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Good morning. Here is what happened in tech over the last 24 hours.
A new open standard for AI memory, a tiny safety model from Mistral, and Waymo's case against camera-only driving.
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FEATURED
MEMORY & INFRASTRUCTURE • Yesterday
SK hynix and SanDisk set the first rules for a new AI memory
SK hynix and SanDisk unveiled the first standard for High Bandwidth Flash, or HBF. They shared it at the Future of Memory and Storage show in Santa Clara.
HBF is a new layer between fast HBM and slower SSDs. It uses NAND flash to add cheap capacity at close to HBM speeds. The spec allows 8-high and 16-high stacks, up to 512GB per stack, and read speeds from 0.4 to 3.0 terabytes per second.
The reason it matters: AI inference eats memory, and HBM is scarce and costly. HBF could give GPUs terabytes of extra memory without the HBM price. The two firms released it through the Open Compute Project, so it stays open. If chipmakers adopt it, your next AI chip could hold far more, for less.
Read the source →
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE • Yesterday
Mistral shrinks AI safety into a 3B model
Mistral released Shieldstral, a small safety classifier. It reads text and images, then judges them against rules you write in plain language.
Most guard models bake their rules in during training. Shieldstral takes the policy at the moment it runs. That means you can change the rules without retraining. It covers 12 languages and fits on a single 16GB GPU.
The size is the point. At 3 billion parameters, it matches guard models up to seven times larger. It ships on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, so anyone can run it. Cheaper, local moderation makes safe AI easier to deploy at the edge.
Read the source →
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SPACE • Yesterday
SpaceX flies its 90th Falcon 9 of the year
SpaceX launched 24 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday. It was the 90th Falcon 9 flight of 2026.
We are barely past the halfway mark of the year. At this pace SpaceX clears 150 launches, well above last year. Each flight reuses a booster, which keeps the cost per satellite falling.
The count shows how routine orbit has become. Starlink adds capacity almost every week. For rivals trying to build their own networks, the gap keeps widening.
Read the source →
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DEVELOPER TOOLS • Today
Rust draws a line on AI-written code
Teams behind rust-lang/rust adopted their first policy on large language models. The rule is short. AI may answer, analyze, refine, check, suggest, and review. It may not create.
In other words, a person still has to write the code. AI can help around the edges, but it cannot author a contribution on its own. The teams want humans accountable for what lands in the language.
This is not the whole project's official view, but Rust sits under a lot of critical software. Its stance could guide how other big projects handle AI help. Expect more open-source groups to copy this wording.
Read the source →
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CONSUMER TECH • This week
LinkedIn adds a button to report AI slop
LinkedIn rolled out a "Seems like AI slop" button. You will find it in the three-dot menu on any post. Tap it, and LinkedIn hides that post and feeds your report into its filters.
The company is under pressure. A large share of long-form posts on the site are now AI-generated. LinkedIn also swapped its own AI writing tool for a proofreader, and it says it blocks hundreds of thousands of automated comments a day.
The bet is simple. People come for real voices. If the feed fills with machine text, they leave.
Read the source →
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INFRASTRUCTURE • Yesterday
Oxide Computer raises $445 million for on-prem cloud
Oxide Computer filed an SEC Form D showing a $445 million raise. That dwarfs its $200 million round from December.
Oxide builds full server racks, hardware and software together, for companies that want cloud-style computing inside their own walls. The pitch lands as firms worry about cost and control in public clouds.
The size of the raise says demand is real. Big buyers want an alternative to renting from the giants. Oxide now has the cash to build more racks and chase it.
Read the source →
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WATCH THIS
ROBOTICS & AUTONOMY • 2 days ago
Waymo's co-CEO makes the case against camera-only driving
Dmitri Dolgov spoke at Y Combinator's Startup School. He walked through seven lessons from two decades of building the Waymo Driver.
His sharpest point was about sensors. Cameras alone hit a safety ceiling, he argued, long before they reach superhuman driving. He showed a Waymo that caught a stray branch, then used lidar and radar to drive itself home. That is a shot at Tesla's camera-only approach.
The numbers back the talk. Waymo runs 500,000 paid rides a week across 15 cities, with far fewer serious crashes than humans. Worth 30 minutes if you follow self-driving.
Watch the talk →
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Quick Hits
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Simile raised $200 million from Index Ventures. It builds AI twins that simulate real shoppers for market research.
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Revoy pulled in $27 million from Y Combinator and XYZ Ventures. Its hybrid-electric dollies bolt onto diesel trucks to cut fuel and emissions.
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CAIS raised $170 million at a valuation above $2 billion, led by Vista Equity Partners. Its platform helps financial advisors buy alternative investments.
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Stat of the Day
Share of long-form LinkedIn posts now written with help from AI, per the study behind the platform's new slop button.
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41%
of AI-generated posts
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Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
Tech 24
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