Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

May 13, 2026

China's AI hardware suppliers can't keep up with surging demand because critical components are scarce and production capacity is lacking, Bloomberg reports. "I believe these capacity bottlenecks are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, certainly not within 2026," says Xiang Xiaotian, director at Shanghai Chengzhou Investment Management.

Optics makers like Zhongji Innolight have aggressively stockpiled chips, circuit boards and components. First-quarter prepayments climbed more than 10-fold to 1.5 billion yuan. Foxconn Industrial Internet also stocked up on raw materials to ensure "smooth mass production and delivery." Suzhou TFC Optical Communication confirmed that "there are still some shortages of certain materials, which has had a certain impact on related products."

New factories in Thailand and Vietnam are meant to ease the pressure but don't yet match Chinese production standards. Despite some companies missing analyst estimates, share prices remained largely stable. According to Xiang, "the market is largely overlooking these concerns." The launch of new models like DeepSeek-V4 could further fuel demand.

Comment Source: Bloomberg

Maximilian Schreiner

May 13, 2026

Short News

AI startup Recursive has officially emerged from stealth, calling recursive self-improvement the "fastest path to superintelligence."

"The fastest path to superintelligence will be realized by AI that recursively improves itself, and does so via open-ended algorithms that drive endless innovation," the company's announcement states. The team's plan is to start by building AI that improves AI, then expand the approach to other scientific fields.

Co-founder Tim Rocktäschel draws on Stanisław Lem's concept of an "information barrier" - the point where available knowledge grows so fast that humans can no longer keep up with it or meaningfully integrate it. Recursive wants to break through that barrier by fully automating the scientific method, starting with AI research itself.

The final funding round totals $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation, led by GV (Google Ventures) and Greycroft, with AMD Ventures and Nvidia also participating. In April, the Financial Times had reported a figure north of $500 million.

The company is led by Richard Socher (formerly Salesforce) and Tim Rocktäschel (formerly Google Deepmind), alongside researchers from OpenAI, Meta, and Uber AI. So far, the company hasn't published any concrete technical results.

Comment Source: LinkedIn / Recursive

Maximilian Schreiner

May 13, 2026

Short News

Google is hiring now also hundreds of engineers to help customers adopt its AI. A sign that implementation remains difficult.

"[We] show up for our customers with more technical resources (vs just an ocean of salespeople)," Matt Renner, Google Cloud's Chief Revenue Officer, wrote on LinkedIn about the new "Forward Deployed Engineers" unit within Google Cloud.

Google is joining an industry-wide trend. On Monday, OpenAI launched the "OpenAI Deployment Company" in partnership with consulting and investment firms, and last week Anthropic announced a joint venture with private equity firms. Google is also in talks with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT to give their portfolio companies access to its AI models.

Despite rapidly growing enterprise revenues at the frontier AI labs, the parallel buildup of human advisors signals that companies are still struggling to put AI to productive use.

Comment Source: The Information

Maximilian Schreiner

May 13, 2026

Short News

From Prompt to Pointer Engineering: Deepmind tries to reinvent the mouse cursor for the AI era

Jonathan Kemper

May 12, 2026

Short News

With Gemini Intelligence, Google is introducing new AI features for Android that automate multi-step tasks, summarize web content, fill out forms, and turn spoken thoughts into polished text messages. Ahead of Google I/O, the company announced that the features will ship on the Samsung Galaxy S26 and Google Pixel 10 this summer, with other devices like smartwatches, cars, headsets, and laptops following later in the year.

Gemini is then supposed to handle things like booking trips or moving shopping lists from a notes app straight into a shopping cart. In Chrome, the system summarizes web content and fills out complex forms using autofill - though the latter only kicks in when users explicitly turn it on. A new Gboard feature called Rambler takes spoken, unpolished thoughts and turns them into clean text messages, with support for multiple languages at once. And with "Create My Widget," users can build custom widgets just by describing what they want - recipe suggestions, specific weather data, or anything else.

