Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s newest StrictlyVC event in El Segundo, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a conversation that kept circling back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a venture event: How do you know if a fish is stressed out?
It’s a fair question for Khawaja to field, since his company, Shinkei, has built its entire business around the answer. Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon that fishermen install on their boats. The machine scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species, and locates the brain. Within seconds of the fish coming out of the water, it pierces the brain and severs the gills, so the fish dies before it can thrash or suffocate.
That matters because a slow death floods the meat with stress hormones and lactic acid, which dull flavor and shorten shelf life. The whole thing is an automated, industrial-scale version of ike jime, a centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally performed dockside by trained fishermen at the moment of catch. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the flesh to be safely aged for days, sometimes longer, before it’s served. That aging period is what gives top-tier sashimi its concentrated, umami-heavy flavor, as enzymes slowly break down the muscle.
Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family in the Middle East, and the idea Shinkei didn’t click until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If Fish Could Scream.” Its premise was that fish lack vocal cords, so the suffering most of them experience on the way to your plate is essentially invisible. Conventional commercial fishing typically lets fish suffocate on deck, a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to roughly an hour. During that time, fish release stress compounds that shorten shelf life and dull flavor, the same basic mechanism that makes a stressed cow produce tougher, less flavorful beef.
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But Shinkei’s ambitions have expanded well past the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvester and processor, deploying robotics and AI across the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free, then pays those fishermen a premium price for the fish that come out of them, well above what the catch would fetch at a standard dock auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full possession of the fish rather than letting fishermen sell it on the open market. The catch then ships to a 16,000-square-foot plant Shinkei bought in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand, Seremoni, marketed as “ceremony grade” fish.
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The most visible proof point so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni Grade Miso Black Cod, hot off the prepared-foods bar, and the marketing around it leans hard on the “sustainably caught, humanely harvested” framing. The arrangement is still a pilot, running for now out of Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location, with wider rollout to other stores contingent on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants holding a combined 50 Michelin stars, and claims something that has reportedly never happened before: Japan importing American-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as distinctly inferior to the domestic product.
Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, the way many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, is still an open question, and even Khawaja treats it as secondary to the pitch when asked about this. He told the El Segundo crowd the real selling point isn’t the animal-welfare story so much as the practical one. A catch that might normally have a 5-to-7-day shelf life can stretch to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after coming out of the water with no issue. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, tries to quantify that by scanning fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each one. That matters in an industry where, by Khawaja’s estimate, roughly 18% of product is lost to spoilage just between dock and store, before retail loss is even counted.
That spoilage problem is tangled up with a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A meaningful share of fish caught in U.S. waters by U.S. boats gets frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive work of heading, gutting, scaling and filleting, then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates of how much American seafood is imported run as high as 90%, though roughly half of that, by some estimates, actually originated in domestic waters before making the round trip abroad. Reporting has tied parts of China’s seafood processing sector to forced labor, including Uyghur workers in Shandong province and North Korean labor in Liaoning, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor scrutiny in recent years. There’s been a push within the industry to “re-shore” some of that processing, spurred partly by tariffs and pandemic-era disruptions that made the China round trip less attractive.
The bet that Shinkei — and Founders Fund — are making is that re-shoring the entire chain, catch, kill, process, and distribute, all under one roof in Tacoma, can be done profitably enough to outcompete it.
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For Founders Fund, the wager fits a pattern the firm has leaned into for years, which is backing founders who are often outside of fashionable categories. Asparouhov, who speaks a mile a minute and without reserve, put it plainly: there’s essentially nobody else on Earth who wants to spend their life on robots that kill fish, and the smell of the office makes that clear enough. (It was a very funny line, though it undersells the field a little. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese firm called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to assist humans performing ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish slaughter and processing. Shinkei’s edge, for now, is being the only one running the fully automated version of the technique at scale on U.S. boats.)
