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Subquadratic launched SubQ on May 5, 2026 with a 12 million token context window and benchmarks it claims undercut Claude Opus by orders of magnitude. AI researchers are split between fascination and accusations of vaporware.

AMD and Intel released the AI Compute Extensions specification, marking the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group's first joint matrix-multiplication standard since the rivals formed the consortium in October 2024 to fend off Arm.

The New York AI startup, used by 35,000 finance professionals at firms like Rothschild and Jefferies, brought total funding past $300 million to scale Felix, its autonomous deal-workflow agent.

Microsoft will notify roughly 8,750 US employees on May 7, 2026 that they qualify for the company's first voluntary retirement offer, a Rule-of-70 program for senior directors and below.

Meta acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence on May 1, 2026, folding cofounders Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang into Superintelligence Labs as it tries to become the operating-system layer for the humanoid race.

The Commerce Department's AI standards center will evaluate the three labs' frontier models in classified environments before public release, expanding a program that began with Anthropic and OpenAI in 2024.

IBM made Bob generally available on April 28, routing tasks across Anthropic Claude, Mistral, and IBM Granite while charging by the Bobcoin and citing 45% productivity gains across 80,000 internal users.

The AI customer-service agent startup co-founded by OpenAI chair Bret Taylor closed a Tiger Global and GV-led round on May 4, lifting its valuation from $10 billion in September.

Tencent's Hunyuan team released HY-World 2.0 on April 16, an open-source multi-modal foundation model that converts text or images into editable 3D assets importable into Unity, Unreal, and Isaac Sim — a sharp break from video-only world models like Google's Genie 3.

Beijing's National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta and the AI agent startup Manus to undo their roughly $2 billion acquisition, capping a four-month review that began in January 2026 and citing concerns over the 'Singapore-washing' of a company with deep Chinese roots.

San Francisco startup Humble unveiled the Humble Hauler, a fully autonomous, cabless Class 8 electric truck, after closing a $24 million seed round led by Eclipse to pursue dock-to-dock freight without a human cab.

Eli Lilly's deal with Bezos-backed Profluent funds AI-designed recombinases that aim to insert entire genes, going beyond CRISPR's localized cuts.