📦 Amazon's Robot Could Deliver Your Next Order
+ 🔐 Largest-Ever Data Spill & 🕶️ XR for Real Pilots
Hi! While Apple is hosting WWDC 2025 (which we'll discuss more in the next post), let's review the important events of the past week.
Here's your latest update:
📦 Amazon's Robot Could Deliver Your Next Order
🔐 Largest-Ever Data Spill Hits 4 Billion Accounts
🕶️ EU Certifies Mixed-Reality Simulator for Pilot Training
📰 + Quick News You Should Know About
📚 + Content for Your Leisure Time
🛠️ + Tools That I Recommend (+ Quick Tutorial)
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📦 Amazon's Robot Could Deliver Your Next Order
What’s Happening: According to The Information, Amazon has nearly finished an indoor “humanoid park” at its San Francisco office where bipedal robots will practice hopping out of Rivian electric vans and dropping parcels on customers’ doorsteps.
The obstacle-course setup, described as coffee-shop-sized, is part of an AI project that trains robots to navigate curbs, gates, and front porches before live trials begin. Alongside the new facility, Amazon formed an “agentic AI” team to give robots natural-language skills to shift between warehouse duties and last-mile delivery.
The Context: Amazon has spent a decade automating its supply chain, from Kiva warehouse bots to its Zoox robotaxi acquisition in 2020. The company assumes extending autonomy beyond the loading dock could trim labor costs and speed delivery.
Test units will include Agility Robotics’ Digit—already piloted in fulfillment centers—and a $16k humanoid from China-based Unitree.
🔐 Largest-Ever Data Spill Hits 4 Billion Accounts
What’s Happening: Cybernews has found an unprotected 631 GB database containing “billions upon billions” of personal records—about 4B in total—sitting open on the internet. The trove, now taken offline, held data almost entirely on Chinese residents and appears to have been compiled for large-scale surveillance or profiling.
The leak includes full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and granular financial information such as card numbers, debts, and spending habits. Collections labeled “wechatid_db,” “address_db,” and “bank” alone total more than 2.2B entries, while smaller sets cover Alipay tokens, vehicle registrations, and even pension records.
The Context: If validated, this incident eclipses China’s 2022 “National Public Data” breach and would become the largest single-source exposure on record, highlighting both the appetite for mass data aggregation and the difficulty of enforcing security controls when the collector remains unknown.
🕶️ EU Certifies Mixed-Reality Simulator for Pilot Training
What’s Happening: The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has formally qualified the NOVASIM MR DA42 trainer—a flight simulator that replaces surrounding projection screens with Varjo’s XR-4 “Focal Edition” mixed-reality headset—for logging real flight hours toward a pilot’s license in Europe.
Built by Swiss firm Brunner Elektronik around the cockpit of a Diamond DA42 aircraft, the system blends photorealistic virtual scenery with physical controls, letting trainees see their own hands while flying through computer-generated weather, night, and emergency scenarios.
The Context: Regulators have started to embrace extended-reality tools in tightly controlled industries—VR helicopter trainers won EASA sign-off in 2021, and the FAA followed last year—but this is the first mixed-reality system cleared for fixed-wing civil aviation.
Varjo, a Helsinki-based XR scale-up that has raised more than $200M, sees the approval as proof that immersive headsets can meet airline-grade safety rules and offer cheaper, modular alternatives to multimillion-euro motion platforms.
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📰 Quick News You Should Know About
Anthropic Launches Claude Gov for U.S. Agencies: Anthropic has released Claude Gov, a special version of its LLM built for defense and intelligence work. The company claims the model is already deployed at “the highest level of national security” and relaxes certain guardrails when handling classified data.
Epic Games Scores Key Court Win Over App Store Rules: A U.S. appeals court refused Apple’s emergency stay, forcing it to drop the 27 % fee on outside purchases; Epic CEO Tim Sweeney celebrated that the “Apple tax is ended” and said Fortnite will return to iOS.
The decision compels Apple to let developers steer users to cheaper payment options while it pursues a longer appeal.
Anyone Can Be a Writer in The Washington Post (Thanks to AI): According to The New York Times, the media outlet will soon allow its readers to write columns using Ember, an AI writing coach. This way, WP wants to open up to new authors and opinions.
Neuralink Raises $650M: Elon Musk’s startup has closed a $650 million round led by ARK Invest, Sequoia, Thrive, and others. The deal values the brain-computer interface firm at about $9 billion and follows FDA breakthrough device status for its speech-restoration implant.
Neuralink says it has implanted chips in five paralyzed patients as human trials expand.
Microsoft Unveils Portable Console: After dozens of rumours and direct hints from Xbox, the company released its portable gaming PC in collaboration with Asus. It's called the ROG Xbox Ally.
Technically, it does everything the same as Asus ROG Ally, but it is based on a special version of Windows. I suggest you check out the video by Linus Tech Tips for more details on the console's specs and features:
📚 Content for Your Leisure Time
Humanoid robots in Europe: From factory floors to living rooms - Tech EU
The cursed world of AI kiss and hug apps - The Verge
Cambridge mapping project solves a medieval murder - Ars Technica
DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts - ProPublica
Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China - MIT Technology Review
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🛠️ Tools I Can Recommend
🎥 Use Sora for Free via Bing
In addition to the usual list of tools, I want to share a new (and most importantly, free) way to use OpenAI's Sora video generator. This week, Microsoft noticeably updated its Bing app (for iOS and Android), and it now supports native video generation using the popular model.
Here's how to use it:
1. Download the Bing app
2. Open the Video Creator feature
Tap the menu in the bottom‑right corner of the app and select “Video Creator”.
Or, just type “Create a video of…” into the search bar—it will launch the tool.
3. Enter your prompt
Write a short description of what you want to see.
Videos are short (≈5 seconds) and in vertical 9:16 format for now.
4. Choose a generation speed
Standard mode: Unlimited and free, but slower.
Fast mode: Creates video in seconds—10 free fast generations are included, but it costs 100 Microsoft Rewards points per extra fast creation.
5. Generate and save
Submit and wait—up to three videos can be queued at once.
When done, you’ll get notified. Download, share, or copy the link.
Note: Videos are stored in the app for 90 days only.
Yeah, that’s all.
More Tools
As for other tools, a couple of cool platforms caught my eye this week: Nodeflow AI, Agora, and Mention.
Nodeflow AI - a visual workspace that connects sources like YouTube, TikTok, PDFs, and websites into node-based flows powered by AI. Nice for summarizing, brainstorming, and interactive mind maps, all via drag‑and‑drop linking.
Agora - an e‑commerce search engine indexing millions of products from Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, and Squarespace. You can search, compare, save, and buy via unified checkout.
Mention - a social‑listening and media‑monitoring platform scanning 1 B sources in real time—news, blogs, forums, and social media. It offers keyword alerts, sentiment analysis, reach metrics, and social‑media publishing features for tracking.