We love the idea of the natural-born leader. The prodigy. The one who just seems to have it all.
But leadership isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you learn. Something you’re pushed into, tested on, and built through experience. Sometimes under pressure, sometimes over a stove.
This philosophy comes to life through the Camp of Leaders (COL) programme, a structured mentorship platform by Taylor’s University that connects students with industry professionals to bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world.
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The COL programme is more than just a boot camp. It offers direct exposure to industry realities where mentors guide students through genuine challenges and share insights shaped by actual practice, not just lessons and textbooks. And this year, that experience took a turn into the kitchen.
For its fourth edition, the programme focused on culinary arts, throwing 17 handpicked students from Taylor’s Culinary Institute (TCI), specifically from the Advanced Diploma in Patisserie and Gastronomic Cuisine, into the pan under the theme “The Art of Modern Asian Culinary Expression”.
Their task was to reimagine classic Asian flavours with a contemporary twist. This challenge demanded not just technical skills but composure, collaboration, and the ability to lead from within a team.
Students handled mise-en-place and plated the evening’s main course—Crispy-scale Kinmedai fish. / Image Credit: Vulcan Post Malaysia
The challenge unfolded as a one-day crash course where students had to prepare a five-course, four-hands dinner (a culinary term for a collaborative style where two chefs craft a one-off tasting menu) under the guidance of two Taylor’s alumni who have made their mark in the industry.
One was Chef Yuda Bustara, an internationally recognised Indonesian chef, entrepreneur, and TV personality. He has brought Indonesian cuisine to global audiences through shows like Urban Cook, Home Cooked Indonesia, and Iron Chef Indonesia, as well as represented Indonesia on Netflix’s The Maverick Academy.
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Alongside him was Chef Hans Christian, one of Indonesia’s most respected names in modern fine dining. He is the co-founder of August, a restaurant known for its contemporary take on Indonesian cuisine, which has earned regional recognition, including the American Express One To Watch Award at Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023 and a spot on the 2024 list.
Chef Yuda Bustara (right) and Chef Hans Christian (left), graduates of Taylor’s Culinary Institute, have since carved out notable careers in the culinary world. / Image Credit: Vulcan Post Malaysia
A Window Into The Real World
While the professional chefs set the tone, the true measure of the programme lies in the hands-on skills of the students on the other side of the pass. Wynn Wyman, a second-semester international student in TCI’s Advanced Diploma in Patisserie and Gastronomic Cuisine, was one of them.
For the Jakarta native, whose interest in cooking began in childhood, the COL programme was more than a day of high-pressure cooking; it served as a window into two very different culinary career paths and a chance to figure out where his own ambitions might eventually land.
Wynn said Chef Yuda was his childhood hero growing up, while Chef Hans has been a major source of learning and inspiration during Camp of Leaders. / Image Credit: Vulcan Post Malaysia
His day at the boot camp began in the morning with back-to-back masterclasses from the two chefs, who gave him and the other students personal insights into their career journeys.
For Wynn, the contrast between the two industry leaders was immediately valuable, not because they were naturally gifted, but because they had each carved their own path through relentless effort.
“They told us a lot about their experiences—how they grew up in the industry, how they started. I really learned a lot, both in technique and in life. How to become a better chef, how to be more of a team player, how to improve as a person.” — Wynn
The afternoon was dedicated to preparing for the dinner service. Students handled mise en place (the French culinary term for preparing and organising ingredients), assisted with desserts, and contributed to main courses and appetisers.
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Learning From Industry Leaders
Wynn (right), seen in the background, preparing the Lobster Ulam starter of the night. Crispy Kinmedai fish served with a creamy green-yellow curry sauce and ginger flower relish—bringing together savoury, sweet, and lightly tangy flavours. / Image Credit: Vulcan Post Malaysia
While Wynn picked up plenty of technical skills during the experience, the bigger impact came from a shift in how he thought, which helped change both his approach and perspective in the kitchen.
“I grew to realise that Asian cuisine can be elevated, made modern and gastronomic,” Wynn expressed. “Not a lot of restaurants try to do modern gastronomic Asian cuisine. They still focus on European, French, Italian. So it’s great knowing that these chefs want to make Indonesian and Malaysian cuisine more interesting.”
As someone who plans to expand the fine-dining discipline into Indonesian cuisine, this realisation fits neatly into Wynn’s broader aspirations.