The push is part of Google's effort to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI agent market. At the beginning of May, the company shut down its experimental browser agent Project Mariner and folded its technology into the new Gemini Agent.

Comment Source: Google

Matthias Bastian

May 12, 2026

AI in practice

Anthropic is making a major push into the legal sector. On Tuesday, the company unveiled twelve new plugins and over 20 MCP connectors for its chatbot Claude, each designed for specific areas of law, including contract law, employment law, and litigation. The plugins combine skills with connectors to external data sources.

Users can also now connect Claude directly to services like Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel Legal, DocuSign, Everlaw, Box, and the AI legal assistant Harvey. The new features are all available through Claude Cowork. Enterprise admins can enable them in their workspace settings.

According to Anthropic's Chief Legal Officer Mark Pike (via Bloomberg), lawyers now use Claude more than almost any other profession. Over 20,000 lawyers signed up for a recent webinar on using Claude, with another session on the way. Back in February, the launch of Anthropic's first legal tools triggered a trillion-dollar drop in legal software stock prices.

That said, Cowork still has known AI security vulnerabilities like prompt injections. For law firms handling sensitive client data, these are serious concerns worth checking before rolling it out.

Comment Source: Anthropic | Reuters | Thomson Reuters | Bloomberg

Matthias Bastian

May 12, 2026

Short News

A new report from Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) details how attackers are using AI at scale for cyberattacks. For the first time, GTIG identified a threat actor who reportedly used AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day vulnerability. Google says it stopped the planned mass attack.

Comparison of vulnerability discovery tools: According to Google, frontier LLMs are especially effective as general-purpose tools, with capabilities that keep growing. | Source: Google Cloud Blog / GTIG

State-backed actors from China and North Korea are also using AI to hunt for vulnerabilities. The report highlights the GitHub project "wooyun-legacy," a Claude plugin with over 85,000 real vulnerability cases from the Chinese platform WooYun, built to help AI models analyze code more effectively. Russia-linked groups are embedding AI-generated obfuscation code in malware: the Android malware PROMPTSPY, for example, uses the Gemini API to control devices autonomously. Criminal groups like "TeamPCP" are also targeting AI supply chains, going after popular open-source packages, Google says.

Google has developed its own AI-based countermeasures, among them Big Sleep and CodeMender. The full report is available here.

Comment Source: Google Cloud

Matthias Bastian

May 12, 2026

Short News

Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug research company led by Alphabet co-founder Demis Hassabis, has closed a $2.1 billion Series B funding round. Thrive Capital led the round, with participation from Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.

The funding will go toward expanding the company's in-house AI platform for drug development (IsoDDE), pushing its pipeline of drug candidates closer to clinical trials, and hiring globally. IsoDDE combines multiple proprietary AI models designed to work across different therapeutic areas and drug classes.

According to Deepmind co-founder Demis Hassabis, the underlying approach has proven itself. The focus now shifts to scaling the technology, with the ultimate "mission to solve all disease," as Hassabis puts it.

The company was founded in London in 2021 and already has partnerships with Novartis, Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson.

Comment Source: Press Release

Maximilian Schreiner

May 12, 2026

AI in practice

Microsoft ousts its Israel chief following reports that Azure quietly powered military AI targeting in Gaza

Maximilian Schreiner

May 12, 2026

Short News

Amazon employees are automating unnecessary tasks just to climb internal AI leaderboards.

The in-house tool "MeshClaw" lets employees create AI agents that can trigger code deployments, triage emails, or interact with apps like Slack. But according to the Financial Times, staff are deliberately using the software to artificially inflate their token consumption.

"There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee said to the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximise their token usage." The background: Amazon has set targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking token consumption on internal leaderboards.

Officially, the numbers don't factor into performance reviews. But another employee disagrees: "Managers are looking at it. When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it." Meta employees have engaged in similar "tokenmaxxing."

As a metric for actual productivity gains, token consumption is of little use. We took a closer look at the challenges of meaningfully measuring AI-driven productivity in the latest edition of our Frontier Radar.

Comment Source: FT