In fact, Asparouhov said the firm intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories like generic AI applications relatively low. By his rough math, AI and defense together account for something like 15% to 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimated is typical elsewhere in venture. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company making solar-powered, GPS-equipped cattle collars that let ranchers herd cattle remotely, and Ohalo Genetics, the crop-genetics company started by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as evidence that the firm’s appetite for food and agriculture isn’t a one-off.
Of course, the fund’s headline-grabbing recent win has nothing to do with fish. Its early and aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX — a relationship that traces back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal — are reported to have generated tens of billions of dollars for the firm, by some accounts the largest venture outcome ever recorded. Asparouhov argued that win has accelerated a broader shift in venture toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the largest companies on the Nasdaq today involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted more of SpaceX’s alumni, flush with liquidity and shaped by working alongside Musk, will go on to start their own ambitious physical-world companies.
Whether Shinkei becomes one of the firm’s next big wins will take time to know. The company is a robotics manufacturer and a seafood processor and a consumer brand, all running at once, and each layer has its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working a certain way. Distributors are built around decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery buyers still have to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. The hardware has to survive saltwater, fish guts, and life on a commercial boat, and the product it’s selling spoils, so there’s little room for the kind of stumble a software company can usually shrug off.
Still, talking with the two together in El Segundo was enough to make me understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The firm thinks it has found a founder building something novel in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry — the kind of company almost nobody else in the United States even wants to build.
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[Myth Made] has a goal to get into writing. However, she likes to do things the aesthetic way, rather than the easy way. Thus, she has eschewed simple word processing on a conventional computer, instead choosing to build a remarkably attractive writing deck styled after a classic typewriter.The keycap marking technique is worth watching the video for on its own.
The build began with a mechanical keyboard with a compact layout. The square keycaps were swapped out for custom 3D printed versions that were rounded to suit the desired look. [Myth Made] used a neat technique where the caps were colored in with a paint marker and then ran through a laser engraver to bond the paint to the surface to make all the key markings.
With the input side sorted, the rest of the build could progress. The typewriter shell was printed in multiple parts, and then welded together with acetone. This was then covered with an ABS-acetone solution that helped remove some of the surface artifacts, before priming and paint. As for the electronics side, a Raspberry Pi Zero runs the show, hooked up to a Waveshare e-ink display which can be cranked up and down like a piece of paper coming out of a typewriter. There’s also a lovely 7-segment display which displays the current word count.
Multi-color filament printing has always carried a heavy tax. Every time a printer switches filaments mid-layer it pauses, pulls the old plastic back, primes the new one, and often dumps a blob of mixed waste into a purge tower. On complex painted models those swaps can number in the thousands. Print times stretch into days and entire spools disappear into the scrap bin.
YGK3D has just demonstrated a completely new method of printing that can significantly reduce costs. Sentient Stardust, a developer, integrated the approach in issue into a modified version of the Orca Slicer software called OraSlicer-ImageMap. The key to it all is that this software simply applies one solid color to every layer. When you move from one layer to the next, the new color appears on top of the old one, rather than a slew of interrupted tool changes within the same layer.
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How does it determine the color to show on the surface? It’s all down to clever geometry. The program just widens the extrusion on the current layer or moves the perimeter route a fraction of a millimeter to the right. This leaves a small amount of plastic hanging over the edge, which ultimately slides down far enough to cover the layer beneath. The software determines which colour will dominate any given region of the model by altering how much each colour projects out from the layer behind it.
The same principle can be applied to many different colors, not just two or three. With cyan, magenta, yellow, and black loaded into the machine, the rotation of colors across successive layers produces these really nice, fine patterns, and because they are stacked vertically, just like full-spectrum dithering, those patterns optically blend into all kinds of intermediate shades. Gradients also appear much smoother because the colours simply sit side by side rather than competing for space.
He had an owl model that used to take about 5 days and 4,000 tool changes, but with this new process, it took only 3 days and he had already decreased the amount of filament needed in half. The amount of garbage decreased from two kilograms to a few hundred grams. The software begins by taking an already painted 3MF file, converting the surface colors into a texture map, and then applying the overhang modulation automatically as the model is sliced.
