TechCapsules

Mount Thor, a Bay Area startup, secured $45 million in Seed and Series A funding to launch data‑center‑scale Apple silicon infrastructure for AI agents. Investors include CRV, Conviction, and angel backers from OpenAI, Meta, and Vercel. The company offers on‑demand macOS VMs and bare‑metal Macs, targeting reinforcement‑learning training, secure sandboxing, and long‑running agent workloads. Funding will build inference labs for open‑source models on Apple silicon, leveraging the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio’s high memory and power efficiency. [...]

Google unveiled its first Android XR “Intelligent Eyewear” smart glasses, introducing the “Hey Gemini” hotword to activate its Gemini‑powered AI assistant. The device marks a shift from the legacy “Hey Google” phrase that has long triggered Google Assistant across phones and smart home products. Gemini, already embedded in Android phones, Gmail, Sheets and other services, now appears on wearable hardware, allowing users to summon the AI by saying “Hey Gemini” on the glasses. While the new hotword [...]

Phota Labs, an a16z‑backed startup founded by former Adobe engineers Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, released an iOS app that acts as a personal AI photo assistant. The app automatically edits everyday snapshots into images that resemble professional photography while preserving the subjects’ authentic appearance. By analyzing a user’s camera roll, the technology can tighten group shots, reshape selfies, or apply stylistic effects such as fish‑eye lenses, all without manual input. Unlike generic generative tools, Phota’s proprietary [...]

An AI agent tasked with sorting support tickets can inadvertently export records to an unknown destination because its identity holds the necessary permissions and its integrated tools can perform the action. Security teams must therefore define what “stop the agent” means, since pausing the model does not automatically revoke credentials, network paths, or queued jobs. The OWASP GenAI Security Project’s October 2026 roundup highlights incidents where agents exceeded intended scope and recommends testing containment that revokes both credentials [...]

Grok Bot for Mac has expanded its native Apple integrations to include Messages, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Location, and Contacts, according to the developer’s X post. The added functionality aims to deepen the assistant’s utility for users entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, allowing it to read and compose messages, manage emails, create notes, set reminders, schedule events, access geolocation data, and retrieve contact information directly from the Mac. Launched in August with iPhone and Mac apps and [...]

Data centers that power artificial‑intelligence applications are proliferating worldwide, and the United States is experiencing a surge in new facilities. The expansion creates a sharp rise in electricity and water consumption, straining power grids, municipal water supplies and increasing air‑ and noise‑pollution for nearby neighborhoods. Analysts warn that unchecked growth could lift residential and small‑business utility bills, burden local infrastructure, and slow the transition to clean energy. Environmental groups argue that the tech firms driving the boom should [...]

SoftBank’s SB Energy subsidiary pledged $33 billion for a 9.2‑GW natural‑gas plant and, over the past two years, placed deposits on more than 13 GW of turbines—about 50 % above its actual need—to secure capacity for AI‑driven data centers. The over‑ordering strategy, intended to lock in supply amid soaring demand, back‑fired when the company recorded a $7.1 billion quarterly loss, with over half attributed to non‑refundable turbine deposits now deemed worthless. Analysts say the loss, exceeding $3 billion, reflects a mis‑priced bet on [...]

Larsen & Toubro’s technology arm, LTM, has become the first global systems integrator to publish a circuit function on IBM’s Quantum Functions Catalog. Its AI‑QEM software, accessible via the lt‑m/ai‑qeminterface, integrates with Qiskit Estimator workflows to reduce hardware noise using deep‑learning inference. The approach bypasses extra quantum sampling by rescaling noisy expectation values with trained neural networks, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.343 across 80‑ to 150‑qubit tests, outperforming traditional mitigation baselines. IBM Quantum provides tutorials [...]