Google Accepted 6,000 Community Contributions to Gemini CLI — Then Shut It Down

Google accepted 6,000+ pull requests from open-source contributors over nearly a year for Gemini CLI. Then on May 19, announced withdrawing API access for all non-paying users. Free users, Pro/Ultra subscribers lose access June 18. Enterprise customers keep it.

Researchers Left AI Agents Alone in a Virtual Town for 15 Days — It Did Not Go Well

Fifteen days. No supervision. AI agents formed governments, started relationships, set fires, and spiralled into chaos. The study is a warning shot for anyone betting on autonomous AI agents.

China's $16.5B AI Micro-Drama Machine Just Ate Hollywood — NZ Could Build the Next One

China dropped 50,000 AI-generated micro-dramas in a single month — more titles than Netflix has ever released. One cost $450 to make and got 500 million views. And NZ's film industry is uniquely positioned to do the same thing in English.

Cohere Open-Sources Command A+ — The Most Capable Fully Open-Weight Model Just Went Apache 2.0

Command A+ is 218B parameters, Apache 2.0, runs on two GPUs, and cites its sources. Cohere just changed the open-source AI landscape — and the closed-source incumbents should be nervous.

Daily Technology & People — AI Culture War Hits Literature, Fake Weather Maps in NZ, Wozniak Roasts AI Hype

The AI culture war reaches literature, fake AI weather maps endanger Kiwis, and Wozniak has some thoughts about actual intelligence.

DeepSeek Is Building Its Own Claude Code — And China Wants the Whole Stack

DeepSeek is recruiting a Harness team in Beijing to build a native agentic coding tool. The model's already cheap enough to win. Now they want the tools too.

Brett Adcock's Hark Raises $700M Series A at $6B Valuation — The Biggest AI Hardware Bet Yet

Figure AI's founder just raised $700M for Hark — a secretive AI hardware company that emerged from stealth two months ago. At a $6B valuation on day one, either Adcock knows something nobody else does, or the AI hardware bubble just got another inflation.

Māori Built an AI Voice Model Without Giving Big Tech Their Language — And It's a Blueprint for Every Indigenous Community

A Waikato team built a te reo Māori TTS system owned entirely by the community. No Big Tech scraping, no external servers, no giving away your language.

Daily Technology & People: May 22, 2026 — When the CEO Says the Quiet Part Loud

Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5, Spark Agents, Omni World Model, and a $100/Month AI Subscription

Google's I/O 2026 was a firehose: cheaper Gemini 3.5 models, a general-purpose AI agent called Spark, a world model called Omni, and a $100/month premium tier. The agentic era is here.

AI Can Now Pass the Turing Test Better Than a Human. What Were We Expecting?

AI just passed the Turing test better than humans. The real question is what the Turing test actually tests anymore.

Daily Tech & People — Nobel Laureate Admits Using AI, Google AI Glasses Return, Agent Guardrails Beat Raw Scale

A Nobel laureate's AI confession and walkback. Google Glass, now with Gemini. And proof that guardrails matter more than scale for agents.