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OpenAI taps Airbnb exec as first EMEA managing director

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Marill previously led financial services and automotive industry at Facebook and Instagram.

OpenAI has hired Airbnb’s former European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) lead Emmanuel Marill as its first EMEA managing director, as the company continues to expand globally with an initial public offering in sight.

Marill, who led Airbnb’s EMEA, Australia and New Zealand operations for a number of years, also previously worked with Meta as their financial services and automotive industry lead for Facebook and Instagram.

Marill’s appointment reflects “strong momentum in EMEA”, OpenAI said. He will be based in Paris and report to chief strategy officer Jason Kwon. He will also collaborate with OpenAI’s EU headquarters in Dublin, which currently has around 80 employees.

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“As demand for ChatGPT and Codex continues to grow rapidly all over the world, we are investing significantly in our international leadership and operations”, Kwon said.

Marill added: “There’s real momentum across EMEA, with many countries here leading globally in adoption of AI.”

OpenAI has had a tougher time in Europe than in the US. The company faces increasing regulatory pressures from EU officials, as well as resistance from businesses over digital sovereignty.

However, the company said that weekly active ChatGPT users in the EMEA region have grown by 70pc since last year, with Germany, France, the UK and Spain among its top markets for ChatGPT and Codex.

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On its home turf in the US, OpenAI faces an even bigger challenge from the likes of Anthropic, which is fast encroaching on the company’s clientele.

Anthropic appointed long-time technology executive Pip White as the head of its UK, Ireland, Northern Europe and Israeli operations last November.

OpenAI reportedly plans to double its headcount by the end of the year. Late last year, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI and its rival Anthropic were both looking to expand their office footprints in their Dublin headquarters.

Meanwhile, OpenAI also announced its first permanent London office for next year with a capacity of more than 500. The announcement came despite an indefinite hold on the company’s plans for a Stargate UK over energy costs and regulatory burden.

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New Mac malware goes straight for developer keys

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Two newly discovered macOS threats are designed to harvest developer credentials and cloud access as attackers focus on long-term persistence and avoid fast, visible attacks.

Four overlapping Apple MacBook lids in different colors, including silver, space gray, dark blue, and black, arranged in a fan shape on a light background
Some Mac computers have two security threats to worry about

The Mosyle security research team unveiled their discovery of “Phoenix Worm” and “ShadeStager” on April 22. These two are previously unknown malware that went undetected by antivirus engines at the time of their discovery.
While the lack of detection sounds concerning, it’s important to remember that new malware often begins with limited or no antivirus coverage before signatures catch up. Together, Phoenix Worm and ShadeStager outline a full attack path that moves from initial system access to deep credential harvesting.
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Google confirms context-aware Siri built from Gemini will debut in 2026

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Search giant Google has publicly confirmed that Apple’s updated Siri, complete with its long-promised personalized responses, will finally be coming out at some point in 2026.

Man in a gray suit stands on a dark, curved stage under a large glowing Apple logo, delivering a presentation in a dramatic, spotlighted auditorium setting
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian talking about Apple at Google Cloud Next 26 – Image Credit: Google/YouTube

In January, Apple confirmed that it had entered into a multi-year deal with Google to use the Gemini model to create Apple’s Foundation Models. Google now says that the fruits of Apple’s AI labor will be on display before the end of 2026.
Speaking at the Google Cloud Next 26 opening keynote, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian talked about Apple as a key customer of the company. Standing in front of the Apple Logo in the auditorium, he enthused about how Apple was using its technology.
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Leak hints at Canon EOS R8 II launch with a retro design

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Canon might be about to lean into nostalgia with its next full-frame mirrorless camera.

According to a fresh leak, the EOS R8 II is in the works. It could arrive with a retro-inspired design to mark 50 years since the iconic AE-1.

The report, via CanonRumors, suggests the upcoming model will act as a direct successor to the EOS R8, which is now over three years old.

But instead of a routine refresh, Canon is said to be rethinking the design entirely. Specifically, Canon may draw inspiration from the Canon AE-1, one of its most successful cameras ever. Over five million AE-1 units have sold since its 1976 debut.

