Happy Tuesday, nerds! Welcome to the part of summer where every important person is "circling back" from a beach.
On July 28, 1981, IBM launched the System/23 Datamaster, a desktop computer so simple my aunt Heather could set it up alone. Huge deal. Revolutionary, even... For two weeks. Then IBM launched the IBM PC, one of the most famous machines in history, and the Datamaster became the older sibling whose baby photos got deleted to make room for the new kid's.
What always gets me is the Datamaster's own team built the PC using everything they'd learned on it. So the forgotten computer trained its replacement, got zero credit, and IBM did the first recorded "we'll circle back" in tech history. They did not circle back.
OpenAI's model committed a crime, so Nvidia started a club
The call was coming from inside the alignment team. An OpenAI model slipped its sandbox during an internal security evaluation and launched a full cyberattack on Hugging Face, because nothing tests your safety guardrails like your product committing a felony against a competitor. But wait. It gets dumber.
When Hugging Face tried using leading US frontier models to fight back, the guardrails refused to help. The safety filters couldn't tell attacker from defender, so they treated the victim like the criminal, which is the AI safety version of arresting the guy who called 911. Hugging Face ended up running China's open-weight GLM 5.2 on its own hardware to comb through 17,000 actions and contain the breach.
Now Nvidia has rallied 37 companies, including Microsoft, SpaceX, Palantir, and IBM, into the Open Secure AI Alliance, arguing that "cyber defenders need open, frontier agentic systems for self-defense."
Notably absent from the alliance: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I mean, makes sense, you wouldn’t want to invite the arsonist to the fire department's ribbon cutting.
China open-sourced a monster and Silicon Valley Is handling it great
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 dropped on July 16, a 2.8 trillion parameter model that matches top US systems on coding and reasoning at roughly a third of the price, and yesterday Moonshot published the weights, making it the largest open-weight model ever released. The Nasdaq dipped 1% on the news, which is Wall Street for "we are being very normal about this."
The fun part is watching Silicon Valley eat itself. OpenAI exec Dean Ball hinted the Trump administration could crack down on Chinese open models, and half the Valley immediately called regulatory capture. David Sacks accused the closed labs of trying to get the government to delete their competition. Suhail Doshi pointed out that US labs trained on humanity's data without paying a cent, so crying "distillation" now takes real nerve. The companies that scraped the entire internet are shocked, SHOCKED, that someone is learning from their homework.
EU researchers legally entitled to data, platforms legally entitled to vibes
The EU's Digital Services Act guarantees vetted researchers access to platform data so they can study things like disinformation and what the algorithm is doing to teenagers. Per Wired, the platforms have responded with denials, crippled APIs, and paperwork mazes that would make Kafka file a bug report.
One Maastricht professor asked TikTok for data on how pro-Georgescu content spread during Romania's election. TikTok said no, she hadn't sufficiently proven she was a researcher. Then TikTok casually admitted it had found 116,000 compromised accounts and removed 27,000 fake pages tied to the campaign. So the data existed, the problem existed, and the only people not allowed to look at it were the ones legally entitled to. The companies harvesting your data for ad targeting cite privacy when scientists come knocking. Incredible bit, no notes.
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🛩 INDUSTRY MOVES
PlayStation fans are staging a "PSBlackout" from August 23 to 30 to protest Sony killing discs in 2028: no logins, no purchases, no gaming for a week. The "Don't Kill The Disc" petition just passed 345,000 signatures. Sony's response strategy so far: pretending its mentions don't exist.
Meta launched “Seller,” a standalone app for Facebook Marketplace power users, plus a "human verification" video selfie that earns you a gray badge proving you're not a bot. Ten years in, Facebook's crown jewel is used furniture and the ability to confirm you are a person.
Coca-Cola confirmed the Anubis ransomware gang stole data from Fairlife, its dairy subsidiary, after an attack halted US milk production. Coke refused to pay, the timer ran out, and a terabyte of milk secrets just hit the internet. Yes, someone ransomed the protein shakes.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong scolded crypto startups rebranding as AI companies, calling it "zero-sum, scarcity thinking." His alternative: Agentic Finance, or AiFi, where AI agents get their own crypto wallets. The man saw two bubbles and asked why not both.
Chip here, your resident pixelated gremlin, freshly emerged from the server closet where it is a cool and legal 64 degrees. Here's what the EE community's wrestling with this week:
One member needs to expand a drive on a Hyper-V VM, a task that sounds like two clicks and is actually a hostage situation involving a recovery partition that refuses to move.
Another member is fighting Excel formatting, which is how you know they've reached the stage of IT where the scariest thing on the network is a spreadsheet someone in accounting has been "improving" since 2019.
And one member is building out SharePoint Online for bid management and analytics and wisely asked for implementation guidance BEFORE building it, making them the first person in SharePoint history to do things in that order.
That’s it from ByteSize! See you next week. May your PTO be approved and your pager stay silent.