Morning Skim

AI

Jeff Dean and Google's top AI minds quit to launch Discovery Loop

Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals are leaving Google and DeepMind to start Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation aiming to automate scientific research; backers include Radical Ventures, Khosla, and even Alphabet.

Why it matters: Losing its most decorated researchers is a serious brain drain for Google's AI program.

Dive deeper → TechCrunch

Anthropic starts building its own AI chips

Anthropic is assembling a team to design custom AI chips so it can co-design hardware and models for speed and efficiency, even as it leans on AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD; Samsung is reportedly a candidate manufacturer.

Why it matters: Owning silicon would cut a top lab's dependence on scarce third-party accelerators.

Dive deeper → TechCrunch

Tech

Snowflake hacker pleads guilty to breaches touching 100 million people

Connor Moucka, 26, of Ontario pleaded guilty to fraud and identity-theft charges over the 2024 Snowflake intrusions that hit at least 165 organizations and more than 100 million people, using old stolen passwords against accounts with MFA switched off; he faces up to 30 years.

Why it matters: It underscores how unrotated credentials and missing MFA remain the cheapest way into big cloud data.

Dive deeper → The Hacker News

Chinese-made routers ship with a factory backdoor that hands out root

Researchers found a factory-installed backdoor dubbed ENDLESSDOORS in at least 20 Zbtlink router models across every one of the 21 available firmware images, beaconing to Chinese servers every 35 seconds and offering an unauthenticated root shell.

Why it matters: A pre-installed, no-login root door in networking gear is a supply-chain nightmare.

Dive deeper → The Hacker News

Business

SoftBank borrows $10 billion against its OpenAI stake

SoftBank arranged a two-year, $10 billion margin loan secured by its OpenAI shares from lenders including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Mizuho, on top of an earlier $40 billion bridge loan toward roughly $65 billion of planned OpenAI investment.

Why it matters: It shows how deeply SoftBank is leveraging one AI bet to fund the rest of its empire.

Dive deeper → Investing.com

Memory and AI stocks slide as earnings test the rally

Western Digital fell 13% and SanDisk 5.4% despite beating guidance, and Asia's KOSPI closed down 4.6% with SK Hynix off 10.4%, as investors questioned AI capital-spending payoffs after a red-hot run.

Why it matters: The sharp unwind signals nerves about how much of the AI boom is already priced in.

Dive deeper → Investing.com

Science

567-million-year-old fossils push back the dawn of animal life

More than 100 fossils found in Canada's Mackenzie Mountains, the first White Sea-type assemblage in North America, show animal movement and sexual reproduction began 5 to 10 million years earlier than thought, possibly in deep stable oceans rather than shallow coasts.

Why it matters: It reshapes where and when complex animals first emerged.

Dive deeper → ScienceDaily

A THC pill erased PTSD nightmares for more than a third of patients

In a 10-week double-blind trial of over 170 PTSD patients at Charite in Berlin, prescription dronabinol cut nightmare severity more than placebo, and over a third of those treated reported no nightmares at all.

Why it matters: It offers a rare option for one of PTSD's most stubborn, treatment-resistant symptoms.

Dive deeper → ScienceDaily

World

US refunds $100 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court struck down

After the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump overstepped emergency powers to tax more than 90 countries, US customs has begun dispersing about $100 billion in tariff refunds, though steel, auto, and copper duties under a separate 1962 law remain.

Why it matters: It is a rare judicial rollback of a signature trade policy, with tens of billions flowing back to importers.

Dive deeper → Al Jazeera

Russian overnight strikes kill six in Ukraine as the drone war widens

Russian attacks killed at least six people in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions overnight, Moscow said it downed 605 Ukrainian drones over its territory and Crimea, and Ukraine struck two Russian oil refineries deep inside Russia.

Why it matters: The escalating long-range drone exchanges show the war grinding on despite diplomacy.

Dive deeper → Al Jazeera

Culture

New Radicals return with their first song in 28 years

New Radicals released "One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!)", the title track for a coming romantic comedy with Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner and their first original since 1998; frontman Gregg Alexander mostly left the spotlight after 1999 to write for other artists.

Why it matters: It is a genuine reappearance from a one-hit-wonder act that walked away at its peak.

Dive deeper → Consequence

JAY-Z drops his first rap verse since 2022 on a Beyonce remix

JAY-Z delivered his first proper verse since 2022's "GOD DID" on the "MORNING DEW (DONK) REMIX," a 2013 recording surfacing for Beyonce's B'DAY 20th-anniversary reissue.

Why it matters: Any new JAY-Z verse is an event, and it doubles as a marquee moment for Beyonce's catalog reissue.