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Hey, welcome back.
If you only had five minutes this week to follow tech news, today's issue covers the six stories that actually mattered. A $2 billion deal killed in Beijing. A learning platform that got hacked and paid the price for saying no. A lone developer who Google has been trying to bury for years. And a chip company that just repositioned itself as something much bigger. Let's get into it.
In This Issue
Big News - Meta & China
Meta Tried to Buy a Chinese AI Company for $2 Billion. China Said No.
Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, wanted to buy a Chinese AI startup called Manus for $2 billion. Manus is basically a smart AI tool that can do tasks on its own, like browsing the web, filling forms, or running research, without a human guiding every step. China's government reviewed the deal and blocked it.
Think of it like this. The US stops China from buying advanced chips. China stops the US from buying its best AI companies. Both sides are protecting what they think will matter most in the next decade. Manus stays Chinese, at least for now.
Read the FT breaking report →Cybersecurity - Data Breach
Udemy Confirmed the Breach. Refused the Ransom. 1.4 Million Accounts Are Now Public.
If you have a Udemy account, change your password now and check every other service where you used the same one. The exposure is confirmed, not theoretical. Ransom refusals are the right policy call in the long run, but users always absorb the short-term cost.
See the original breach disclosure →While Udemy was getting hacked, Viktor was quietly doing the actual work. Viktor is an AI coworker that lives in Slack, connects to 3,000+ tools like Notion, Stripe, and Meta Ads and delivers finished output.
Last week Viktor wrote a brief, built a landing page, and opened a pull request.
Last week, Viktor wrote a campaign brief, built a landing page, opened a pull request, generated a board-ready PDF from live Stripe data, and sent a follow-up email to a churned customer. All from Slack. Same colleague that also pulls your reports and monitors your dashboards. 5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.
Open Source - Internet Freedom
Google's Biggest Threat Isn't OpenAI. It's One Developer Working Alone from Home.
The reason this story keeps circulating is that it cuts against a comfortable assumption: that scale and resources always win. A trillion-dollar company spent years engineering around one developer's free tool and it still runs on the world's most popular browser alternative. That is not a small thing.
Visit uBlock Origin →Future of Work - Data
The Job Exposure Numbers Are Out. Even Technical Roles Are No Longer Safe Ground.
The honest read here is not panic, it is preparation. Exposure is not a prediction of outcomes, it is a signal about which skills to build and which assumptions to let go of. The people who are doing fine are the ones who started adjusting two years ago.
See the full data breakdown →AI Models - Nvidia
Nvidia Is Not a Chip Company Anymore. A $26 Billion Open Model Bet Says What It Actually Is.
Jensen Huang is making a long bet that open models are not competition — they are a distribution channel. If your models run everywhere, your chips run everywhere. The response to DeepSeek is not to out-close them. It's to out-open them, then make sure the hardware layer stays proprietary.
Read the Nvidia announcement →Cybersecurity - Nation State Threat
Microsoft Patched a Critical Office Zero-Day on Monday. Russia Was Using It as a Weapon by Thursday.
Three days from patch to active exploit is not unusual for APT28, but it should still be alarming. The patch is available now. If you run Office in an organization, the update is not optional. RTF files are common in document workflows across Eastern Europe, which is exactly what makes this attack surface so effective.
Read the full technical breakdown →Gladly Connect Live '26. May 4–6 in Atlanta.
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