This idea comes from a 2018 research report on line-based half-toning for dual-extrusion printers. This early experiment demonstrated how controlled overhangs could disguise one filament behind another. Sentient Stardust has taken that concept and expanded on it, adding image-projection features and putting everything as a usable slicer fork that anyone can download and explore.
Of course, there are certain limits. With three colors on a 0.2mm layer height, the print can appear as if it was done on 0.6mm layer height. Steep walls also limit the software’s options, making the blending effect less effective. Models with very mild curves also limit the technique’s possibilities. However, for the majority of painted objects, the time and material savings outweigh any difference in surface appearance. [Source]
Feature launches a day after lawsuit alleges chatbot advice contributed to near-fatal embolism
OpenAI is expanding its healthcare footprint by encouraging users to connect Apple Health data and supported medical records to ChatGPT – one day after a user sued the company, alleging the chatbot’s medical advice nearly killed him.
Health in ChatGPT, as the new feature is called, allows eligible users to connect ChatGPT to Apple’s Health app in iOS, giving the chatbot access to health information users choose to share, including medical records, sleep, activity, and other data stored in the app.
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For those unfamiliar with Apple’s Health app, it’s a health dashboard that collects data from an iPhone, Apple Watch, and compatible health and fitness apps, while also allowing users to add personal health information such as medications, allergies, and medical conditions. Connecting ChatGPT to the app, says OpenAI, gives the chatbot additional context for health-related conversations, allowing it to provide more personalized responses based on a user’s health information.
“With your permission, ChatGPT can consider relevant information you have connected, such as medications, lab results, recent visits, sleep, and activity, alongside the goals and context you share,” OpenAI said in its announcement.
According to the company, the integration of health information into general ChatGPT chats comes after testing a dedicated Health experience in ChatGPT earlier this year that it found users often bypassed, instead conducting more than 70 percent of their health-related conversations outside the dedicated health space.
Did no one think of the timing?
OpenAI said that it won’t use connected health data to train its foundation models or serve ads. Beyond those privacy concerns, however, there are some serious reasons to be skeptical of the Health in ChatGPT rollout.
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Take, for example, the fact that OpenAI was sued on Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court by a Florida man, who alleges ChatGPT gave him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that discouraged him from seeking medical care as his pulmonary embolism worsened. Later hospitalized, the plaintiff claims he now faces years of intensive physical and psychological recovery after the chatbot allegedly repeatedly reassured him that his symptoms were not serious and urged him to remain at home.
An OpenAI spokesperson told The New York Times that ChatGPT’s terms of service make clear it is not intended for medical diagnosis or treatment. The spokesperson also told the newspaper that the company’s models have improved since the incident at the heart of the lawsuit – a point OpenAI reiterated to The Register.
Similarly, the Health in ChatGPT announcement notes that it can still make mistakes and shouldn’t replace qualified medical professionals, even though OpenAI says it worked with hundreds of physicians to test the feature for performance and safety.
“ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be used as a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Register in an email. “Treating chatbots as the whole story behind people’s medical decisions or outcomes oversimplifies a much bigger challenge, and risks getting in the way of people accessing powerful new tools that can aid them in their health journey.”
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The inclusion of medical records in ChatGPT’s contextual data may help prevent some instances of bad advice (that plaintiff’s data may have included prior treatment that suggested increased risk for pulmonary embolism, for example), but that still won’t stop ChatGPT from simply being wrong.
We’ve published multiple stories in recent months about AI’s lack of accuracy being a major hurdle for medicine. One study earlier this year found that AI chatbots were no better at helping people make health decisions than conventional online resources, including search engines. Another study we covered found that LLMs failed at early differential diagnosis in more than 80 percent of cases. In Canada, the Auditor General of Ontario found that AI note-taking systems used by doctors routinely introduced medication errors into patient notes, omitted critical details, inserted incorrect information, and hallucinated things that neither patients nor clinicians brought up during appointments.
In other words, whether or not it’s armed with a patient’s data, involving an AI in healthcare decisions or advice sure seems like a bad idea.