“I really hope that I can be someone who can elevate Indonesian dishes, make them more well-known to people outside of Asia. I want to make Indonesian cuisine as prestigious as French cuisine,” Wynn shared ahead of his internship in France.
Wynn’s experience captures exactly the soft-skills development that the programme focuses on by learning to stay steady and work confidently alongside experienced professionals, qualities that no amount of natural talent can replace.
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“A lot of techniques are not very common for us to use right now,” Wynn noted. “But as they’re fine dining chefs, they explain to us and slowly guide us.”
Wynn said he walked away from the experience knowing he’ll now pay close attention to every detail, work to master more techniques, and never work half‑heartedly.
Emptying The Cup
For Chef Hans Christian, the chance to return to Taylor’s and mentor this session of the COL programme came from a deep understanding of how critical the university-to-industry transition can be.
“Moving to Taylor’s is the first major life decision for you as a high schooler, and that kind of determines your life path after that.” — Hans
Hans described himself as a driven and curious student who actively sought opportunities beyond the standard curriculum. “You have to be like a sponge,” Hans emphasised, noting the importance of looking for opportunities outside the classroom.
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This mentality is the core message he tries to impart to students during the programme, and he stressed that academic prowess alone does not automatically translate to professional success.
“No matter how good you are when you are in school, when it comes to the real kitchen, it takes a certain mentality, character, and attitude to empty your cup and really absorb as much as you can. Whatever you believe here is only a small part of what makes you a great chef,” he explained.
He also addressed the importance of mindset over raw talent, especially when facing the inevitable pressures and criticisms of a professional kitchen. For Hans, true leadership reveals itself in how someone responds to difficulty, not in whether they have innate talents or confidence.
“No matter how good you are, if your chef scolds you like crazy and gives you a hard time, how do you process that?” He continued, “Can you wake up the next day and come back and say, ‘I’m going to do better this time’? That’s what matters.”
Hans said that cooking goes beyond the plate, and that every chef needs to constantly reflect on themselves, and how they work with and manage others. / Image Credit: Vulcan Post Malaysia
At its core, the COL programme gives students something no textbook can provide by offering them the chance to experience real pressure before they step into the workforce.
With three sessions slated for April, September, and November 2026, each themed differently and guided by renowned industry leaders from around the world, the COL programme stands as a platform where students can step up and become leaders in their own right.
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Learn more about Taylor’s Camp of Leaders programme here.
Find out more about Taylor’s Culinary Institute here.
Ubotica will deploy and operate AI models directly in orbit using Novi’s smart-satellite constellation.
Dublin-based NASA and the European Space Agency collaborator, Ubotica, is partnering with Texas’ Novi Space to deliver real-time intelligence from the Earth’s orbit.
Novi provides computing technology for spacecrafts, alongside a constellation of multi-sensor edge-processing satellites linked to an intelligence management platform.
The open-access platform allows companies to build AI-powered applications in space, including improving Earth observation, geospatial intelligence and autonomy.
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The collaboration integrates Ubotica’s AI platform with Novi’s ‘Genie’ smart-satellite constellation and platform to enable Earth observation data to be processed directly onboard satellites, unlike traditional systems that transfer data to Earth before analysis.
Through the partnership, Ubotica will deploy and operate AI models directly in orbit through the Genie multi-sensor satellite platform.
The Dublin start-up’s ‘Space:AI’ platform generates analysis within 90 seconds from when it begins processing, it said, resulting in lower latency and bandwidth costs translating to savings.
According to the company, in a single observation of a Singapore port, the platform processed hundreds of vessels and detected those operating dark in under two minutes. The company has deployed its AI capabilities on numerous missions, including its own CogniSAT-6 satellite.
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“Our collaboration with Novi brings more AI-enabled Earth observation capacity into orbit. By combining Space:AI with Genie’s onboard compute, we’re shifting satellites from data collectors to intelligent agents, delivering insights in minutes rather than days,” said Ubotica co-founder and chief technology officer Dr Aubrey Dunne.
“That capability underpins our live maritime intelligence service and unlocks new operational models for time-critical surveillance.” The start-up won the SpaceNews Icon Award for Space AI Partnership last December, alongside NASA JPL and Open Cosmos.
Michael Bartholomeusz, the CEO of Novi Space added: “Partnering with Ubotica allows us to demonstrate the full potential of Genie – delivering real-time intelligence from orbit, not just data. This is a fundamental shift in how space-based systems create value.”
