Another former Uber executive is joining Travis Kalanick’s robotics and industrial AI startup Atoms, just a few weeks after it raised $1.7 billion.

Gautam Gupta, the former finance chief under Kalanick, said in social media posts on Wednesday that he has has joined Atoms as chief financial officer. Gupta spent more than four years at Uber until he left in July 2017, just a few weeks after Kalanick resigned as CEO. (Gupta had announced his intention to leave that May.)

Hiring Gupta continues a trend of Kalanick getting the Uber band back together at Atoms. Earlier this year, Atoms acquired mining autonomy startup Pronto, which is run by former Uber (and former Google) self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski. According to LinkedIn, a number of former top Uber employees who worked with Kalanick also work at Atoms, which was previously called CloudKitchens.

“On many levels, this round is a bit of unfinished business. Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens, and will now finish at Atoms,” Kalanick wrote when he announced the $1.7 billion funding round last month.

Uber even joined the round as an investor, reuniting the company with the founder it pushed out in 2017 after a series of scandals and complaints of widespread sexual harassment and discrimination. Uber hasn’t disclosed how much it contributed. The Information reported $100 million, a figure that TechCrunch has also been able to confirm.

Kalanick has said he wants Atoms to work on mining, food, and transportation, though his posts to date about the startup have been less about specifics and more about wanting to “go up against the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change.”

Gupta invested in Uber in 2012 when he was a vice president at Goldman Sachs, and then joined the company in 2013.

“[T]he single biggest reason I joined was – Travis. I believed he possessed a magical mix of genius and intensity that made me want to bet on the person, not the market,” Gupta wrote Wednesday. “First one in, last one out, every day. Breaking down walls of regulations, unions, city bureaucracies, etc. Had he not pioneered ridesharing, I don’t think anyone else had the fortitude to fight through one adversity after another to create a whole new market worth hundreds of billions out of nothing.”

Gupta wrote Wednesday that A*, the VC firm he co-founded in 2020 after three years at Opendoor, invested in Atoms in what was the “largest investment in the history of our fund.” Gupta is stepping down from A* to take on the CFO role at Atoms, according to his LinkedIn profile.

NASA is about to launch a telescope built to unlock some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, and it turns out that same design could help protect Earth along the way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, with a primary mission focused on studying dark matter and dark energy – the invisible forces shaping galaxies and cosmic expansion. Researchers now say its unique design also makes it unexpectedly effective at spotting dangerous asteroids headed our way (via MIT Technology Review).

What makes the Roman Telescope capable of hunting killer asteroids?

Roman carries a super wide-angle, 300 megapixel infrared camera capable of viewing a section of sky roughly 100 times larger than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see in a single glance. That massive field of view, meant for surveying galaxies and distant stars, happens to work just as well for scanning large stretches of space for asteroids at once.

Scientists say Roman could detect asteroids as small as 60 feet across, a size comparable to the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, releasing energy equal to 500,000 tons of TNT. Some software adjustments are still needed, since Roman’s system currently filters out streaks in images that could actually be asteroids.

The Roman Telescope will be a part of Earth’s defense team

Roman telescope won’t lead asteroid hunting efforts alone. NASA’s dedicated Near-Earth Object Surveyor, launching in 2027, will lead detection efforts. Roman will support it alongside the James Webb Space Telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory. When other telescopes flag risky asteroids with uncertain orbits, Roman’s massive field of view can quickly narrow down their paths. That helps scientists decide which asteroids truly need closer study.

The timing is also notable, since Roman faced funding cut threats last year, and researchers say showcasing its planetary defense value could help secure its future with lawmakers. With over half of the largest near-Earth asteroids still undiscovered,Roman’s unplanned second job might end up being just as important as its first.

“I have no idea how they got my contact information,” says the engineer. Unlike other interviews for government jobs, the engineer says, there was no recruiter present—only Coristine was on the interview call. “Normally initial screenings are done over the phone, rather than video, to reduce bias in the process,” they say.

During the engineer’s NDS interview, they say, Coristine didn’t seem to know the skill set he was looking for. “I generally don’t know if this person is capable of evaluating a full-stack engineer,” they say, “because they themselves aren’t aware of the skill sets, tools, and things needed in this profession.” Coristine did not reply to a request for comment. (In January 2025, Coristine was one of several DOGE members who interviewed workers at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services, who were required to defend their jobs and justify their projects. At the time, employees who spoke to WIRED described meetings in which the DOGE members were not familiar with their work.)