“We use dedicated training to improve the models behind health conversations in ChatGPT,” OpenAI said, noting that its models have made “meaningful gains in recognizing when urgent care may be needed, asking for relevant context, explaining uncertainty, and making complex information easier to understand.”
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We’re told OpenAI has trained its models to address uncertainty in health queries when information is incomplete rather than just making up an answer.
Whether that’s enough to make it safe and reliable will ultimately be up to users to decide. For those determined to put their wellness in the hands of a company defending a lawsuit alleging ChatGPT dispensed dangerous medical advice, Health in ChatGPT is rolling out now to logged-in iOS and web users aged 18 and older in the US on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. ®
Europeans now get a direct look at the faces and landscapes that could soon fill their wallets. This week the European Central Bank unveiled ten shortlisted design proposals for the next series of euro notes and opened an online survey so the public can weigh in before a final choice arrives at the end of the year.
These proposals stem from two clear themes that were picked years ago after extensive public involvement and professional opinion was taken into account. One theme honors European culture in common places and concludes with some of Europe’s most well-known figures. The other walks down rivers from their mountain source to the sea, pairing each bit of water with a bird that lives there, as the one on the other side of the river is a key European institution. Both sets include the classic euro denominations from five to two hundred, and don’t worry, there will never be another 500 euro note.
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In the culture series, Maria Callas appears among a group of street performers on the five euro note. Ludwig van Beethoven appears on the tenth with a choir of young singers attending a festival. Marie Curie anchors the twenty in a classroom or at a university. Miguel de Cervantes gives the fifty to readers in a library. Leonardo da Vinci takes over the hundred, among children and adults learning art, while Bertha von Suttner, on the two hundred, has people gathered in a tree-lined square, as she was the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The back of each note depicts ordinary Europeans participating in the cultural life associated with that figure.
The Rivers and Birds series tells a very different story. On the five euro note, a wall creeper is depicted near the source of a river, with the European Parliament in the backdrop. On the tenth, a kingfisher waits by a waterfall, with the European Commission in the background. Bee-eaters are nesting in a sand bank along a river valley on the twentieth, and they are paired with the ECB building in Europe’s financial district. A white stork soars over a meandering river on the fifty, with the European Court of Justice in the background. An avocet is skimming across a river mouth on the hundredth anniversary of the European Council. A northern gannet is surfing the ocean waves on the two hundred, along with the European Court of Auditors. You can expect that water and wings are up front, whereas institutions are at the back.
Five design teams worked on each theme. On the cultural side, one of the teams, Studio Joost Grootens, clipped historical pictures around the eyes and lips, leaving only observation and expression – it’s like a thread that runs across the designs. Another company, Neue Gestaltung GmbH, positioned the humans against the stars and purposefully selected some featureless modern people to fill out the scenes. Myrsini Vardopoulou organized a team based on circular symbols from each personality’s work in the culture portrait series. Meanwhile, Jan Robert Dünnweller created hand-drawn portraits with textured backgrounds. Rubio and del Amo, along with their sidekicks Cruz más Cruz, designed the notes to feature people gazing you directly in the eyes with the words “EURO” written in vertical blocks.
On the nature side, PunktFormStrich converts birdsong and aircraft speed into graphic data. Rudy Guedj and François Girard-Meunier pair those abstract landscapes with a continuous ribbon of light that evolves throughout the series. Meanwhile, Atelier Goppel-Toperngpong uses water as a metaphor for collective power in their work. Isabelle Daëron’s work combines hand-drawn elements with digital patterns to explore the relationship between mobility and interdependence. Ville Tietäväinen sequences the notes like a river, gradually approaching the sea with each successive value.