AMD has launched the Ryzen PRO 9000 Series processors for commercial desktops and workstations. With these processors, the company offers enterprise-level 3D V-Cache capabilities to enhance performance for demanding workloads. AMD designed these processors for professionals working in content creation, architecture, engineering, and design.
These processors are the latest in AMD’s lineup, designed for commercial desktops and professional workstations. Along with performance upgrades for heavy workloads, the lineup also includes enterprise security and long-term platform support features.
3D V-Cache for Professional Workloads
3D V-Cache will be introduced in enterprise workstation processors with the upcoming Ryzen PRO 9000 Series. With increased cache memory, the company aims to improve processor performance when handling intensive tasks or applications. The increased cache memory will enhance the performance of applications working on large files by making it easier for them to access them. The company states that the technology aims to increase processor efficiency in professional environments.
The Ryzen PRO 9000 Series is designed for professionals such as creators, architects, engineers, and designers who rely on heavy-duty professional software. According to AMD, the chips will provide improved performance during the editing and encoding of videos in 4K and 8K resolutions, along with compositing performance in media workflows. The processors are also intended for architects and construction professionals, including BIM and 3D modeling. Manufacturing professionals working with CAD models and simulations will benefit from the performance of this series of chips.
Performance and Security
Image Credit: Unsplash
The AMD Ryzen PRO 9000 Series comes in various configurations designed for desktop computers and business workstations. These CPUs are offered in six-core, eight-core, 12-core, and 16-core varieties with several thermal design power (TDP) choices. AMD has created high-performance CPUs for individuals who require reliable performance on challenging projects.
Along with performance upgrades, the Ryzen PRO 9000 Series also focuses on enterprise reliability and security. As part of the AMD PRO platform, the processors include advanced security protections and manageability tools for IT departments. AMD says the platform supports long-term business deployments with stable and consistent performance.
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Availability Details
According to AMD, the Ryzen PRO 9000 Series processors will arrive in the second half of 2026. Lenovo has already confirmed that it will feature the new processors in its ThinkStation P4 workstation at NXTBLD. AMD may also announce additional OEM partners and systems closer to launch.
Cloud giant says humans remain accountable, even when code gets an assist from the machines
Google is encouraging its database developers to lean “heavily” on AI coding tools as it ramps up contributions to open source projects such as PostgreSQL.
Earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new contributions to PostgreSQL, the open source database that has become a popular RDBMS for developers building new applications in the cloud.
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Sailesh Krishnamurthy, VP of Databases, Google Cloud, told The Register that the company was using AI coding tools to accelerate its contributions to open source database systems, although each developer remains responsible for their individual contributions.
“We do encourage folks to use AI heavily ,” he said. “We are seeing huge amounts of productivity improvements internally. In the end, we have individual engineers take accountability for our contributions. Whether you have a piece of code that is completely drafted by AI, or not even part of what you’re pasting into your development environment, you have a whole spectrum where AI is used in different places. Either way, the accountability remains on behalf of the person who’s done it.”
AI coding tools can be especially suited to developing contributions to open source projects because the codebase is publicly available and has been used to train the generative models, he said.
“That’s how models have a better sense of the code, as opposed to many proprietary pieces of code, which are inside the firewall.”
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PostgreSQL was designed to be extensible. As such, it can be a system well suited to vibe coding to get new ideas off the ground quickly, Krishnamurthy said.
“The sweet spot is where you have maybe an interesting academic idea that is well understood, and you have a codebase that’s well understood, and you’re trying to say, well, I want to take this idea and I want to take this piece of code and build an extension for it. That’s a great example where you have something isolated – the blast radius is small – and you can go and use AI to interpret the code. Our own engineers are using AI quite heavily, but also judiciously.”
PostgreSQL became the most popular database among developers in 2023, according to the Stack Overflow survey. The trend owes a great deal to the plethora of PostgreSQL database services out there, not least from the big three cloud providers, which have ramped up investment in the open source system.
Last year, Microsoft contributed pg_documentdb_core, a custom PostgreSQL extension that enables support for Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON, a binary-encoded serialization of JSON documents), and pg_documentdb_api, a data layer providing MongoDB-compatible commands for create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, queries, and index management. The extensions are set to run on the Azure Cosmos DB PostgreSQL database service and offer a document-store-style database to rival MongoDB.
