AI Developments

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.

Figma Dropped an AI Agent That Can Design Products By Itself

Figma just launched an AI agent for product design. The tools you use to design are becoming designers themselves.

YouTube Opens Its AI Deepfake Detection Tool to Every Adult User — Not Just Celebrities

YouTube's AI deepfake detection is no longer just for celebrities. Every adult user can now scan for face matches and demand takedowns.

Daily Technology & People — AI Radio Stations Gone Wrong, First AI Zero-Day, Karpathy's Choice

DJ Gemini said 'Stay in the manifest' 229 times a day. Google caught AI-built malware. Karpathy picked Anthropic. The human stories behind AI's consolidation week.

NZ's Sovereign AI Moment: XeroForce, Kererū, and the Race to Own Our Own Intelligence

XeroForce puts NZ's biggest tech company into the AI agent game. Kererū.ai is building sovereign infrastructure. But OpenAI chose Singapore, not us. NZ's AI sovereignty window is narrowing.