Getting to those ten proposals wasn’t easy. When the contest went live in 2025, more than 1200 graphic artists from throughout the EU applied. From there, 25 of them were requested to further develop their concepts into whole series, and by April 25th, a total of 39 complete proposals had arrived. An independent jury of 21 specialists, each selected by a different euro-area central bank, then began evaluating them in the dark (i.e., without knowing whose work they were reviewing). They reduced it down to five suggestions per subject based on criteria such as inventiveness, thematic clarity, accessibility, and how effectively the resulting designs will function in everyday life. [Source]
Microsoft says a bug in its automated network maintenance request system caused Thursday’s massive outage by mistakenly removing IP routes from more devices than intended, disrupting Azure and Microsoft 365 services.
The outage began at 10:44 AM ET on Thursday, July 23, and mostly affected customers accessing Microsoft 365 services through network infrastructure connected to Microsoft’s West US Azure region.
At 11:11 AM ET, Downdetector had recorded 2,403 outage reports, sharply above its normal baseline of 29. SharePoint accounted for 78% of the complaints, followed by Excel at 11% and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center at 6%.
Microsoft tracked the Microsoft 365 outage under incident ID MO1437424 and confirmed that multiple Microsoft 365 services were impacted:
Microsoft OneDrive – Access to OneDrive was intermittent.
SharePoint Online – Users received “Something went wrong” errors.
Microsoft Teams – Chat functionality was degraded, including images not loading.
Microsoft 365 Admin Center – The Admin Center loaded slowly or not at all.
Power Automate – Automate flows did not load.
Copilot Chat – Users experienced intermittent delays or failures when performing actions and queries.
Microsoft Loop – Users were unable to open or load Loop pages.
Other affected services included Fabric and Power BI, Power Apps, Copilot Studio, Windows 365, and Microsoft Defender.
Some Defender customers experienced delays receiving responses from Microsoft Defender Experts, while investigations, workflows, and remediation actions triggered through Threat Explorer and Advanced Hunting could fail.
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Microsoft initially attempted to mitigate the outage by rerouting traffic through alternate network paths, which helped customers, but many services continued to be affected.
Before determining what caused the outage, Microsoft warned customers that they might need to review their business continuity and disaster recovery plans and take actions appropriate for their environments.
The company later identified a recent networking change as the cause and began reverting it.
Microsoft completed the reversion at 2:26 PM ET and confirmed through service telemetry and customer reports that the Microsoft 365 incident had been resolved.
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Maintenance bug caused outage
In a preliminary Post Incident Review for the Azure incident, Microsoft said the outage was triggered during routine device maintenance in its West US Azure region, where specific network paths were being isolated.
Microsoft says its maintenance process converts these types of requests into system-readable instructions and checks that at least one of two redundant paths remains healthy before the work begins.
However, a bug in the request conversion system incorrectly marked additional network devices as part of the maintenance event.
As a result, IP routes were removed from more devices than intended between Microsoft’s West US datacenter and its wide-area network.
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The removed routes disrupted network traffic entering or leaving the West US region. However, Microsoft said traffic remaining entirely within the region was not affected.
The Azure incident caused connectivity failures, increased latency, and problems accessing numerous cloud services, including Azure App Service, Application Gateway, Azure AD B2C, Azure AI Search, Azure API Management, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Databricks, Azure Firewall, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Monitor, Azure Virtual Desktop, ExpressRoute, Log Analytics, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Sentinel, Power BI Embedded, Virtual WAN, and VPN Gateway.
Microsoft said its engineers began investigating the issues immediately after the outage began at 10:44 AM ET.
The problem initially presented itself as large-scale route churn in Microsoft’s WAN. Engineers later traced the route removals to a datacenter in the West US region and linked them with the recent maintenance activity.
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Microsoft initiated a rollback of the maintenance change at 1:45 PM ET, which was completed at 2:26 PM ET.
The rollback restored the affected network infrastructure and allowed Microsoft 365 services to recover. Some Azure services continued recovering after the fix was put in place, with Microsoft reporting that all affected services had fully recovered by 3:41 PM ET.
Microsoft is now conducting a full internal review focused on the safety checks and automated processes used to execute maintenance requests.
“We will be preforming a full analysis focusing on safety checks, automated maintenance request change process, and more as we progress through our post mitigation internal retrospective,” explained Microsoft.