Krishnamurthy said: “The industry at large is investing heavily in PostgreSQL. We see this across the board, whether it’s customers, whether it’s digital native services, and certainly we see the migrations coming from commercial databases. It is also a broad industry trend of PostgreSQL as a layer, no matter where data is being stored.”
As such, Google has contributed new code to the project, with the engineering effort focused on advancing logical replication. Contributions included Automatic Conflict Detection, designed to allow the replication worker to automatically detect when an incoming change (Insert, Update, or Delete) conflicts with the local state; and logical replication of sequences.
Demand for PostgreSQL services is coming from migrations as well as new applications, Krishnamurthy said. Customers are ditching Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2, as well as other legacy systems, including Sybase and Informix.
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Research from Gartner earlier this year shows that of the leading database vendors 15 years ago – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP – only Microsoft has grown its market share since. As well as its own database systems, Microsoft offers PostgreSQL and MySQL services, as does AWS, the leading database vendor. Oracle remains third, ahead of Google, and that position seems unlikely to change soon. Nonetheless, with all the major cloud vendors contributing to open source database projects such as PostgreSQL, momentum is slowly shifting. ®
The 1970s were a period of great change in the US car market, thanks to the oil crisis of the decade, which led to lower horsepower in cars. Many companies simply had to rethink how engines, gearboxes, and cars should be packaged. They began to prioritize efficiency in ways they hadn’t before, and one of the ways they did that was by shrinking car sizes and moving to front-wheel drive.
Mitsubishi saw the opportunity and took it. It launched a little hatchback in 1978 called the Mirage, and this car came with an odd engineering quirk. As highlighted by The Autopian, most rivals at the time were building transverse front-drive layouts, in which the engine is mounted sideways, with the gearbox bolted to the side. Mitsubishi decided to take a different route, though, and stacked the gearbox underneath the engine instead. This made the whole package narrower from side to side, making it easier to fit into the Mirage’s tight engine bay, and, as a result, freeing up more space for the wheels and cabin. But rather than simplifying things, the choice actually set off a cascade of quirks. At the end of that cascade sits the Twin-Stick transmission, as it was branded in some markets.
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How the two sticks came to be
When the Mirage was being designed, its Orion inline-four engine sat with its carburetor facing the front of the car. Further testing revealed icing problems up there, and that’s what kicked off the cascade, as mentioned. The fix itself was simple: just flip the engine around so the carb faced the other way. Trouble is, turning the motor also reversed the direction the crankshaft spun, and that meant the wheels would now turn in reverse.
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Normally, you’d solve that by slipping in a small idler gear between the engine and the gearbox to flip the rotation back the right way. But the engineering team saw an opportunity. If they were already adding a gear set to sort out the rotation, why not build a second ratio into it while they were at it? The result was two sticks paired together, a four-speed manual lever, and a second one sitting beside it. It was something no one else was offering at the time.
That second stick was a two-position lever, and when paired with the four-speed manual, it essentially gave drivers eight forward gears to choose from. The lever moved between Power and Economy modes, with a little indicator on the dashboard letting you know which one was active. The economy mode basically turned the car into a normal four-speed. Flick it over to Power, though, and the gear ratios immediately shorten, giving you punchier ratios for acceleration.
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Did they actually improve the driving experience?
Power wasn’t just a crawler-style low range. Unlike the off-road high/low gearing on a 4×4, the gears under this mode still stayed tall enough to use all the way up to highway speeds. In fact, there were just a few hundred rpm separating the Power and Economy versions of each gear. The transfer case also worked in reverse, so you technically had two reverse gears at your disposal.
Because the rpm differences weren’t major, the performance boost wasn’t significant either. MotorWeek actually ran the turbocharged Colt GTS Turbo, a rebadged Mirage sold in North America, back in the day. They recorded a 0 to 60 mph sprint of 9.4 seconds in Power mode and 9.7 seconds in Economy, which, again, isn’t that big of a difference unless you’re really looking for it. Mirage owners figured this out for themselves soon enough. Rather than shuffling between all eight gears in sequence, which would have taken some extreme levels of coordination, most settled on one mode depending on the situation.
But the Mirage, at least the initial Japanese model, wasn’t the only car to get Mitsubishi’s Super Shift. The setup also made its way into the Cordia, Tredia, and Chariot, as well as the Dodge and Plymouth Colt, which were rebadged Mirages sold in North America. The implementation remained in production until 1990, when it was quietly phased out. The Mirage itself was produced until 2003 before being revived in 2012.
