Tootfinder

South Korea reopens a program letting AI talent fulfill their military obligations by doing research in corporate labs instead of conventional military service (Jo He-rim/The Korea Herald)
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10879596

Korea reopens military-service alternative for AI talent - The Korea Herald
South Korea will allow AI researchers to fulfill their military obligations at large corporate laboratories from 2027, reopening a route closed for 14 years. Bu

Cloudflare debuts Clairic, a System One-class extraction model it says processes unstructured data faster, more cheaply, and more accurately than normal LLMs (Cloudflare)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/clairic-extraction-model/

Introducing Clairic, a new System One class of extraction models
Clairic is a new model from Cloudflare that is a System One extraction modeI, capable of extracting, computing, estimating, and forecasting data from unstructured inputs.

OpenAI says its new models show major performance leaps in low-resource legacy languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic, used by banks and governments (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/low-resource-programming-languages

Samsung announces a virtual Galaxy event for August 27 at 8am ET, where the Galaxy S26 FE is expected (Alan Friedman/PhoneArena)
https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-announces-event-for-next-week_id182692

MiniMax launches M3.1 Flash, saying it delivers "a generational leap" in agentic tasks, coding, computer use, and cybersecurity, with weights due October 23 (MiniMax)
https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-m31f

MiniMax M3.1 Flash: Redefining Agent Performance and Cost - MiniMax Research
Today, we officially roll out MiniMax M3.1 Flash. As a next-generation Flash model, M3.1 Flash delivers a generational leap in agentic tasks, coding, Computer Use and cybersecurity, while making online inference nearly three times faster and reducing usage costs by 70%.

Analysis: London fell from 7th to last place out of 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed from 2021 to 2026; 5G adoption has outrun 5G capacity (Luke Kehoe/Ookla)
https://www.ookla.com/articles/london-mobile-2026

London's mobile networks are running out of room | Ookla®
London has fallen from seventh to last among 18 European capitals for median mobile download speed. See how commuter demand and limits on new sites hold it back.

German insurance giant Munich Re agrees to acquire cyber insurance provider At-Bay for $575M; At-Bay has raised $276M and was last valued at $1.35B in 2021 (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/3icwf2pbx

Munich Re to acquire Israeli startup At-Bay for $575 million
The German insurance giant is buying the cyber insurtech at less than half its 2021 valuation, as insurers increasingly seek to combine coverage with technology that can prevent cyber losses.

Reconstructed code from Flock's login pages shows a new AI-powered system, called OS Investigate, that integrates license plate scans, case files, and more (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.

A profile of Sarah Guo, Greylock's youngest GP before founding Conviction in 2022, which has since backed six of the 21 AI-native companies now worth over $10B (Dom Cooke/Colossus)
https://colossus.com/article/sarah-guo-conviction/

Sarah's Wager
Sarah Guo built Conviction into the venture firm closest to the AI frontier. Now she's betting against its biggest companies.

Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-2.1, a 7B open-weight model it says outperforms most closed-source models, with native transparency and up to ten reference images (Qwen)
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-2.1

Qwen
Qwen offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.