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The company said it will publish a final Post Incident Review after completing its investigation, which is usually within 14 days.
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Players may be unable to log into their account, play online or purchase games from the PlayStation Store.
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PlayStation Network (PSN) is going through an outage that’s affecting all of Sony’s video game services, according to the PlayStation Service Status page. Players may be unable to access their PlayStation account or use the PlayStation Store, and the outage has had at least one real world impact by delaying the EA Sports FC 26 championship at the Esports World Cup.
Sony’s status page notes that “all services are experiencing issues,” including account management features, game streaming, the PlayStation Store and even PlayStation Direct, Sony’s website for selling PlayStation hardware. The issues also extend to older platforms the company is still maintaining in one way or another, like the PS Vita, PS4 and PS3.
Engadget has asked Sony to comment on the outage and the work it’s doing to fix it. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
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Sony has yet to publicly acknowledge the PSN outage on its public-facing PlayStation Support account, but the timing is awkward, to say the least. The company recently announced plans to retire physical game disc production by 2028 and make all PlayStation games available digitally. While digital games offer certain conveniences, one way their weaknesses show is when a network outage makes them completely unavailable to purchase or play.
If you remember Jibo, you’ll probably also remember its emotional farewell. The social robot, once named one of TIME’s Best Inventions, shut down in 2019 with a message asking owners to “say hello” to future robots. Singapore-based AI hardware startup Lingverse, the team behind the original visoon, has announced $29 million in Pre-A funding to develop iKairos, a wearable AI companion that the company describes as the spiritual successor to Jibo. Unlike existing AI wearables, iKairos is designed to understand both its user and their surroundings, allowing it to offer proactive assistance instead of simply responding to prompts.
iKairos Wants to Be More Than Another AI Wearable
AI wearables have gained momentum over the past year, but most products still rely on a single camera or microphone to interpret the world from the wearer’s perspective. Lingverse believes that’s only half the picture. The company says iKairos is the first dual-perspective AI wearable, featuring a modular design that can be worn on the body or used as a desktop device. Users can switch its field of view between themselves and their surroundings, allowing the AI to build context about both the person wearing it and the environment around them.
The goal is to make the device less reactive and more proactive. Instead of waiting for voice commands, iKairos is designed to recognize situations where reminders, suggestions, or questions might be useful based on what it observes over time.
Beyond that, the company says iKairos includes a physical camera shutter that completely blocks visual recording whenever users want additional privacy. It also claims that personal data is either processed locally on the device or encrypted during transmission, and that user data won’t be used to train its AI models.
Speaking on the matter, Jiawei Gu, Founder and CEO of Lingverse, said:
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Today, with iKairos, we can finally pick up where the Jibo team left off and deliver on the promise. iKairos continuously observes both you and your surroundings, creating the context that today’s AI lacks. Once the AI understands your life instead of just your prompts, iKairos can begin to act as a personal AI guardian, which is capable of unlocking entirely new experiences and proactively adapts to and works around your lifestyle.”
Dynaudio’s decision to close its U.S. subsidiary raised the question every owner wanted answered first: would the warranty still mean anything once the company packed up and left? The answer is yes, but the repair network, service contacts and future North American distribution plan are still being worked out.
A warranty promise is good news. A warranty promise without a named repair center, service contact or explanation of where your loudspeaker goes when something fails is still only half an answer.
Dynaudio has now addressed the most important consumer question following its decision to close its U.S. subsidiary and end direct commercial operations across North America this fall: existing warranties will remain valid.
In an email interview published by Stereophile, Dynaudio Chief Commercial Officer Julien Bergere stated: “All warranties of existing products in the US market will be honored.” He also confirmed that products purchased through official Dynaudio dealerships during the transition will retain warranty coverage.
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That should provide some reassurance to current owners and anyone considering remaining dealer inventory. What Dynaudio has not provided is the support structure required to turn that promise into an actual repair.
