative on Earth, the Vicar of Christ, acting as the visible head and spiritual successor to St. Peter, the foundation of the Church.
The only conclusion for Catholics using AI is that God Hates AI.

I've been worried AI will crowd out human voices, and now an AI copy has replaced my 2006 Connected Knowledge site, warping context and displacing the original work online. Can we stop this creeping ensloppification?
https://www.linkedin.…

Since Ai is able to make video, everybody's best friend is a wild animal they rescued.
Stop complaining about Ai, it's saving the wildlife!!

'It is 2025, and seemingly everyone wants us in the humanities to do stuff “with AI,” informed not by what the technology avails but by the hopes it encodes.' Sonja Drimmer on 🔥on Art Forum
https://www.artforum.com/features/generative-ai-st…

Generative AI’s Structure of Feeling
Sonja Drimmer critically examines art historians’ recent embrace of generative AI as a tool for humanities research. 

Checkbox, an AI startup that aims to automate legal intake, raised a $23M Series A led by Touring Capital; Checkbox has 100 clients, including SAP and PepsiCo (Anastasia Santoreneos/Forbes Australia)
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/

Good point, "Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker said artificial intelligence agents embedded within operating systems are eroding the practical security guarantees of end-to-end encryption (E2EE)."
https://cyberinsider.com/signal-presid

Signal president warns AI agents are making encryption irrelevant
Signal president Meredith Whittaker said AI agents embedded within operating systems are eroding the practical security guarantees of E2EE.

Emerging NIST guidance suggests that the practice of treating AI as “just software” for cybersecurity purposes is giving way to more novel approaches to managing AI risks.
Check out my latest CSO piece for a clear guide to NIST's many AI and cyber initiatives.
https://www.

NIST’s AI guidance pushes cybersecurity boundaries
Emerging NIST guidance suggests that the long-standing practice of treating AI as “just software” for cybersecurity purposes is giving way to more novel approaches to managing AI risks.

Pro-AI group Innovation Council Action, praised by David Sacks, plans to spend $100M in the US midterms to drive deregulation and support Trump's AI agenda (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/29/ai-pac-midterms-trump

Scoop: New pro-AI group preps $100M midterm blitz to boost Trump's agenda
The group has the blessing of tech mogul David Sacks.

This is a good listen, investigating what many others have called out as fraudulent dealings by tech companies like #Coreweave, #nscale and #Microsoft and a

UK’s big, risky AI bet – podcast
Reporter Aisha Down explores the UK’s ‘phantom investments’ in AI, and the risk the government has taken in betting so heavily on the technology if it all goes bust

Fun playing ARC-AGI-3 , puzzles that the most advanced AI-models can only solve for 1% 😀
Illustrates how AI models look extremely smart but are at the same time quite dumb.
#AI

🎃 Where Winds Meet Players Are Finding Clever And Sexy Ways To Screw With The Game’s AI NPCs
#games

Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised $125M in 2025, including from a16z and Greg Brockman, to try to shape the US midterms and federal AI regulation (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/30/openai-a16z-cash-ai-super-pac

Exclusive: OpenAI's Brockman and a16Z funnel cash to pro-AI super PAC
The tech industry is loaded and ready to influence elections.

Q&A with Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis on AGI, next breakthroughs like continual learning, his vision for AI glasses, whether AI progress is slowing, more (Alex Kantrowitz/Big Technology)
https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/google-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-946…

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on AI’s Next Breakthroughs, What Counts As AGI, And Google’s AI Glasses Bet
The leader of Google's AI program weighs in on the cutting edge of AI research, Google's plans to put the technology in its products, and the imperative of publishing AI-generated protein structures.

