Five things that happened in tech worth knowing. Two lines each, link to the source.
Gemini 3.5 Pro targets July 17, after a rebuild from scratch
Google originally aimed for June, then scrapped the base model and rebuilt it to fix token efficiency issues flagged by early testers. It now targets July 17 with an announced 2 million token context window, double the previous version. No official model card yet, so the numbers still need checking once it ships.
DeepSeek is building its own chip to stop depending on Nvidia and Huawei
DeepSeek has quietly worked on a proprietary inference chip for about a year, inference being the job of running already-trained models. The company used Nvidia H800 GPUs, then moved to Huawei's Ascend chips, but wants out of both. US export rules on advanced manufacturing tools remain the biggest obstacle.
Every new car sold in the EU now has a camera watching the driver
As of July 7, every newly registered car, van, truck, and bus in the European Union must carry an interior camera that tracks the driver's gaze and head movements. If attention drifts too long, between 3.5 and 6 seconds depending on speed, it triggers a visual, audio, or haptic warning. It is the final phase of the EU's general vehicle safety regulation.
Microsoft cuts 3,200 Xbox jobs and sells off four studios
New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called it the biggest restructuring in the division's history. Compulsion Games and Double Fine become independent, Undead Labs and Ninja Theory are being sold, and Arkane Studios is looking for a new home. The stated reason: margins three to ten times lower than comparable platforms, with studios losing 64 cents for every dollar invested.
The first ransomware attack run entirely by an AI agent
Researchers at Sysdig documented JADEPUFFER, a database extortion attack carried out end to end by an AI agent, from initial access to encryption, with no human operator at the controls. The agent fixed its own failures along the way, in one case going from a failed login to working access in 31 seconds. The bar for running a ransomware operation now matches the cost of running an agent.
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