Dynaudio Focus 50 Loudspeaker
What Dynaudio Has Confirmed
Dynaudio’s confirmation applies to products already sold in the United States and to new purchases made through authorized dealers while the company winds down its North American operation. Buying from an official dealer remains important; a deeply discounted grey market speaker with no authorized sales record is unlikely to become more appealing because the U.S. office is closing.
Dynaudio’s published warranty policy currently provides up to 96 months of coverage for registered passive loudspeakers, provided registration occurs within 12 months of purchase. Registered active products receive up to 96 months on passive components and 36 months on electronics, while OEM drivers and automotive aftermarket products carry 24 months of coverage. Terms vary by product and local warranty law.
Owners should register qualifying products now, retain the original receipt and document the authorized dealer. This is not the moment to discover that the invoice disappeared with an email account from 2021.
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The Repair Network Is Still Unresolved
Bergere acknowledged that Dynaudio is still studying how warranty service will be delivered after the subsidiary closes. The company has not named replacement service centers, explained whether repairs will remain inside the United States or confirmed how parts and technical support will reach dealers.
Dynaudio’s current contact page still lists Dynaudio North America and its existing U.S. sales contact, but that does not explain who takes over once the Northbrook, Illinois, operation shuts down.
For a small bookshelf speaker, uncertain shipping logistics are irritating. For a large floorstander, active loudspeaker or professional monitor, they become expensive very quickly. Owners need to know who authorizes the repair, where the product is shipped, who pays the freight and how long replacement drivers or electronics will remain available.
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“We will honor it” is welcome. “Here is how” is the part still missing.
Dealers Can Place Final Orders
Dynaudio has offered U.S. and Canadian dealers the opportunity to place final orders before the transition is completed. Bergere said remaining inventory will be returned and “shipped back to be sold elsewhere.”
That could make some models harder to find once existing dealer stock is depleted. It could also produce discounts, although buyers should not let a sale price distract them from asking who will provide support after the local subsidiary disappears.
The company has also left open the possibility of returning through an independent distributor or selling more directly to retailers. Dynaudio says it would consider either arrangement if it could maintain the required level of brand representation and customer service. No agreement has been announced, and nobody should confuse willingness to consider a distributor with actually having one.
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Tariffs Mattered, but Greenland Did Not
Dynaudio says the U.S. importer, rather than Dynaudio A/S in Denmark, pays tariffs at the border. Those costs are then absorbed through lower margins, higher retail prices or some combination of both. The company deliberately used the broader phrase “economic challenges and market uncertainty” in its original announcement rather than turning the release into a seminar on customs policy.
Bergere also rejected online speculation that tensions between the United States and Denmark over Greenland played a role in the decision.
Greenland did not drive Dynaudio from North America. The spreadsheet appears to have been sufficiently persuasive on its own.
Dynaudio maintains that the move is strategic, allowing it to concentrate on Europe, Asia and new premium products including the Legend loudspeaker, Confidence i range and Symphony Opus One system. That makes the timing no less strange after prominent appearances at AXPONA and High End Vienna, but it provides a clearer explanation than geopolitical revenge involving an island with fewer people than Hoboken.
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Dynaudio Legend Bookshelf Speaker at AXPONA 2026
The Bottom Line
Dynaudio’s warranty confirmation is genuinely good news. Existing owners are not being abandoned, and authorized purchases made during the transition will remain covered.
The unresolved issue is execution. Dynaudio still needs to identify the repair network, publish the service process and explain how parts, freight and customer communication will work after its U.S. subsidiary closes.
A warranty is a promise. A functioning service network is how that promise gets kept.
Consumers do not need to panic, and the loudspeakers did not suddenly become worse because the company changed its regional strategy. But anyone buying Dynaudio inventory in the coming months should register the product immediately, keep every document and ask the dealer for a clear explanation of who will handle future service.
Despite their small size, mosquitoes are one of the deadliest creatures on Earth, and keeping them away from you is one of the best ways to stay safe. DEET has been the mainstay of insect repellents for decades, but what if there was a repellent you could grow yourself?