Wishing all our readers a peaceful weekend, but before you head out, don't forget to read today's Metacurity for the most crucial cybersecurity developments you should know, including
--US ODNI ignores her remit and is investigating 2020 election fraud claims,
--US law enforcement are probing if WhatsApp employees can read users' messages,
--Popular AI app exposes millions of users' private messages,
--Darkweb market Empire Market creator pleads guilty,…

US ODNI drops her remit to investigate 2020 election fraud claims
US law enforcement are probing if WhatsApp employees can read users' messages, Popular AI app exposes millions of users' private messages, Darkweb market Empire Market creator pleads guilty, US seizes $400m in darknet crypto mixer Helix's assets, UK safety charity warns about The Com, much more

🤦‍♀️ Women treat AI with greater skepticism than men do, study suggests
#women

Women treat AI with greater skepticism than men do, study suggests
Women perceive artificial intelligence (AI) as riskier than men do, according to a study. Beatrice Magistro and colleagues hypothesized that women are both more exposed to risk from AI and are more averse to risk in general than men. Their work was published in PNAS Nexus.

Ant Group reports 30M MAUs for its AI health chatbot Ant Afu, which integrates appointments, test analysis, and insurance payments within Alipay's ecosystem (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-health-care-is-taking-off-…

AI health care is taking off in China, led by Jack Ma’s Ant Group
Ant’s health chatbot has become a top downloaded app in China as users seek personalized care they can’t get from the overburdened hospitals.

Google's experience in India has become a proving ground to scale AI in education, as the country accounts for the highest global usage of Gemini for learning (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/29/india-is-teaching-google-h…

India is teaching Google how AI in education can scale | TechCrunch
With the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, India is emerging as a key market shaping Google's approach to AI in education.

Some thoughts about companies and people in San Francisco adapting to AI workflows, AI's sycophancy, "cognitive offloading" and "cognitive surrender", and more (Ezra Klein/New York Times)
https://www.n…

Opinion | I Saw Something New in San Francisco
Marshall McLuhan was right about Claude, too.

Sycamore, founded by former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath to let enterprises build, deploy, and monitor AI agents, raised a $65M seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed (Lucinda Shen/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-software-deals…

Exclusive: Former Atlassian exec raises $65M for a secure AI agent operating system
It was founded at the end of last year.

Darren Aronofsky's Primordial Soup debuts its short-form Revolutionary War series, made via Google DeepMind with human voices and distributed by Time Studios (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/da…

Darren Aronofsky AI Revolutionary War Animated Series Used Human Voice Actors
Darren Aronofsky's Primordial Soup used AI to create an animated American Revolution series for Time Studios, but employed real-life human actors for the voices.

Q&A with NYU professor Julian Togelius on his recent paper about LLMs' limitations in playing video games, why coding is a kind of well-designed game, and more (Matthew S. Smith/IEEE Spectrum)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/ai-video-games-llms-togelius-2676614974…

Why Are Large Language Models so Terrible at Video Games?
AI models code simple games, but struggle to play them

Sources: Granola, which makes an AI-based note-taking app, aims to raise $100M led by Index Ventures at a $1B valuation, up from a $250M valuation in May 2025 (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

VCs’ Favorite Note-Taking App Granola In Talks To Hit $1 Billion Valuation
The London-based AI startup aims to raise a new round of at least $100 million led by Index Ventures, making the popular note-taking app the latest AI unicorn.

After Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub, referencing Raycast, GitHub says it "disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback" (Sean Endicott/Windows Central)
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-ap

Copilot is now injecting ads into GitHub pull requests. It's a disaster.
A developer caught Copilot adding promotional "tips" to code descriptions, highlighting a messy new era of AI slop.

Sources: OpenAI is laying the groundwork for a public listing in Q4 2026, holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and growing its finance team (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-ipo-anthropic-race-69f0…

Deezer makes its AI music detection tool available for businesses to buy and says daily deliveries of AI tracks averaged 60K in January, ~39% of total uploads (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/870186/deezer-ai-music-detection-commercial…

Deezer opens its AI music detection tool to other platforms
Deezer is making its AI song-detecting tool commercially available, allowing other platforms to identify and tag tracks not created by humans.

Sources: C3.ai is in talks to merge with Automation Anywhere, which would go public in the deal; C3.ai's market cap is now ~$1.7B, a tenth of its 2020 valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/c3-ai-talks-merge-startup-autom…

C3.AI in Talks to Merge with Startup Automation Anywhere
C3.AI, founded by tech industry veteran Thomas Siebel, is in talks to merge with privately held startup Automation Anywhere, which will effectively go public in the deal, according to people familiar with the discussions. C3.AI, which sells AI to large companies and government agencies, was the ...

