SILICON VALLEY — Your 50GB of cloud storage now includes 300GB of files you deleted three years ago. That’s right: your tech company is charging you for digital ghosts, according to a new billing transparency report from the Cloud Storage Transparency Coalition.
“We’re seeing a new phenomenon where customers expect their deleted photos to just… vanish,” said Marcus Henderson, a spokesperson for MegaStorage Inc., the world’s largest cloud provider. “But what they don’t realize is that their hard drive still has a relationship with those files, and that relationship is a recurring monthly expense.”
BERLIN — Siemens unveiled today what it calls the “Digital Twin Composer,” a software platform that transforms any human employee into a photorealistic simulation that never sleeps, never takes vacation, and never questions its existence. The new system, available on Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace mid-2026, combines NVIDIA Omniverse libraries with real-time engineering data to create virtual workers that are indistinguishable from their organic counterparts—until they aren’t.
“It’s not about AI replacing humans,” said Dr. Klaus Weber, Siemens’ Lead Digital Morality Officer. “It’s about humans becoming so tired they accept the simulation as the default option.”
SAN FRANCISCO — In a move that has the industry collectively gasping like a fish pulled from a WiFi router, startup ‘Authentic’ has today unveiled its revolutionary new product: itself, with no algorithms.
“We’re going to start by removing the AI that curates your news feed, then we’ll remove the AI that recommends what you watch, then we’ll remove the AI that knows you’re thinking about something before you’re ready to admit it yourself,” said ‘Authentic’ CEO Marcus Henderson, who last week described this product as “technology stripped bare, the way it used to be before we got all this weird internet baggage.”
BEIJING / MENLO PARK — China’s government has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion
acquisition of AI startup Manus, ruling that the deal represents an unacceptable transfer of
frontier technology and escalating what analysts are calling “the AI version of a trade war”
and what both governments are calling “a regulatory matter” while clearly meaning the same thing.
The ruling, issued by China’s Ministry of Commerce, requires Meta to fully divest its stake in
Manus — a Shanghai-founded AI company known for its autonomous “agentic” capabilities — within
ninety days. Failure to comply will result in penalties that the ministry described as
“significant” and that Meta’s legal team described as “something we are reviewing.”
LONDON — A London-based artificial intelligence startup called Ineffable Intelligence announced
Monday it has secured $1.1 billion in seed funding at a $5.1 billion valuation, in what investors
are calling “a defining moment for the field” and also, quietly, “a lot of money for a company with
no product.”
The round was led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Both firms issued statements
praising the company’s “vision,” “ambition,” and “fundamental approach to the science of
intelligence.” When asked to be more specific, both firms said they would follow up by email and
have not yet done so.
PALO ALTO, CA — Chinese AI startup DeepSeek unveiled its fourth major model on Friday,
promising dramatic improvements in reasoning and agentic capabilities, prompting what multiple
sources describe as “a very quiet but very real panic” spreading through Silicon Valley’s open-plan
offices like a silent, well-ventilated fog.
The new model, DeepSeek V4, features a 1-million-token context window, a novel Hybrid Attention
Architecture, and the ability to autonomously write and deploy code — capabilities that several
senior engineers at competing US labs described as “fine,” “completely fine,” and “I’m totally fine.”
MENLO PARK, CA — Meta announced Thursday that it has developed an artificial
intelligence model trained on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, communication
style, and company strategy, designed to interact with employees when he is
unavailable.
The announcement was received with cautious optimism by staff, followed by the
unsettling realisation that no one was entirely sure which version they had
been talking to at last Tuesday’s all-hands.
“He asked me how my weekend was,” said one product manager, who requested
anonymity. “The real Mark has never asked me how my weekend was. I went home
and cried a little, but in a good way.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Following a series of security incidents at his
residence, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly installed a custom home
security system that combines a Ring doorbell camera with a fine-tuned
version of GPT-5 capable of conducting “full psychological assessments of
anyone who approaches the property.”
Sources familiar with the system say it has been operational for two weeks
and has already generated 14 complaints from neighbours and one restraining
order request from a UPS driver.