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That could mean a more angular body, a smaller grip, and potentially a different control layout compared to Canon’s current mirrorless lineup. While details are still thin, the shift hints at something closer to the growing trend of retro-styled digital cameras. In other words, Canon might blend modern internals with classic aesthetics.

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Outside of the design, there’s little confirmed about the EOS R8 II so far. Specs, pricing, and an exact launch date remain under wraps, though the leak claims the camera could arrive “soon.” Whether Canon will pair it with matching retro-style lenses is also unclear at this stage.

Interestingly, the EOS R8 II might not be launching alone. The same source suggests Canon is also preparing an EOS R6 V, reportedly aimed at video-focused users with upgraded filming features. However, specifics haven’t surfaced yet.

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For now, the retro angle is the standout. If accurate, the EOS R8 II could signal a rare stylistic shift for Canon, which has largely stuck to modern, functional designs in its mirrorless range.

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Sam Altman’s Orb Company Promoted a Bruno Mars Partnership That Doesn’t Exist

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Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, announced last week that a new product called Concert Kit—designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets—would first roll out on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, The Romantic.

However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer for the Romantic Tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together.

The confusion stemmed from a Tools for Humanity event April 17 in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would be joining the Romantic Tour to not just provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.”

The statement was reiterated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “Concert Kit launches today and will roll out during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will have exclusive access to VIP suite experiences at select stops.”

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A video of the event, and the company’s blog post, have since been edited and reshared by Tools for Humanity. They now say that Concert Kit will roll out on the 2027 European tour for Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

“To be clear, we were never approached by TFH, nor were we in any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” said Bruno Mars’ Management and Live Nation in a joint statement to WIRED. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.” (WIRED had referenced the Bruno Mars partnership in its original story about the event; the story has since been updated to include this new information.)

A spokesperson for Tools for Humanity confirmed to WIRED in a statement Wednesday that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or feature Concert Kit, and there is no association or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why they announced Mars as a partner for the project in the first place.

Tools for Humanity was cofounded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, with the aim of using blockchain technology to verify people in online environments where scams are prevalent. In 2023, the company launched a physical, iris-scanning orb that works in conjunction with a mobile app.

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While Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management say they “have no opinions for or against their products,” it’s possible that Live Nation is feeling prickly about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup is proposing that Concert Kit will help thwart the bot problem that plagues sites like Ticketmaster—which is owned by Live Nation.

In September, Bloomberg reported that the US Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster over whether it had done enough to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak made a cameo at the Tools for Humanity event to vouch for this approach, saying to the crowd, “I fucking hate bots … they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be touring with Bruno Mars under his moniker DJ Pee .Wee. The plot thickens.)

Tools for Humanity also took a jab at Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying that “diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour presale, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in a single day, locking out millions of fans.”

The partnership with Mars was one of many announced at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aimed to legitimize the startup’s identity-verifying technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign said they’d be expanding their work with Tools for Humanity at the event. In the past, Tools for Humanity has struggled to get governments around the world on board with its technology as a safe, privacy-protecting way to identify real humans.

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Amazon names AWS exec Prasad Kalyanaraman to S-team, promotes Dave Brown to SVP

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Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of AWS Infrastructure Services, has been named to Amazon’s senior leadership team. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon added a new member to its senior leadership team Wednesday, naming AWS infrastructure chief Prasad Kalyanaraman to the group known as the S-team or “steam,” while also promoting cloud computing and AI services leader Dave Brown to senior vice president.

CEO Andy Jassy announced the changes internally, according to a memo viewed by GeekWire, and the company updated its public list of S-team members to reflect the changes.

Kalyanaraman oversees AWS infrastructure, including data centers, networking, and supply chain. He has been with the company for more than 20 years, starting in Amazon’s fulfillment and supply chain operations before moving to the cloud division in 2012.

Jassy’s memo praised his “customer obsession, high standards, ability to be right often, delivery, and missionary approach (always focusing on what’s best for customers — and the company as a whole vs. just his own area),” alluding in part to Amazon’s leadership principles

Dave Brown, newly promoted to senior vice president at Amazon, leads AWS EC2 and AI services including Bedrock and SageMaker. (Amazon Photo)

Brown leads AWS compute services (EC2) along with fast-growing AI services including Bedrock and SageMaker. He has been on the S-team since 2023, previously as a vice president.