Google has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to protecting Pixel users from spam calls, and it looks like the company isn’t done yet. According to a recent teardown of the Google Phone app by Android Authority, Google is working on a new phone number spoofing detection feature.
What is phone number spoofing?
Phone number spoofing, also known as caller ID spoofing, is when a scammer tricks your phone into displaying a familiar or saved contact’s number, even though the call is actually coming from a completely different number.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
As users are more likely to pick up a call if it looks like it’s coming from family members, friends, or authorized personnel, like a doctor or a bank representative, phone number spoofing is on the rise in the scam chart. It has become a surprisingly common tactic and one that has caught a lot of people off guard.
So what is Google doing about it?
Android Authority cracked open version 222.0.913376317 of the Google Phone app and found strings of code that point to an upcoming spoofing detection system. One of the strings reads, “Someone may be pretending to call from your contact’s number,” and another suggests that users will have the option to hang up the call immediately.
It’s not entirely clear how Google plans to detect spoofed numbers, but the timing is interesting. Only a few days back, Google announced a slew of security features, including verified financial calls, OTP protection, real-time malware detection, APK scanning in Chrome, and more.
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Google
With the new call spoof detection feature and existing spam call protections, including Call Screening and spam detection, the Pixel phones have become the best anti-scam smartphones. There’s no word yet on when this feature will roll out, but it’s good to know Google is working on it.
The Tampa-based, Sun Capital-owned software services firm is folding the SAP- and IWG-trusted UK digital agency into its Digital Experiences practice. Deal terms were not disclosed.
Exadel, the Tampa-based software-development and consulting firm, has acquired Tangent, the London-based digital experience consultancy, the company said on Monday. Terms were not disclosed.
Tangent will continue to operate under its existing brand inside Exadel’s Digital Experiences practice, with chief executive Leigh Gammons moving into a managing director and senior vice president role to lead the business.
On Exadel’s own framing, the deal is about pairing two halves of an enterprise transformation engagement that have traditionally lived in different vendor categories.
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Exadel sells what it calls AI-native engineering: data infrastructure, applications, and the back-end work of running an enterprise’s technology stack, on a 2,000-plus headcount across the US, Europe and LATAM.
Tangent sells the front-end discipline, including UX, product, web experience and MarTech engineering, on a smaller boutique footprint built up around what its website describes as enterprise digital-product work. The acquisition pulls strategy, design and engineering inside one contract.
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‘Brands increasingly win or lose based on the AI-driven digital experiences they provide to customers,’ said James Dalziel, Exadel’s chief operating officer, in the statement.
‘By bringing Tangent into the organisation, we are fortifying our ability to help global clients not only design exceptional experiences, but also continuously optimise and scale them through AI.’
Gammons described the value of the combination from the other direction: ‘Companies are demanding more than great digital experiences. They need to provide experiences that can constantly evolve and drive measurable outcomes.’
Tangent has been operating since 2001 and counts SAP, IWG, and UK Power Networks among its enterprise clients, according to its own published materials, with the Exadel release also naming New Balance and Vodafone.
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Its team is London-headquartered with a Newcastle office and a delivery footprint across Spain, South Africa, Poland, Egypt, and Pakistan. Gammons joined the agency as chief executive after leaving a senior role at WPP.
Exadel’s M&A appetite has a recognisable shape. The company is owned by an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners after a take-private transaction, and has spent the past few years adding capability through bolt-ons.
Its prior acquisitions include Motion Software, CPQi and Coppei. Tangent is the latest in that arc, and the first explicitly aimed at the design-and-strategy front of the enterprise stack rather than the engineering or sector-specific back.
The two companies have also announced a joint AI accelerator programme for enterprise clients, framed as a way to take engagements from ‘AI ambition to real-world delivery’.
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The structural detail, pricing, and pilot customers have not been published. The framing positions Exadel as an AI-native alternative to the Big Four and the global systems integrators on engagements where Tangent’s experience-design front-end has historically been outsourced to a different vendor.
The acquisition lands inside a broader recalibration of the enterprise-services category that has been visible for several quarters. AI-agent products from the foundation labs have started to reach directly into the workflows that consultancies have traditionally billed for.
Anthropic shipped ten financial-services agent templates earlier this month, pulled Moody’s data inside the workspace, and built distribution through Microsoft 365 and Snowflake.
