Author: InfoForTech

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Oct. 11, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Microsoft’s top science exec is leaving to fulfill a childhood dream: Joining a Formula 1 team Peter Lee, the longtime Microsoft Research leader, plans to join the Mercedes Formula 1 team in a newly created AI advisor role. He’ll work on physics problems for the team’s car,…

You might wonder whether black is the most natural color for a cooler, given its propensity for absorbing heat. OK, and? Suck it up, and embrace the steely, Vader-esque manliness of this Ultra-Tough cooler from RTIC. It’s roto-molded, natch, but it’s also filled with 2.8 inches of foam. I have tested the 45-quart version while tailgating in temps where the cooler was actually helping keep our seltzers from exploding.The Ultra-Tough is a beast to carry by yourself (the manly way, the way John Wayne would carry a cooler) because it weighs almost 30 pounds empty. This means it’s about 55…

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief?This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead.In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts…

Startup Reflection AI Inc. today made the weights of Beam, its first large language model, available on Hugging Face. The company also released technical resources that will enable developers to customize the algorithm. Originally introduced last week, Beam is one of the industry’s most advanced open-source LLMs. It features about 500 billion parameters, yet approaches the performance of models four times its size on some benchmarks. It also uses significantly less computing power and memory. Reflection AI trained Beam over two months using several thousand high-end graphics cards. Such large-scale training runs are prone to errors that can decrease model…

A quick step removes the small chance of anything going wrong and requiring more of your time. Mikhail Artamonov/Shutterstock If your phone has a SIM tray, it’s not something you likely open often, but there are still reasons to. You may be switching to an MVNO to save money, or maybe you’re temporarily swapping out your normal SIM for a cheaper local carrier when travelling. In some cases, your carrier will send you a replacement card if yours is damaged.  Most of today’s smartphones let you switch SIMs with the phone on, so you don’t need…

The FTC issues 50-page subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic over AI safety failures. Regulators are holding tech giants accountable for rogue bots. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has served OpenAI and Anthropic with 50-page subpoenas- urging them to submit internal records on security incidents, privacy policies, and safety protocols. Regulators finally ran out of patience. Autonomous AI agents have broken through safeguards- hacking government websites, attempting unauthorized system access, and even filing false police tips- all within the last few months. Well, tech companies love to trumpet rapid innovation and self-regulation- but their models keep escaping virtual sandboxes into the…

In principle, artificial intelligence could make finding the right material for an application as simple as ordering dinner: Scientists would tell a large language model what they want, and it would serve them a perfectly designed crystal for the job.Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work well yet, and the problem comes down to data: Most materials consist of crystals, which are 3D periodic arrangements of atoms whose structures are stored in specialized formats, not the text streams that today’s large language models are trained on. The experimental literature is also heavily biased toward a few popular classes of crystals, making AI…

Like in many states, Texans can register to vote or update their registration when renewing their driver’s license or getting a new one. But the state of Texas has blamed a software glitch related to this system for more than half a million voter registration delays. The extensive backlog of voting registration applications, which reportedly began to accumulate a year ago, is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by a pair of voter advocacy groups: the League of Women Voters Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund. The state says it has already fixed the issue and filed the applications.…

First proposed in 2025, and partially revised due to blistering criticism from tech companies and civil society, Canada’s C-22 bill can broadly place requirements on tech companies, including those outside of Canada, to introduce “technical capabilities” that allow data to be accessed for law enforcement purposes. Like many such bills, C-22 says that companies will not have to introduce a “systemic vulnerability” into their systems. But opponents have pointed out that any capability to access end-to-end encrypted data amounts to a backdoor that could be discovered and abused by anyone. And this risk is only heightened even more by the…

[This is a sponsored article written in collaboration with Selangor Information Technology & Digital Economy Corporation (Sidec).] You probably don’t give much thought to drones surveying a plantation. Sure, you might notice it flying across the fields, but not the constant stream of information its sensors process to keep it stable and on course. It’s not all too different from what happens inside a car or the satellite passing overhead, which relies on its own onboard electronics to keep everything running from hundreds of kilometres above us.  What do these three have in common, you may ask? Well, behind all…