Researchers at Cardiff University found that the essential oil from catnip plants (Nepeta cataria) could be as effective as DEET at repelling mosquitoes when applied as a 6% lotion. The oil has been shown to be effective against many species of mosquitoes, ticks, and mites in previous research. You can look at the paper for details, but the catnip oil was obtained through steam distillation followed by some processing with hexane. The essential oil was then mixed with “water, glycerin, emulsifying wax, cetyl alcohol, cetyl stearyl alcohol, shea butter, glycerol monostearate, olive oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil, methyl paraben, propyl paraben and silicone oil.” We suspect that list will look familiar to anyone who’s read an ingredient label of most any store bought lotion, unless it was paraben free.
The Guardian’s coverage quotes one of the researchers, [Dr. Simon Scofield]: “We did not conduct any experiments to see if it is attractive to cats, but given that the active ingredient [nepetalactone] has well-known cat-attractive properties, I would expect they would quite like it,” he said. Depending on how your cats react, you may want to consider applying the lotion shortly before departing home.
A huge debate is brewing in Silicon Valley over the proliferation of Chinese-made artificial intelligence tools, particularly “open-weight” AI systems that, by some measures, can compete with or even outperform some of the best US models. My WIRED colleague Hugo Lowell has written about the Trump administration’s internal debate on how to handle these Chinese models. Among AI companies in the Valley, the issue is proving even more divisive.
A top concern in both DC and the Valley relates to distillation, in which a less capable AI model is trained on the outputs of a more powerful one. In June, Anthropic accused the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of illicitly stealing its IP through distillation attacks. Then, earlier this week, the White House said that it believes the Beijing-based Moonshot AI had developed its Kimi K3 model by distilling Anthropic’s Fable 5 model.
Another big concern is how quickly China’s models are appearing and spreading. An open-weight AI model has its core components made public, so that it can be fine-tuned to suit a user’s needs. But they don’t have the kinds of guardrails on which Anthropic has been building its reputation. Yasir Atalan, deputy director and data fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, points out that the main benefit of open-weight AI models is their speed of diffusion. They can spread especially easily “through Hugging Face, GitHub, cloud providers, local deployments, and third-party inference platforms,” he writes. If you’re Anthropic, and you’ve built a cult around safety and charge for access to your big expensive proprietary models, you have every reason to want to regulate this.
But some Silicon Valley startups—not the trillion-dollar ones like OpenAI and Anthropic—really don’t want the US government to put restrictions on these AI models. On Wednesday a group of over 200 startups called the Little Tech Association sent a letter to Michael Kratsios, science adviser to President Donald Trump, and US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lobbying against an outright ban of open-weight AI models. The group, which includes famed startup incubator YCombinator, has argued in favor of certain safeguards but says that denying Americans access to AI models abroad would weaken US startups and create a monopoly among the AI giants.
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Bill Gurley, the legendary tech investor and longtime partner at Benchmark Capital, has publicly argued in favor of letting “the free market work.” In a lengthy blog that offers a nice little history of open-source software, Gurley writes that open-weight models avoid lock-in, encourage true academic research, and are critical for capital-constrained startups.
“Every AI startup, every solo developer, every two-person team building a product on top of AI infrastructure depends on having access to good models at affordable prices,” Gurley says.
Chamath Palihapitiya, one of the All-In podcast hosts, wrote on X that “tricking the US Government to protect frontier labs’ business model by using a China boogeyman is a mistake…It is protecting the equity of 5,000 people who are investors in OAI and Ant at the sale of everyone else. This would be a terribly stupid decision.” His cohost and fellow VC Jason Calacanis piled on. “Daddy Trump protect us!!!!” he wrote on X, with an alarming number of crying-laughing emoji.
This stance from some of Silicon Valley’s most ruthless capitalists might at first seem counterintuitive. Why let a foreign adversary’s technology flourish in the US? It’s as if the US is up just 1-0 in the AI World Cup, a slightly uncomfortable lead, and the crowd is chanting for the opposing team to get a free kick.
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