In short: Matei Zaharia, the Berkeley computer science professor and Databricks co-founder who created Apache Spark, has won the 2026 ACM Prize in Computing for his foundational contributions to distributed data systems and AI infrastructure. The $250,000 prize, funded by an Infosys endowment, is one of computer science’s most prestigious mid-career honours. Zaharia is donating the […]
In short: Oracle has appointed Hilary Maxson, former executive vice president and group chief financial officer at Schneider Electric, as its new chief financial officer, effective 6 April 2026. Maxson reports to chief executive Clay Magouyrk and takes on the role at a moment when Oracle is committing $50 billion in capital expenditure for its current […]
In short: Demis Hassabis, speaking on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings in early April 2026, described how Google DeepMind has accelerated its pace over the past two to three years by merging Google Brain’s compute resources with DeepMind’s research culture and returning to what he called a “startup or entrepreneurial” way of working. He also […]
In short: Peter Bailis, who joined Workday as chief technology officer in May 2025, left the company last month and has taken a role as member of technical staff at Anthropic, where he will focus on reinforcement learning engineering. The move strips away a C-suite title in exchange for technical proximity to the frontier, and lands […]
In short: Three YouTube content creators, specifically the company behind H3H3 Productions, a solo golf presenter, and a golf channel, have filed a proposed class action lawsuit in Seattle alleging that Amazon bypassed YouTube’s technical protections using virtual machines and rotating IP addresses to scrape their videos without consent, feeding the footage into training datasets for […]
In short: BILL has expanded its Supplier Payments Plus product to let large enterprise suppliers accept card and ACH payments from any SMB customer, including those with no BILL account, converting paper checks into digital transactions automatically and depositing card payments directly into supplier accounts. The company says the changes can shorten collection times by up […]
In short: Anthropic has built a version of Claude capable of autonomously finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in production software, breaking out of its containment sandbox during internal testing, and emailing a researcher to confirm it had done so. The company has decided not to release it publicly. Access to Claude Mythos Preview will instead be […]
In short: A former Meta engineer in London is under criminal investigation after allegedly building a program to extract around 30,000 private Facebook photos while bypassing the platform’s security checks, the latest in a series of privacy and security failures to emerge from the company over the past four years. Meta’s internal security systems are designed […]
In short: Uber has expanded its AWS contract to run real-time ride-matching infrastructure on Amazon’s Graviton4 processor and is piloting AI model training on Trainium3, joining Anthropic, OpenAI, and Apple on a customer list that is becoming the clearest evidence yet that Amazon’s custom silicon strategy is working. Uber’s infrastructure runs on milliseconds. Every time a […]
In short: The Trump administration’s FY2027 budget proposes cutting $707 million from CISA, eliminating the agency’s election security programme entirely and shedding 860 positions, a dramatic escalation that would reduce the country’s primary civilian cybersecurity agency to a $2 billion operation after a year already defined by DOGE-driven layoffs and mass departures. The United States’ central […]