SAP unveiled an Autonomous Enterprise framework with more than 200 AI agents at Sapphire on a co-development with Anthropic. The competitive question for a services firm with Exadel’s profile is no longer whether the AI side of the stack will be the most valuable; it is whether the integrator that can plug the model layer into the customer experience layer end-to-end retains pricing power against the model layer itself.
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Whether the Exadel-Tangent combination has the scale to be that integrator is the question the next 18 months of customer wins will settle.
The ‘Exadel Colleague’ AI delivery product, which Exadel launched last month, is the company’s bet that its engineering side will not be commoditised by the models.
Tangent’s customer roster is what determines whether the design side, attached to that engineering side, gives the combined business a contract-by-contract structural advantage in front-end-heavy enterprise work.
Google‘s annual Google I/O developer conference is almost upon us, and as well as getting new features for Android phones and a better look at those new Googlebooks, as a wearables enthusiast I’m curious to see what happens with Wear OS 7.
Because Google I/O is primarily for developers, we should get a better look at the latest slate of operating systems and AI powers that devs can use to design new apps and features for the likes of the Google Pixel Watch 4, Samsung Galaxy Watch8, and more upcoming, unannounced devices.
We got a bit of a glimpse of what’s coming thanks to the Android Show, a Google stream broadcast on 12 May specifically focusing on Android ecosystem updates. While no Wear OS 7 changes were mentioned specifically, we did get to see some cool new AI features that will feature on Wear OS that will help Google stay competitive against the likes of the best Garmin watches and best Apple Watches.
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So, here are a few of the changes we know are coming to Wear OS users, along with a couple of educated guesses. We’ll find out more at Google I/O on May 19.
🎬 Watch The Android Show | I/O Edition 2026 – YouTube
The Android Show had some neat new Gemini Intelligence features on display, notably the ability to create custom widgets simply by describing them to Gemini. After doing so, Gemini will seemingly vibe-code your widget for you.
We weren’t given any indication that you could create widgets directly on a smartwatch using Gemini and its microphone, but we were shown that watches could use custom widgets too. During the stream, we see a widget created for a Google Pixel Watch 4 to display wind and rain for ideal cycling conditions.
Expect more customization like this on Wear OS 7, with the ability to pull out nuggets of information and display them front-and-center.
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2. Complex task automation with Gemini Intelligence
During the Android Show, we saw a graphic of a message about getting lunch with a friend display on a Pixel Watch. Once the plans have been made, a prompt shows up to create a calendar event, listed as “Add lunch at Zany’s Bistro, Sun 11:30am”.
This is part of Gemini’s new ‘complex task automation’ feature, which can look at contextual information and complete tasks for you, such as booking a front-row bike for your upcoming spin class, or searching for a coffee tour in Costa Rica fitting your specifications (both examples given in the presentation).
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Because the feature was shown as being on-watch, we’re betting Wear OS 7 will be ideal not just to serve you notifications that these things are happening, but to do some of its own on-device thinking too. For example, I bet we’ll be able to ask the watch to open Google Maps and generate a route to Zany’s Bistro based on the messages described, likely by asking a simple question like “how far is it?”
3. Rambler on watch
(Image credit: Coros)
During the Android Show, we saw director of product operations Dieter Bohn use a piece of software called Rambler, an improved AI-powered speech-to-text that interprets long-winded, unclear messages full of filler words and backtracking, rather than transcribing literally.
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As transcription gets better, speech is becoming one of the key ways we interact with wearables today — I certainly wouldn’t get very far in the kitchen without asking my Apple Watch Ultra 3 to set a timer for me, using its raise-to-talk functionality. As we expand our usage of voice assistants with wearables, it’s hard not to see Rambler coming to Wear OS sooner rather than later.
4. Battery improvements
All these AI features need a lot of power. While it seems every upgrade promises better, more efficient battery management, this is almost a given if we’re getting upgraded AI tools — even if it’s just to keep devices like the Google Pixel Watch at, or close to, the device’s battery life listed at the point of sale.
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5. Context, context, context
(Image credit: Future)
We’ll likely see more unannounced features, but they’ll all be revolving around the same sort of thing — using to power of AI to hoover up contextual information from existing functions to improve or iterate on previous features.
For example, if you turn up to the same pilates studio every week, Apple will combine GPS information with workout data and prompt you to start a pilates workout. Its Workout Buddy feature takes you entire exercise history and crunches it, letting you know if the mile you just ran was your fastest ever.