Coristine told the engineer that the role was geared toward supporting what would become Rampart, a tool released in late June to prevent personally identifiable information (PII) from leaving a user’s browser, particularly if they’re using something like a chatbot. In an interview with the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN) podcast, Coristine described the project as a “side quest ” and told the engineer that the NDS team of about 30 people did not include a machine-learning engineer.

The tool is similar to OpenAI’s browser-based “privacy filter,” which can detect things like a personal email, address, or account number, and mask them automatically. But exactly how this tool is meant to be used in the context of government services is unclear. In the interview with TBPN, Coristine did not offer any particular examples, though he noted the tool is significantly smaller than OpenAI’s, making it potentially more accessible in lower-bandwidth environments.

“It feels very counterintuitive because in most instances, when you are asking for PII, you want PII,” says the engineer, noting that in government work, a user might need to provide PII like their social security number or address in order to access government benefits. “You don’t want that information redacted.”

In many cases, developers can choose to encrypt certain fields that an API sends to the backend of a website, and websites that use HTTPS connections to communicate with their backends also encrypt their requests.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to reinvent the wheel of government technology. Last year, as DOGE promised government efficiency through technology, its members fired technologists who were already working on exactly the kinds of projects it purported to want, even killing a flagship product in the Internal Revenue Service’s free tax filing tool. An OPM memo published last week instructed agencies to prioritize hiring technical talent.

“This does feel superfluous. My most optimistic speculation is that this is indicative of an organization that has no goals,” the engineer says, noting that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regularly supports the creation of tools to solve complex technical problems around issues like privacy. “Why are these guys who are so closely associated with the White House wasting tax money on this little hacker project?”

Nikita Bier has stepped down as head of product at X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, after a little more than a year in the role.

Bier wrote Wednesday that he thinks it’s “time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster,” adding that he’ll continue to advise the company.

The serial entrepreneur and Lightspeed venture partner took over the product lead role in July 2025. He wrote Wednesday that, while in the role, he oversaw the launch of 30 new products while “protecting the integrity of the town square.”

Of course, Bier was also head of product during a number of scandals at X. Just a few days after he took the product lead role, the chatbot Grok — made by xAI, which was then a separate company owned by Musk — started calling itself “MechaHitler.” Grok has also been used by X users to generate nonconsensual nude imagery, including child sexual abuse material, which has gotten the platform in legal trouble.

“X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history. But running this app is a 24/7 job and it’s now time for me to take a breather,” Bier wrote Wednesday.

The terminal-based coding tool is powered by a new AI model, Muse Spark 1.2.

• Ukraine develops ground robot firing nets against incoming FPV drone attacks
• VORON combines drone interception with logistics and battlefield evacuation capabilities effectively
• Net launchers attempt physical drone captures instead of explosive aerial interceptions

Ukrainian firm SMART BIRDS has introduced an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) called VORON, built specifically to intercept first-person view drones from multiple directions simultaneously.

The system relies on Pavuk net launchers, a defensive mechanism designed to trap incoming drones before they reach their intended target.

A one-line command in your macOS terminal can get you access to Meta’s Muse Code, which aims to be a transparent AI coding tool that can work across large repositories.

There are already coding agents like Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex available for macOS, but Meta wants to enter the ring with its latest AI toolset. Unlike the others, it doesn’t have an app interface and runs through the Terminal.

According to an announcement post from Meta, Muse Code can take on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories. It is capable of planning changes, writing code, and validating the results while coordinating multiple persistent subagents.

As always with these AI announcements, remember that the language being used attempts to anthropomorphize the tools to be more human-like. Nothing about an AI behaves like a human — they don’t think, reason, organize, sympathize, or understand.

AI is a tool, and if Muse Code sounds like it could help you develop software, it might be a particularly useful tool. Developers have shared just how useful having a coding agent available can be, especially for troubleshooting bugs.

To install Muse Code, you’ll just need to paste in a single command into Terminal:

curl -fsSL https://dev.meta.ai/install.sh | bash

Of course, this isn’t free. Those that install Muse Code will start on Meta’s contributor tier. Developers join with a pay-as-you-go option which charges $1.25 per million tokens in input and $4.25 per million tokens of output.

The Muse Code announcement was paired with the release of Muse Spark 1.2, which was trained with coding assistance in mind. Meta says the training included rejection-sampled harness trajectories and recipe optimizations for goals, compaction, and subagents.

Choose your AI partner

Meta’s inevitable introduction of a coding agent was a long time coming. The company has been poaching Apple employees in its expensive chase for so-called superintelligence.

Muse Code is also another revenue stream to cover the incredible costs of AI and research around it. Meta previously tied some of its premium subscriptions to AI tool use as well.

There are several AI coding tools to choose from, so it will be interesting to observe if Meta can make a dent in the market. Not having a direct UI and interfacing via Terminal could be a problem for some.