AI has led some employers like L'Oréal to return to in-person assessments during recruiting, as senior HR leaders see a steep rise in AI-generated applications (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/bcc3becc-859e-4628-b6a7-b4788e6f20a6
…

How the music industry is split over AI; some labels signed licensing deals for AI that mirror revenue splits they use with YouTube for user-generated content (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/10e4…

Sources: ByteDance and Alibaba both plan to release flagship AI models around China's mid-February Lunar New Year holiday, including ByteDance's Doubao 2.0 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bytedance-alibaba-…

ByteDance, Alibaba to Launch New Models in Race for AI Supremacy in China
The battle for AI dominance in China is reaching new heights. Tech giants ByteDance and Alibaba Group are both poised to release their next flagship AI models around the Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February, in what could be the most consequential battle in the country’s tech sector. ByteDance ...

Following UK CMA's proposals, Google says it is exploring controls to let websites opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode (Barry Schwartz/Search Engine Roundtable)
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-opt-out-of-search-ai-features-40831.html

Google Exploring Ways To Allow Sites To Opt Out Of AI Overviews & AI Mode
Google just announced it is looking into ways to allow websites to specifically opt out of Google using its content in the Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. This comes b

Google launches Project Genie, which lets users create interactive worlds using Genie 3, Nano Banana Pro, and Gemini, for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/869726/google-ai-project-genie-3-world-mode…

Google’s AI helped me make bad Nintendo knockoffs
Google is launching Project Genie, an app that lets users test its Genie 3 AI world model, and I got to test it.

Tel Aviv-based Sett, which builds AI agents to automate game marketing, raised a $30M Series B led by Greenfield Partners, bringing its total funding to $57M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rjxbyqisze

Sett secures $30 million Series B to automate game marketing with AI agents
The Israeli startup targets billions spent on user acquisition with agent-based automation.

Filing: Chinese AI chipmaker Axera aims to raise up to ~$379.2M in a Hong Kong IPO, offering 104.9M shares at ~$3.61 each; trading expected to start February 10 (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific

Chinese AI firms are leading a wave of IPOs in Hong Kong, where at least 25 companies debuted in December 2025, the busiest month for deals since November 2019 (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

How the AI data center boom boosted Caterpillar's power and energy unit; generator sales are up 28% YoY through Sept. 2025, after growing 22% to $7.8B in 2024 (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/caterpillar-generator-sales-…

Filing: Chinese AI chip startup Biren raises ~$717M in its Hong Kong IPO; institutional and retail tranches were oversubscribed ~26x and ~2,348x, respectively (Himanshi Akhand/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific…

Sources: ByteDance plans to spend about $14B on Nvidia's AI chips in 2026, an increase of about 18% from 2025 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3338191/bytedance-pour-u…

Exclusive | ByteDance to pour US$14 billion into Nvidia chips in 2026 as AI demand surges
Chinese unicorn’s computing needs have climbed across its portfolio of popular apps, cloud unit Volcano Engine and large language models.

Sources: Apple has lost at least four more of its AI researchers in recent weeks in addition to a top Siri executive; most moved to Meta or Google DeepMind (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sandisk reports Q2 revenue up 61% YoY to $3.03B, vs. $2.69B est., and net income up 672% to $803M, as AI drives demand upward; SNDK jumps 11% after hours (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/sand…

Perplexity signs a deal with Microsoft; sources say the $750M, three-year commitment will let Perplexity deploy AI models through Microsoft's Foundry service (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-29…

Taiwan's GDP rose 12.68% in Q4 2025, its fastest quarterly growth since 1987; full-year GDP grew 8.63%, topping the 7.5% forecast on AI demand for tech products (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30…

Filing: SpaceX is seeking FCC approval to launch 1M satellites into space; SpaceX claims the fleet will orbit the Earth and use the sun to power AI data centers (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-de…

