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July 2020 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft plugs wormable Windows DNS Server RCE flaw
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New insights from Google’s AI & Economy ATLAS
Google launches an interactive AI & Economy ATLAS experience; new research shows nearly half of surveyed scientists use AI daily.
Google introduced new interactive, open-access data visualizations for its AI & Economy ATLAS project tracking global AI adoption patterns. Research from Google, Google DeepMind, and MIT FutureTech analyzed 2,600 specialized AI models and surveyed over 600 U.S. and U.K. scientists, finding nearly half use AI daily and report saving almost seven hours per week. The study also found validation bottlenecks and a growing backlog of untested hypotheses limiting research productivity gains.
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OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating
25 Fields Medalists sign an open letter warning AI labs threaten math attribution; NYU's Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of pressuring him over collaborator credit.
Twenty-five Fields Medal-winning mathematicians signed an open letter arguing rushed AI proofs raise severe attribution and plagiarism questions and could destroy the culture of open research. NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit an Anthropic-employed collaborator, and OpenAI withdrew sponsorship of a Caltech math event after researcher criticism. OpenAI's marathon-weekend proof remains unverified, and mathematicians fear their Codex usage may be fed into OpenAI's new models. The letter follows the June Leiden Declaration on LLM proofs.
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India’s Pocket FM doubles revenue run rate to $500M as AI powers 93% of audio content
Indian audio platform Pocket FM doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500M, with AI now producing 93% of its catalog.
Pocket FM, an Indian serialized audio storytelling platform, doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million in a year, with AI powering 93% of its catalog and 99% of new content. The company says generative AI, including in-house creative-writing and text-to-speech models, made production roughly 80 times cheaper, letting 550,000+ creators produce about 2.5 million hours of content annually across 770,000 audio series for 250 million listeners. Parent Pocket Entertainment is reportedly in talks to raise $100-120 million at about a $2 billion valuation, is profitable on an adjusted basis, and its AI-only microdrama app Pocket Saga has reached a $15 million annualized run rate.
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Why the current tech backlash feels different
The Verge's Decoder mailbag discusses the current tech backlash, arguing AI hype overstates verifiability outside software engineering.
Nilay Patel's Decoder mailbag episode addresses listener feedback on the widely discussed 'software brain' essay. He argues AI hype is concentrated on software because code is verifiable through compilation, while domains like drug discovery, math and science lack equivalent verifiability. The episode also touches on AI backlash, surveillance, data centers and upcoming midterm coverage.
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Recreating a 70-year love story frame by frame
Google DeepMind and filmmakers used generative image restoration and performance capture to recreate a couple's unrecorded past in the documentary 'Love, Rendered'.
Google DeepMind partnered with Primordial Soup, Darren Aronofsky's creative venture, on 'Love, Rendered,' a documentary short directed by Academy Award-nominated Liz Garbus. The film follows Burt and Ethelle Shatz, married over 70 years, as AI recreates their unrecorded first meeting amid Burt's cognitive decline. The team restored black-and-white photos with generative models and mapped the couple's present-day mannerisms onto younger likenesses using performance capture models. Google also highlights photo restoration and colorization capabilities in the Gemini app.
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China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies
NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.
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Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip
Roland launched Melody Flip, a DAW plugin that generates genre-themed MIDI loops rather than complete songs like Suno or Udio.
Roland's Melody Flip is a DAW plug-in offering around 250 genre-based 'Palettes' for generating melodies, chord progressions, basslines, and drum patterns, either from scratch or derived from a reference track. Users can control genre, note density, BPM, and key but cannot use text prompts, and outputs are simple loops with General MIDI-style tones intended for MIDI export into a DAW. The launch follows well-received hardware releases like the SH-4d, Gaia 2, and TR-1000, though music-community sentiment toward generative AI may limit goodwill.
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Scareware ads keep running on Google's transparency tool, even after they're reported
NYU and Radboud researchers built AdLens, which found 238 scareware and 3,346 false-claim ads in Google's ad archive; reported ads often stayed live.
The AdLens tool, built by NYU and Radboud University researchers, mined Google's Ads Transparency Center and screened 188,000 software ad creatives using similarity search plus a panel of open-source language models, finding 238 scareware ads, 3,346 false-claim ads, and 258 anonymity-avoiding ads with over 100 million impressions in Europe. Reporting ads through Google's standard flow produced inconsistent removals: some ads acknowledged as violations stayed live, and after one takedown tied to the TamperedChef malware domain, 41 other ads pointing to the same domain kept running. The pipeline runs entirely on open-weight models at low cost (a $96 DigitalOcean VM plus $1.57/hour L40S inference) and is designed to extend to Meta and Amazon ad libraries.
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The latest AI news we announced in August 2026
Google's August 2026 AI recap includes launches of Gemini 3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, and the Pixel 11 series, plus 1 billion Gemini users.
Google's monthly recap covers the Gemini 3.7 Flash workhorse model for coding and agents, released three weeks after 3.6 Flash at half its per-million-token cost, and the Gemini app surpassing 1 billion monthly users. The Pixel 11 series launched with the Tensor G6 chip running Gemini Nano, alongside Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for real-time speech-to-text and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash for studio-quality video generation. Other announcements include a free year of Google AI for college students, Gemma's 1 billion downloads, and AI weather forecasts for aviation contrail reduction.
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