NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

Meta’s Dream Team: Where Are The Women?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is racing to build a superintelligence AI team, poaching talent from OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind with offers reportedly up to $300 million, including $100 million to lure OpenAI staff.

With Meta’s stock near record highs, investors seem convinced. On paper, it’s a “dream team.” But of the 18 people named so far, only one is a woman, according to Gizmodo.

Why does this matter? Because AI reflects the worldview of its creators. Evidence already shows harms when perspectives are narrow, including facial recognition systems that misidentify people with darker skin at far higher rates and chatbots that reproduce bias.

It is not like the talent is not there. Here is just a glimpse of women driving AI forward:

• Raquel Urtasun, Founder of Waabi, former Chief Scientist at Uber ATG, leading expert in self-driving perception and probabilistic AI.

• Luo Fuli, Researcher associated with DeepSeek and Peking University, co-author of the DeepSeek-R1 paper and contributor to DeepSeek’s MoE research.

• Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech; known for pioneering tensor methods, neural operators, and AI for scientific discovery.

• Sara Hooker, Vice President of Research at Cohere, former Google Brain researcher focused on large models, efficiency, and algorithmic fairness.

Excluding women from AI teams silences vital perspectives, embedding blind spots into the very systems that shape our world.

Why the Internet Depends on Earth’s Oceans

Most of the world’s internet doesn’t travel through satellites or the cloud. 95% of the globe’s data travels through hair-thin glass strands, bundled into massive cables that rest on the ocean floor. 😲

These subsea cables quietly carry trillions of dollars in daily financial transactions and keep global communications running. Without them, everything from video calls to stock trades would stop entirely.

A small group of companies own most of this network: Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have poured billions into building their own private cables.

This week, the US announced new rules to protect that hidden backbone:

• The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) will fast-track cable projects but add stricter security checks.

• This will make it harder for companies linked to foreign rivals, like China, to get approval unless they can prove zero security risk.

Here’s why: Cables can be sabotaged, tapped for surveillance, or accidentally damaged by something as simple as a ship’s anchor. Officials warn that adversaries are already mapping and monitoring them, with countries like China investing heavily in new routes.

We don’t see them, but subsea cables are as vital as power lines or highways. In the coming years, they may prove to be one of the most valuable - and vulnerable -strategic assets on Earth.

ps. Here’s a 6-min primer on undersea cables.

Zoom’s Most Attentive Employee 😳

In more and more offices, AI-powered meeting assistants are becoming the quiet extra “person” on your Zoom, Teams, or Meet calls.

Otter, Fireflies, Sembly: they don’t laugh at your jokes or accidentally leave themselves on mute, but they will happily listen to every single word you say. Then, like overachieving interns, they churn out tidy transcripts, bullet-point summaries, and action lists before you’ve even closed your laptop.

I use them myself. No more frantic scribbling to remember who promised to “circle back” on what. You can even share notes with anyone who ghosted the call.

But here’s the thing: they don’t just log the important bits. They capture everything. The snarky side remark about the budget? Yep, immortalized in crisp, searchable text. Suddenly, those “off the record” moments aren’t so off the record.

So… would you still crack a joke in a meeting if you knew it was being filed away forever?