Everything in AI/tech this week in 5 minutes

Happy Sunday. This week the internet had one of its worst security weeks in years. Here's what happened.

The internet is having a very bad cybersecurity week. Researchers from OpenAI, Google-owned Wiz and the security firm Calif used AI to find two critical holes in PHP, the language behind roughly 70% of all websites, WordPress included. The bugs, called PHP2Shell, let anyone run their own code on a server without logging in, and the only trace they leave is a single error line in a log nobody reads. The details leaked before the fix was out, Amazon spotted someone testing the exploit four days before it was even announced and the NSA, CISA and Germany's BSI told companies to patch immediately or take their sites offline. And PHP wasn't the only fire: Node.js patched four serious bugs the same day, LiteLLM, a popular open-source tool for routing requests between AI models, got hijacked to ship malware that steals cloud and AI credentials, and an Indian certificate authority lost its private keys, which security people are calling "bigger than Heartbleed". The common thread is speed. AI now turns a published patch into a working attack in hours instead of weeks, so if you run anything on PHP, update today. Read more

The US banned DeepSeek from every federal agency, and DeepSeek answered by open-sourcing its own engine. The Homeland Security order doesn't just cover DeepSeek's app, it also bans third-party tools built on its models. One day later DeepSeek put DeepInfer, the software it uses to run its own models, on GitHub for free, with support for Nvidia's newest chips and Huawei's. Read more

A startup just raised $200 million to genetically engineer war dogs. Warhound comes from Colossal's Ben Lamm, the guy trying to bring back the mammoth, and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. They want to gene-edit Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds to be healthier and better at sniffing bombs, then kit them out with Anduril vests full of sensors. The first dogs are supposed to be born early next year. Read more

Tech stocks had their worst day since June. The Nasdaq dropped 2.6% on Thursday after Meta said it will create a new class of shares, partly to keep funding its AI spending, while its free cash flow turned negative for the first time. Investors are getting more nervous about how much money is going into AI data centers and when it actually pays off. Read more

“You can’t build a very successful startup and have a life at the same time”. I heard this quote from the founder of one of the few European tech decacorns (companies valued at over $10B) during a panel in Zurich this week. I felt like I had read this quote a hundred times online but hearing this guy sitting in front of me actually say it felt different. It felt much more real. He went on to talk about how he had a wife and kids and still decided to spend 100 hours a week in the office for 3 years until the company finally succeeded, not knowing if it would ever happen. While this is a story of a lifetime and sounds super epic in retrospect, I can only imagine how stressful and heavy it must have felt back then. You definitely have to be a special kind of person to take risks like that. This closely ties to the idea that I mentioned last week about “being obsessed” with something and putting in unreasonable amounts of work. I still disagree with the whole toxic hustle culture we see online, but working hard for something you are passionate about and something that can change the world for the better, yeah maybe it’s worth having “no life” for some time to build that.

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Have a great week,

Chris