Sources: Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100B in OpenAI has stalled after some inside Nvidia expressed doubts about the deal (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-100-billion-…

Inside the rise and fall of Sora, whose team worked separately from OpenAI's core research team, as OpenAI shuts down Sora and redirects compute to other tasks (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-sudden-fall-of-openais-mo…

Poetiq, which leverages existing LLMs to create "expert agents" for specific tasks, and spent just $40K to achieve high ARC-AGI-2 scores, raised a $45.8M seed (Ian Krietzberg/Puck)
https://puck.news/how-poetiqs-six-person-team-beat-google-at-ai/

OpenAI financial data: its stock-based pay averaged ~$1.5M per employee in 2025, ~7x Google pre-IPO and ~34x the average pay of other pre-IPO peers, per Equilar (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-i…

US-based AI startup Arcee releases Trinity Large, a 400B-parameter open-weight model that it says compares to Meta's Llama 4 Maverick 400B on some benchmarks (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny

Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta's Llama | TechCrunch
30-person startup Arcee AI has released a 400B model called Trinity, which it says is one of the biggest open source foundation models from a U.S. company.

Samsung reports Q4 revenue up 24% YoY to ~$65.6B, vs. ~$65.28B est., and operating profit up 200% to ~$14.06B, driven by memory chip price surge and HBM demand (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/samsung-record-q4-2025-profit-…

Samsung profit triples, beating estimates as AI chip demand fuels memory shortage
Samsung Electronics reported an over three-fold surge in fourth-quarter profits, hitting a new record and beating analysts' estimates.

A San Francisco jury finds former Google engineer Linwei Ding guilty of stealing trade secrets related to AI chip technology to build a startup in China (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ex-google-engineer-guilty-…

Ex-Google Worker Guilty of Stealing AI Tech for Chinese Firm (1)
A former Google engineer was convicted Thursday of economic espionage and trade secrets theft for taking hundreds of the company’s confidential documents on AI chip technology to build a startup in China.

SK Hynix surpassed Samsung in annual operating profit for the first time in 2025; SK Hynix posted a record profit of ~$33B in 2025 while Samsung posted ~$30.5B (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/29/sk-hynix-beats-samsung-2025-profit-ai-memor…

SK Hynix overtakes Samsung in annual profit for the first time as AI reshapes rivalry
SK Hynix beats rival Samsung Electronics in profits for 2025 for the first time ever, as the memory maker retains a lead in AI products.

Paris-based AI startup Mistral raised $830M in its debut debt financing to build Nvidia-powered data centers across Europe; Mistral plans to spend €4B in total (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/229f4f59-d518-4e00-abd6-5a5b727cd2aa

Miami-based Indigo, which uses AI-powered underwriting tech to provide medical liability insurance to physicians, raised a $50M Series B led by Rubicon Founders (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/health-tech-deal

Exclusive: Indigo raises $50M for medical liability insurance
The company is open to M&A that would help it enter credentialing or tucking in competitors that add scale.

Peter Steinberger rebrands his AI agent project to OpenClaw, its second name change after Anthropic forced a shift from Clawdbot to Moltbot (Ron Schmelzer/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/01/30/mo…

Moltbot Molts Again And Becomes OpenClaw, Pushback And Concerns Grow
OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot and Clawdbot, gets another rename while security, installation, and the increasing prevalence of scammers and grifters grow.

Sources: bids for GroqCloud, Groq's AI inference platform, are expected to exceed $1B after Nvidia's $20B non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/nvidia-

Anthropic details how NASA engineers used Claude to plot out the route for Perseverance rover to navigate a ~400 meter path on the Martian surface (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/features/claude-on-mars

Claude on Mars
The first AI-assisted drive on another planet. Claude helped NASA’s Perseverance rover travel four hundred meters on Mars.

OpenAI details its custom internal-only GPT‑5.2-powered AI data agent that allows its employees to do natural language data analysis across 600 PB of data (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/inside-our-in-house-data-agent

Sources: China has given DeepSeek approval to buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips but imposes regulatory conditions, which are still being finalized (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-conditionally-…