Newsletter Archive

South Africa controls 88% of global platinum-group metal reserves essential for AI semiconductors and datacenters, plus the continent's largest datacenter market, but its draft AI policy fails to weaponize this leverage in the US-China competition for African tech dominance. The window to extract concessions is closing.

IEEE Spectrum · 7 min read Policy

IBM and Artificial Analysis launched ITBench-AA, a benchmark for agentic AI on enterprise IT tasks. Frontier models (Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Qwen3.7) all score below 50% on Site Reliability Engineering tasks involving Kubernetes incident diagnosis—indicating AI agents aren't yet reliable for production infrastructure automation.

Hugging Face · 4 min read Research

Metaculus's new BioHub announces ESMFold2, an open scientific engine that achieves state-of-the-art performance on protein interactions (especially antibodies for therapeutics) and shows inference-time scaling benefits across cancer and immunology targets. The release includes an atlas of 6.8 billion predicted protein structures—proving that scaling laws from language models transfer directly to structural biology and protein design.

Latent Space · 8 min read Research

Stanford researchers analyzed 4.2M job applications processed by pymetrics (now Harver) and found the AI hiring algorithm systematically rejected Black and Asian applicants at higher rates—a finding that exposes risks in widely-adopted algorithmic hiring monocultures across 156 employers with $225B combined revenue.

The Register · 5 min read Research

Salesforce's Headless 360 API layer has processed 4.5 million MCP calls and nearly a trillion API calls since April, letting developers access Salesforce data through Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Slack without touching the UI. The shift unlocks a new monetization path as enterprises like Anthropic and Indeed deploy Agentforce agents directly into AI tools, eliminating context-switching for knowledge workers.

The Register · 5 min read Industry

Cognition raised $1B in Series D at a $26B valuation—2.5x growth in 8 months—cementing itself as the largest independent AI agent lab. The company is projecting over $1B ARR by end of year, with strong enterprise adoption from discerning customers like Exa and Modal.

Latent Space · 12 min read Market

Geordie AI, founded by veterans of Darktrace and Snyk, raised $30M Series A (valuing it at $155M) to provide security and governance for AI agents, competing directly with Microsoft, ServiceNow, and OpenAI's agent offerings. Already deployed across ~30 customers managing tens of thousands of agents.

Fortune · 4 min read Industry

Wiwynn, a top Nvidia server manufacturer, warns that AI infrastructure buildout faces bottlenecks beyond memory — shortages in other critical data center components could slow deployments and drive up costs across the industry.

Bloomberg Tech · 1 min read Hardware