Then there’s the privacy aspect. Meta is known for its horrific history of scraping every piece of data it can from users, and while it might have safeguards in place for its AI tools, it seems unwise to trust Meta software installed with access to so much information.

Prime Video and Samsung have decided that the HDR format war was not quite confusing enough.

Beginning in August 2026, Prime Video will become the first streaming service to offer HDR10+ Advanced on supported movies and television programs worldwide. The new format will initially be available through the Prime Video app on select Samsung 2026 televisions.

The promise is brighter and more detailed HDR, improved shadow reproduction and motion processing that changes according to what is happening in each scene.

The reality is that Amazon and Samsung have not revealed which titles will support it, precisely when the rollout begins or whether owners of older Samsung televisions will eventually be invited to the party.

Progress apparently still requires a scavenger hunt.

What Is HDR10+ Advanced?

Standard HDR10+ already uses dynamic metadata to adjust brightness, contrast and tone mapping on a scene by scene or frame by frame basis. That allows a compatible television to handle a dark interior differently from a sun drenched exterior instead of applying one set of HDR instructions across an entire movie.

HDR10+ Advanced expands that tool kit with six primary features:

• Enhanced overall brightness
• Intelligent motion smoothing
• Local tone mapping
• Genre based optimization
• Advanced color control
• Adaptive cloud gaming

The format supports brightness metadata up to 10,000 nits and color depth of up to 16 bits at the specification level, although current streaming video remains limited by the practical capabilities of existing displays and codecs.

Prime Video’s initial rollout is focused primarily on enhanced brightness and intelligent motion smoothing.

Enhanced Overall Brightness uses additional metadata to help capable televisions make better use of their available light output. Samsung says AI driven tone mapping can preserve shadow detail in darker scenes while allowing sports, action movies and other bright material to use more of a premium television’s brightness capability.

That could be useful on newer OLED, MiniLED and Micro RGB televisions capable of reaching substantially higher brightness levels than earlier generations.

It does not mean that every program will suddenly resemble a television showroom with the brightness control welded to its maximum setting. The goal is to use the available brightness more intelligently, not simply make everything brighter.

At least that is the theory.

Can Intelligent Motion Smoothing Avoid the Soap Opera Effect?

Motion smoothing remains one of the most divisive forms of television processing.

It can make sports, camera pans and fast moving action look cleaner, but excessive frame interpolation can also make an expensive movie resemble a daytime soap opera filmed in the back room of a furniture store.

HDR10+ Advanced attempts to address that problem with scene specific metadata. A compatible television can reduce smoothing during cinematic material while applying more processing to sports, action and other fast moving scenes where cleaner motion may be desirable.

That sounds far more sensible than forcing viewers to choose one motion setting for everything.

Whether it actually works will depend on how accurately the content is tagged, how Prime Video encodes it and how Samsung televisions interpret those instructions. Until we can test it, “intelligent” remains a job title rather than a performance guarantee.

Filmmaker Mode Is Not Invited

There is one significant catch.

Samsung confirms that HDR10+ Advanced will not operate when Filmmaker Mode is enabled.

Filmmaker Mode is designed to disable or reduce many forms of television processing so movies and television programs can be displayed closer to the creators’ original intentions. HDR10+ Advanced also claims to preserve creative intent, but requires Filmmaker Mode to be turned off.

That leaves viewers with an unusual choice: use the picture mode specifically designed for movies or activate the new HDR format designed to make movies look better.

Someone may want to workshop that.

It is also notable that HDR10+ Adaptive, introduced several years ago, was promoted as being compatible with Filmmaker Mode. The Advanced version adds more sophisticated motion and genre based processing, which may explain the conflict, but Samsung has not provided a detailed technical explanation.

Which Samsung TVs Support HDR10+ Advanced?

Samsung says the Prime Video rollout will begin on its 2026 television lineup, although the company’s U.S. announcement refers more cautiously to select 2026 models.

Samsung has already introduced HDR10+ Advanced support across portions of its 2026 OLED, Neo QLED and Micro RGB ranges, but the Prime Video announcement does not include a definitive model by model compatibility list. Owners should check the specifications and firmware status of their individual television rather than assuming every 2026 Samsung display is supported.

There is also no confirmation that 2025 or older Samsung televisions will receive HDR10+ Advanced through a firmware update.

Support is expected to spread beyond Samsung. HDR10+ Technologies says Roku intends to deploy the format across its platform, while MediaTek has also announced chipset support. Neither company has provided a product list or rollout date.