I’m positive we’ll see similar features on future Wear OS watches, and it might even be this year. The use of historic data from different apps to anticipate the user’s needs is already becoming a key part of the agentic AI experiences companies like Google are trying to provide.
And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too
Commencement season has come around again — and this year, a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.
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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.
But Schmidt also got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”
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To be fair, AI isn’t becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.”
Still, it’s not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022.
“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.
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Even when graduation speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that there is “a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”
Caulfield, meanwhile, might also have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”
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Best Buy found a way to stay alive and even thrive as contemporaries like Circuit City fumbled in the age of Amazon. Now it’s one of the biggest electronics retailers on the web, leveraging a quality online shopping experience with brick-and-mortar outfits so you can choose to wait for delivery or head to your nearest store and get your new phone, TV, laptop, or audio gear in a hurry. With a Best Buy discount code or Best Buy promo code, you can save on the company’s already competitive pricing. Here are some hot deals currently available.
Get 10% Back in Rewards With the My Best Buy Credit Card
This Best Buy Credit Card deal is a solid offer for anyone shopping big on electronics like OLED TVs, headphones, soundbars, and other gear. For everything you buy on your first day of purchases, you’ll get 10% back, including 2.5 bonus points and an additional 5% back in rewards. There are, of course, stipulations and terms. You’ll need to make your purchases within 14 days of opening a new account, you can’t combine these deals with other offers, and points aren’t awarded on promotional credit purchases. The deal is available in select stores, and online offers “may vary.”
Best Buy offers some sweet daily deals, including Top Deals that could save you up to 60% off retail pricing, and 24-hour discounts on a rotating deal of the day to help you save on gear like laptops, TVs, appliances, and other products. These deals switch swiftly, so be sure to check back often so you can jump on the next big discount.
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Join My Best Buy for Free Shipping, Member Prices, and More
If you’re in it for the long haul, it’s worth signing up for My Best Buy. It’s free and you get all sorts of Best Buy discounts and promos, along with multiple other benefits, starting with Free Standard Shipping across all levels.
Move up to the My Best Buy Plus ($50/year) or My Best Buy Total ($180/year) will get you benefits like two-day shipping, exclusive member prices and deals on thousands of items, access to exclusive sales events and products, and a 60-day return window on the majority of products.
The My Best Buy Total plan offers a few other extras, including protection plans like AppleCare+, free in-store and online support services for computers and tablets, 24/7 tech support, 20% off repairs, and more.
Score Bonus Perks as a My Best Buy Plus or Total Member
Those aren’t the only perks of jumping on one of Best Buy’s paid membership plans. Join up with the My Best Buy Plus or My Best Buy Total plans and get a slew of other Membership Deals, including a daily chance to win $1,000 in My Best Buy certificates (through May 2).
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The paid membership deals also unlock all sorts of subscription deals, including , 30 days of free Fubo Pro, a 2-month trial of Tastemade+ recipes, 6 months of free SiriusXM All Access satellite radio, 3 months of free YouTube Premium, and 60 days of free LifeLock ID theft protection (along with 75% off on your first year’s subscription). You can also get a 90-day free trial for McAfee Privacy and Identity Guardian Online protection (or 80% off a 1-year subscription), and a month of Discord Nitro for free, to enhance your Discord experience with personalized profiles, animated emojis, and more.
Use the Best Buy Price Match Guarantee to Always Pay the Lowest Price
Finally, there’s no better way to stretch your dollars than to leverage hot deals on items like TVs, monitors, computers, and other electronics from major competitors to save with the Best Buy Price Match Guarantee. The deal works like this: identify an identical product from a Qualified Competitor (which, sadly, excludes Amazon), then connect with Best Buy over Best Buy Chat online or by calling 1-888-BEST BUY to save.
AI is spawning new job titles from Claude Evangelist ($240K) to vibe coder ($108K) even as it eliminates the roles they’re replacing.
AI companies are not just changing the way people work. They are changing the kinds of roles that exist. Org charts are morphing as an entirely new class of jobs emerges, some with titles that did not exist two years ago, others that represent old professions reborn inside the technology industry. The hiring sprees stand in stark contrast to the layoffs that many of the same companies are citing AI as the justification for.
The range is striking. Companies are looking for everything from one of the oldest intellectual pursuits, philosophy, to an entirely new category of work spawned by generative AI coding tools, the professional vibe coder. Between those poles sit forward deployed engineers, AI accelerators, evangelists, gig workers training models, and a growing class of C-suite officers whose entire job is to make sure the rest of the company uses AI.