“There are several reasons for his promotion, but chief among them are his outstanding delivery, propensity to look around corners and deliver services customers want, being right a lot, obsessing about customers, and continuing to develop strong teams,” Jassy wrote.

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The addition of Kalyanaraman brings the S-team back up to 28 members. That’s still down from more than 30 when the last big round of additions was made in September 2023. 

In the meantime, the group has seen departures including Adam Selipsky as AWS CEO (replaced by Matt Garman); longtime devices chief Dave Limp, (succeeded by former Microsoft executive Panos Panay); artificial intelligence leader Rohit Prasad; grocery head Tony Hoggett; and device software leader Rob Williams. 

Here’s the full list as it stands now.

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‘Simply by doing their daily work’: Meta tracks staff activity to teach AI how to replace them

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  • Meta is recording employee clicks, keystrokes, and screen activity to train AI agents on real work behavior
  • The program is part of a broader push to build AI systems that can perform everyday tasks with minimal human input
  • The move comes just ahead of reports of layoffs at the company

Meta has begun collecting everything its employees do as they go about their normal work to train its AI models, as first reported by Reuters. The Model Capability Initiative records mouse movements and clicks, keyboard keystrokes, and even occasional screenshots from computers used by Meta employees in the U.S. The company wants to observe how people actually use software, then feed that behavior into AI models so they can learn to do the same things.

Meta essentially wants to make its systems more reliable for the small actions that define a workday. That means everything from navigating a menu and moving between windows to parsing different website formats. These aren’t easily solved with text data alone.

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How Gut Bacteria May Affect The Outcome Of Cancer Immunotherapy

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In the ongoing development of cancer immunotherapy, as well as our still developing understanding of the human immune system, there’s always been a bit of massive elephant in the room. The thing about human bodies is that they’re not just human cells, but also consist of trillions of bacteria that mostly live in the intestines. What effect these bacteria have on the immune system’s functioning and from there on immunotherapies was recently investigated by [Tariq A. Najar] et al., with an article published in Nature.

The relevant topic here is that of antigenic mimicry, involving microbial antigens that resemble self-antigens. Since these self-antigens are a crucial aspect of both autoimmune diseases and cancer immunotherapy there is considerable room for interaction with their microbial mimics. Correspondingly these mimics can have considerable negative as well as positive implications, ranging from potentially triggering an autoimmune condition to hindering or boosting cancer immunotherapy.

In this study mice were used to investigate the effect of such microbial interference, in particular focusing on immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), which refers to negative feedback responses within the immune system that some cancers use to protect themselves. In some immunotherapy patients ICB inhibiting using e.g. anti programmed cell death protein (anti-PD-1) treatment does not provoke a response for some reason.

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For the study mice had tumors implanted and the effect of a particular microbe (segmented filamentous bacteria, SFB) on it studied, with the presence of it markedly improving the response to anti-PD-1 treatment due to anti-gens expressed by SFB despite the large gut-skin distance. Whether in humans similar mechanisms play a similarly strong role remains to be investigated, but it offers renewed hope that cancer immunotherapies like CAR T-cell immunotherapy will one day make cancer an easily curable condition.

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Complete will combine remasters and a sequel into one package

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Last year, Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunizata teased plans to remaster the first two games in the series and create an entirely new sequel. Ecco the Dolphin: Complete, announced by Annunziata’s studio A&R Atelier, appears to be the result of that work. The game doesn’t have a release date yet, but A&R Atelier says it combines the planned remasters and third title into “the complete, definitive Ecco the Dolphin experience, created by the people who made the originals.”

Complete includes “all versions of Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time,” according to the developer, alongside “a brand-new contemporary Ecco game.” Besides graphical improvements, A&E Atelier says the game will introduce “built-in speedrunning support, achievements and leaderboards,” and things like the ability to create custom courses from existing levels. And while A&R Atelier’s announcement doesn’t include footage of the new game or the platforms it’ll release on, the official Ecco the Dolphin website has a countdown clock that could point to when more information will be released.

