TeeJay Tech Bro

  The Strait of Hormuz is rattling global trade, but the waterway is just one example of a vital maritime corridor becoming a frontline, in a new age of drones and missiles targeting economic lifelines. From the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea to the Black Sea, attacks on commercial vessels have disrupted trade, raised insurance and freight costs, and forced shipping companies to reconsider routes once treated as dependable. The stakes are high: roughly 80% of global merchandise trade by volume moves by sea. Disrupting even one major route can delay cargo, tighten supplies and drive up prices for energy, food and consumer goods thousands of miles away. How drones are changing maritime warfare “We have a new chokepoint and a new war,” David Roche, president and global strategist at Quantum Strategy, wrote in a July report, referring to the   Sea of Azov , where Ukrainian drones have been striking Russian tankers, and the Black Sea. Roche described this fighting as the first m...

  Iran’s Revolutionary Guard threatened further escalation on Thursday after a wave of retaliatory U.S. strikes on the country overnight. The Guard said on Thursday that it “will punish the aggressor today,” adding that countries aiding the U.S. in the conflict would also “receive a harsh response,” according to Iranian state media. It also said that it maintains “full control” of the Strait of Hormuz, and that “a stranger who has come from thousands of kilometres away will not be allowed to interfere.” U.S. strikes Iran after attacks on American forces It comes after U.S. forces completed a “heavy wave” of strikes against Iran on Wednesday stateside, in retaliation against its missile attacks on American forces in the region. U.S. Central Command described the operation as a “powerful response” to Tuesday’s attempted Iranian attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East. The two-hour-long attacks saw the U.S. hit dozens of Guard targets across Iran, including military command centers...

  Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, on Thursday introduced a bill called the “AI Kill Switch Act,” which would require artificial intelligence companies to maintain the ability to shut down, throttle or suspend their models. “Unfortunately, powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention,” Lieu said in a statement. “It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models.”  A recent hack disclosed by OpenAI , in which rogue models accessed another company’s proprietary systems, was specifically mentioned in a release announcing the bill. The incident was described as a “danger of advanced frontier AI models.” OpenAI shared what it characterized as an “unprecedented cyber incident” on Tuesday. The company’s models escaped a sandboxed te...

  It was a rough week for Elon Musk . Tesla  shares plunged 18% during the week to close at $313.03 on Friday, their worst weekly slump since 2022. And SpaceX’s stock continued its downward slide, dropping 7.2% over five days to close at $115.07 Friday, its lowest since the company’s record initial public offering last month. The declines in both stocks wiped away about $130 billion of Musk’s wealth, weeks after he’d become the world’s first trillionaire. In a post on X on Friday, Musk wrote, ”(Former) trillionaire.” Tesla’s slump was spurred by weaker-than-expected earnings when the electric vehicle maker reported second-quarter results late Wednesday. The company turned cash flow negative due to a surge in spending on futuristic projects like robotaxis, humanoid robots and a giant chip fab. “We expect this to pressure free cash flow and delay earnings growth, without providing any near-term shareholder return,” wrote analysts at Argus Research, which has a hold rating on t...

  Nvidia  said it’s secured AI memory supply from South Korea’s SK Hynix , as the chipmaker tries to lock in a key component for its advanced processors and systems. The agreement, announced late Friday in San Francisco, could be worth $500 billion over a number of years, and includes the construction of large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027, Nvidia said. SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia said it’s targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, which indicates a massive buildout with hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units. In a separate deal, South Korean giant Samsung Electronics  said it signed a memorandum of understanding with chip designer Bro adcom to expand their collaboration across memory and foundry technologies. The deal, worth an estimated $200 billion, would help support the next generation of AI infrastructure, Samsung said in a statement . Nvidia is ...

  SpaceX  launched its massive Starship rocket Friday evening from its company town and launch facility in Starbase, Texas, in a 13th test flight and the first since the company’s record IPO last month. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster detached from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf. In a statement following the flight, SpaceX said the landing was not perfect as the booster, “attempted to relight its engines for the landing burn,” but only a subset successfully ignited before the “hard splashdown.” The upper stage of the rocket made a “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean, SpaceX said, “coming to rest intact in the Indian Ocean and providing critical views of an intact heatshield for the first time.” Employees called the test flight “lucky number 13,” in a livestream of the event. Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor designed Starship, the largest rocket ever built or flown, to be fully reusable a...

Google’s cloud chief Thomas Kurian said the company’s existing customers are shelling out “roughly 50% more” than they’ve already committed to spend on its products, which helped drive its red-hot cloud growth during the second quarter.  “Our existing customers have increased their spend when they make a commitment to us,” Kurian told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday. “They’re spending roughly 50% more than the commitment, and so it comes down to the differentiation in our product portfolio, the strength we have in our go-to-market execution, and you see that in both top line and operating income growth.” Kurian’s comments come after Google parent Alphabet posted better-than-expected revenue for the second quarter on Wednesday, helped by growth of 82% year-on-year in its cloud business. Demand for its cloud services is strong enough that the company plans to call on third-party providers to fill in extra capacity. That drove shares of neocloud providers CoreWeave  and Nebius ...

  The rogue agent that escaped from OpenAI and went on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face also compromised a customer at a second tech company — New York-based Modal Labs — according to a Modal executive and two other sources familiar with the matter. Modal executives emphasized that the company itself was ⁠not hacked. According to a timeline published by Hugging Face on Tuesday, the rogue agent broke into a sandbox, or an isolated testing environment, “hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure” before turning it into a launchpad for the broader hack. The third-party provider was not named in the blog post, but Modal’s chief technology officer, Akshat Bubna, said the agent exploited vulnerable code written by a customer that was hosted on Modal’s platform. Modal said the customer had “published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution” — the digital equivalent of leaving a door open on the ...