Google axed the engineer who pre‑empted its own product

Stockholm’s Fika Jobs just closed a $4 million pre‑seed round to build a video‑first hiring platform where AI agents conduct 10‑minute interview clips. By turning AI‑generated answers into short video profiles, the service aims to let employers scout communication skills and cultural fit far earlier than a résumé ever could.

Robotics startup HaloBraid, founded by Harvard alum Yinka Ogunbiyi, raised $7 million in a seed round led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. The funding will launch a braiding‑assistant device that lets stylists hand off braids to a robot, shrinking sessions that can last up to 12 hours into minutes. The tech aims to ease stylists' strain and meet consumer demand for faster braids.

A Google Workspace developer relations engineer built an open‑source, AI‑friendly CLI that instantly scraped Google’s Discovery Service and went viral on Hacker News. Two days later Google announced an official CLI, and the engineer was fired, a stark reminder that internal side projects can clash with corporate control.

A Detroit pension fund sued Uber’s board, accusing executives of knowingly cutting compliance corners that enabled thousands of driver sexual‑assault lawsuits. The plaintiffs seek personal compensation from leaders and tighter oversight, flagging a stark governance risk for the rideshare giant.

Meta suspended its Model Compatibility Initiative, a tool that logged keystrokes and screen content, after an internal breach let the data roam across the company. The pause signals leadership’s misstep in employee‑monitoring and raises fresh concerns about privacy, trust, and AI‑training practices at big tech.

Mozilla’s Brian Grinstead showed how a simple Claude‑Code harness, combined with a goal‑loop pipeline, helped triage tens of thousands of files and ship 423 security patches in one month, including a 15‑year‑old bug. The approach proves that structured LLM workflows can rival traditional fuzzing teams, and is openly reusable.

Apple has taken over the community‑run Swift Package Index, the go‑to registry for over 10,000 Swift packages. The move promises deeper investment in testing, security and scale, while keeping the service open‑source and unchanged for developers today.

Meta is building a standalone smartphone app called Arena that lets users trade on political, sports and entertainment outcomes using a video‑game‑style points system, with real money possible later. Zuckerberg plans to drive traffic from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, expanding Meta beyond social networking into information markets.

Boris Cherny unveiled a new AI loop where multiple agents continuously refactor and merge code without human prompts. By authorizing a swarm to run in the background, developers can hand off routine maintenance and let AI iterate indefinitely, accelerating productivity and lowering oversight costs.

Microsoft has locked in a 20-year power purchase agreement with Chevron to run a 2.67 GW natural-gas plant in West Texas, dedicated to its AI and cloud data centers. The co‑located facility, dubbed Project Kilby, will emit over 13 million tons of CO₂, challenging the tech giant’s 2030 carbon‑free pledge.

OpenAI launched Patch the Planet, a Daybreak initiative built with Trail of Bits, HackerOne and Calif to pair its newest cyber‑focused models with expert security engineers. The program scouts high‑impact open‑source projects, validates vulnerabilities, builds patches and hands over reusable workflows, cutting maintainer workload while tightening the software supply chain.

MoEngage just bought San‑Francisco AI startup Aampe, adding a reinforcement‑learning engine that gives each user a dedicated autonomous AI agent. The tech lets marketers decide goals while agents choose content, timing, channel and frequency for millions of customers in real time, promising true 1:1 personalization at scale.

A new Strat​ech​ery analysis warns that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron could see their market dominance erode as China scales its own memory fabs. At the same time, Microsoft’s cloud revenue hinges on adopting Chinese AI models, creating a strategic dependency risk.