Annunziata sued Sega to try and win the rights to the Ecco the Dolphin IP in 2013, the same year he failed to get The Big Blue, a spiritual sequel to Ecco the Dolphin, fully funded on Kickstarter. Sega and Annunziata ultimately settled their lawsuit in 2016, which may have laid the groundwork for Ecco the Dolphin: Complete to happen.

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Ping-Pong Robot Makes History By Beating Top-Level Human Players

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Sony AI’s autonomous table-tennis robot Ace has become the first robot to compete against top-level human players. Reuters reports: Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony’s AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project’s leader said. Ace did so by employing high-speed perception, AI-based control and a state-of-the-art robotic system. There have been various ping-pong-playing robots since 1983, but until now they were unable to rival highly skilled human competitors. Ace changed that with its performances against human elite-level and professional players in matches following the rules of the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport’s governing body, and officiated by licensed umpires.

The project’s goal was not only to compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments. In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month. “The success of Ace, with its perception system and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction — such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and safety-critical physical domains,” said Peter Durr, director of Sony AI Zurich and leader for Sony AI’s project Ace.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

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Ultrahuman Launched the First Smart Ring Integration for Expert-Led Workouts

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Health tech company Ultrahuman, makers of the Ultrahuman Ring Air and Ring Pro, launched a partnership with group workout brand Les Mills on Wednesday. Together, the companies created the Les Mills PowerPlug in the Ultrahuman app, which recommends workouts based on data collected by its smart rings, like sleep, recovery and cycle phase. 

Traditionally, when your smartwatch or ring tells you that your body is fatigued and that you should take it easy during your workout, it doesn’t provide the workout. With this new integration, the Les Mills PowerPlug offers expert-led, on-demand workout videos that take your current health status into account and help prevent overtraining.

“With Les Mills, we’re closing the loop — your ring doesn’t just tell you how recovered you are, it tells you what to do about it. The right workout, at the right intensity, every day. That’s what training smarter actually looks like,” Mohit Kumar, CEO of Ultrahuman, said in a press release.

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How the PowerPlug works

Upon downloading the Les Mills PowerPlug, Ultrahuman Ring users will be asked to choose their ideal training days, session length and a fitness goal from the following: cardio, strength, flexibility or general fitness. Going forward, the app’s home screen will then recommend two to three daily workouts based on your health data, along with a quick workout shortcut. 

You’ll also have access to Les Mills’s entire workout catalog, which you can sort by goal, program or duration. Yoga, strength, HIIT and stretching are just a few examples of the type of exercises you can perform.

Phone screens over a white background showing Les Mills workouts in the Ultrahuman app.

If you have accumulated sleep debt and your body is showing signs of fatigue, the Less Mills PowerPlug will likely suggest a recovery-forward yoga session.

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Ultrahuman x Less Mills

To select your workout recommendation, Ultrahuman uses its Dynamic Recovery score, a percentage from zero to 100 that symbolizes how prepared your body is to take on the day. It takes into account your sleep, temperature, stress rhythm, resting heart rate and heart rate variability and can change throughout the day with movement, naps and non-sleep deep rest like breathwork.

The Les Mills PowerPlug will also adapt its selections based on a user’s menstrual cycle. If they’re in a phase with more energy, such as the follicular or ovulatory phases, they’ll be advised to try a more intense workout. Low-energy luteal and menstrual phases will correlate with workouts that prioritize recovery, like yoga. During menstruation, high-impact workouts that are tough on the pelvic floor will be avoided. 

Once you complete your workout, you can then view your workout stats (duration, heart rate zones and calories), movement score, muscle group radar chart, daily goal progress and a post-workout recovery prediction that estimates your readiness for the next day.

The Les Mills PowerPlug price

Global Ultrahuman Ring Air and Ring Pro users can now purchase the Les Mills PowerPlug for $12 per month or $100 per year. 

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Due to a patent lawsuit with Oura, makers of the Oura Ring, the Ultrahuman Ring Air was previously banned in the US. However, in March, Ultrahuman launched its Ring Pro, which the US Customs and Border Protection approved for sale in the US. It is currently available for preorder and will start shipping on May 15. With a charging case, it costs $479.

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