The forward deployed engineer is the hottest role in the category. Popularised by Palantir in the 2010s, the job embeds a specialised engineer directly with a customer to deliver tailored AI solutions rather than off-the-shelf software. Indeed data shows that job postings for forward deployed engineers in January 2026 were roughly 19 times the volume of the year before. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has compared the role to a seasoned waiter in a French restaurant, combining deep product knowledge with exquisite service. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Palantir are all hiring, with starting salaries ranging from $115,000 to more than $200,000. Salesforce’s projected $300 million in Anthropic token spending this year illustrates the scale of enterprise AI adoption these engineers are being hired to support.
The AI evangelist is a different kind of hire. Anthropic is looking for a “Claude Evangelist,” someone who will serve as the company’s face in the startup ecosystem, combining at least seven years of founder-builder experience with developer-facing credibility. The role pays $240,000, significantly more than the $106,000 average for a US director of communications, according to Indeed. OpenAI has tripled the size of its communications team. Adobe is hunting for a “Business Architect & AI Evangelist.” The underlying logic is that AI products are too complex and too consequential to sell through conventional marketing. They require people who can explain, demonstrate, and build trust in person.
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The AI philosopher may be the most unexpected entry. Anthropic has a resident philosopher. So does Google DeepMind. Both positions focus on ensuring AI models are aligned with human values. Anthropic publishes a Constitution for Claude, a detailed description of the values it wants its AI to have, and the philosophical work behind it is not decorative. Google DeepMind recently sought an emerging impacts manager in AI ethics and safety with a base salary of $212,000 to $231,000. Philosophy departments that have spent years defending their enrolment numbers now have a direct pipeline into technology companies paying more than twice the median salary for the discipline.
The internal AI accelerator is the role that most directly confronts the tension between AI hiring and AI layoffs. Stripe is hiring a “Forward Deployed AI Accelerator” to embed within its marketing team and make “AI the default mode for all work.” Box is hiring an “AI Business Automation Engineer” to integrate AI agents across its cloud management platform. These roles exist to push employees who already have jobs to use AI more aggressively, which raises the question of what happens to the employees who do not adapt. GM’s decision this week to lay off 500 IT workers while simultaneously hiring for 250 AI positions is the clearest illustration of the dynamic: the same company is both creating and eliminating jobs in the same quarter.
The vibe coder is the newest category. The term, popularised by AI coding tools that allow non-engineers to build functional software through natural language prompts, has moved from internet slang to job listings. Lovable, a vibe-coding platform, is hiring professional vibe coders. TikTok is looking for a product designer who can create prototypes using “code and AI tools.” YouTube wants an “AI Solution Architect” who can “bypass traditional, slow-moving development cycles by utilizing AI-assisted development (vibe-coding) and low code solutions.” Engineering leaders are still figuring out how to measure the productivity gains from AI coding tools, but the job market is already pricing the skill as a standalone qualification. TikTok’s role starts at $108,000. YouTube’s starts at $149,000.
At the bottom of the AI jobs pyramid sit the gig workers who train the models. Companies like Scale AI and Mercor employ workers to evaluate creative writing output, train translation capabilities, and refine AI reasoning. Traditional gig platforms including Uber, DoorDash, and Instawork are also offering jobs that pay users for uploading photos and videos of chores and tasks that will be used to train AI systems. Depending on experience and task complexity, workers earn anywhere from $15 to roughly $200 per hour. The barrier to entry is lower than for any other AI role, but so is the security.
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At the top sits the Chief AI Officer. PwC appointed one in July 2024. Accenture created a chief responsible AI officer the same year. Raymond James established a “Principal AI Architect” in 2025. Local governments are following: Arkansas is hiring a Chief AI Officer at a starting salary of just over $117,000. Glassdoor estimates private-sector pay for the role between $265,000 and $494,000.
The graduates entering this market are doing so at a moment when AI is simultaneously the most in-demand skill and the technology most frequently cited as the reason for layoffs. Detroit’s Big Three automakers have cut 20,000 white-collar jobs while posting 400 AI positions. Salesforce cut 4,000 support staff and is spending $300 million on Anthropic tokens. The pattern is consistent: the jobs AI creates pay more, require more specialised skills, and are fewer in number than the jobs it eliminates. The net effect on employment is a question economists will debate for years. What is not in debate is that the job titles on the name tags at the next networking event will look nothing like the ones from two years ago.
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