• Increased scrutiny of Chinese tech companies pushed startups to hide their roots overseas.
• DeepSeek’s success has emboldened some Chinese founders to tout advantages of China talent and operations.
• Startups chasing foreign investment are more likely to pursue China-shedding.

This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.

A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.

Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.

Israeli authorities, who have blocked the entry of aid, food, fuel, and medical supplies into Gaza for 75 days, have reportedly decided on a plan that would include “flatten[ing]” buildings and displacing Gaza’s entire population into a single “humanitarian area” if no “deal” with Hamas is reached by mid-May 2025. The dire humanitarian situation stemming from the unlawful blockade and plans to escalate forced displacement and widespread destruction demand a more robust response from other governments and institutions, especially the United States, France, Germany, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Human Rights Watch called on all parties to the Genocide Convention to do more to prevent further atrocities, including ending weapons sales, military assistance, and diplomatic support to Israel, imposing targeted sanctions on Israeli officials, and reviewing and considering suspending bilateral agreements.

• The new class of vulnerabilities in Intel processors arises from speculative technologies that anticipate individual computing steps.
• Openings enable gradual reading of entire privilege memory contents of shared processor (CPU).
• All Intel processors from the last 6 years are affected, from PCs to servers in data centres.

• Scientists were able to target a fat-recycling process to reduce pancreatic tumors in mouse and human models.
• The findings hint that interrupting fat-processing pathways could lead to new approaches for treating this often-deadly cancer.

A new study found middle-aged Americans demonstrated higher levels of loneliness than older adults.