Why This Matters for Samsung Owners

Samsung continues to support HDR10 and HDR10+ rather than Dolby Vision across its television lineup, making the success of HDR10+ considerably more important to Samsung owners.

Prime Video has supported the original HDR10+ format since 2017 and was the first major streaming service to adopt it. Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu have subsequently expanded their own HDR10+ support, giving Samsung television owners access to a much broader selection of dynamic HDR programming than they had only a few years ago.

HDR10+ Advanced is also royalty free, which could make it attractive to television manufacturers, streaming platforms and hardware companies looking for an alternative to Dolby Vision and its licensing costs. Samsung says the broader HDR10+ ecosystem now includes 183 adopter companies and more than 22,000 certified products.

The Bottom Line

HDR10+ Advanced could deliver meaningful picture improvements on newer premium televisions, particularly in scenes that combine intense highlights with dark shadow detail. Scene specific motion instructions also offer a more intelligent alternative to leaving one motion setting enabled for every type of content.

But the launch arrives with several unresolved questions.

Prime Video has not named any supported movies or shows. Samsung has not published a complete compatibility list. Older television support remains unknown, and HDR10+ Advanced cannot be used with Filmmaker Mode.

Samsung and Amazon have created a potentially smarter HDR experience. Now they need to explain why movie enthusiasts must disable the picture mode created specifically for movie enthusiasts to see it.

For more information: hdr10plus.org/advanced/

Related Reading:

Huawei just released the MateBook Pro S, a 14.2-inch laptop that weighs 798 grams and measures only 11.9 millimeters thick. That puts it among the lightest full-metal machines in its size class, lighter than many 13-inch models by a noticeable margin. The magnesium-lithium body keeps the whole package easy to carry all day, and it comes in several finishes including Midsummer Purple, Dawn Yellow, Smoke Gray, Velvet White, and Feather Black.

A 14.2-inch flexible OLED display sits right in the center of this slim laptop. It has a crisper-than-crisp 3,120 by 2,080 pixel resolution in that ‘document-friendly’ 3:2 ratio, and it refreshes at 120 times per second, boasting 1,600 nits at its brightest points, a color gamut that covers the entire P3 range, and even ten-point touch. Let’s not forget the two million to one contrast ratio. That’s some very impressive screen technology, but the real magic isn’t in the numbers, but in how those pixels are arranged.

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Huawei refers to this screen as their “privacy display,” and it’s a game changer. The deal is that each part contains two entire sets of light-emitting pixels, and this is what happens when you flick a physical switch on the side. The first set covers standard viewing, so your coworkers can crowd around the screen without issue, but the second set kicks in and light travels practically straight ahead. So, if someone looks in from the side, they’ll see a dark or virtually black surface, but the person in front gets to keep the full brightness, resolution, and color accuracy intact; no extra film, no software dimming, just 100 percent pixel power. There is a camera on board that is continually on the watch for someone attempting to peek over their shoulder, and when this occurs, the system gently asks the owner if they want to change to private mode. Now, the switch is easy, works instantaneously, and is entirely controlled by hardware, which is a significant improvement over add-on filters or reduced pixel counts.

So, what makes this whole thing work? Huawei’s proprietary Kirin XE90 chip is the brains of the operation. It has a 9-core ARM CPU that boasts a 23% increase in single-core speed, 25% higher energy efficiency, and a 40% more powerful neural processing work than the previous model. We’re also talking about a sustained output of roughly 20 watts, thanks to two fans and improved heat distribution. You can have up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and you’re running HarmonyOS 6.1, which includes some useful tools for creating documents, filling out forms, and making rudimentary web pages. There are six microphones (yes, six!), four speakers for audio, and a pair of 1080p cameras in the front and back. Finally, a fingerprint sensor is buried away inside the power button.

According to Huawei, the battery capacity is a reasonable 54 watt-hours, which is enough to power an 18-hour marathon of 1080p movie streaming. Power it up with one of the two USB-C connections, which can handle a speedy recharge of up to 66 watts. The greatest part is that those same ports can also be used to charge other devices. For wireless networking, they use no fewer than four antennas and Wi-Fi 7 to deliver the kind of long-range connections you’d expect from a high-end device, with Huawei claiming they can reach up to a kilometer under perfect conditions.

The base model starts at 7,999 yuan ($1,185) and includes 16 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. If you want a privacy screen, which sounds like a fairly handy feature, you’ll have to pay a premium of 10,299 yuan ($1,526) for 24 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, with more fancier configurations available if you’re willing to spend. We should expect the machine to be ready for purchase in China between mid and late August, but there is still a wait for those outside of China at this moment, and it may be longer than that, given that it runs on ARM-plus-HarmonyOS rather than Windows.
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