Meta's Giant Open Model, California Student Breach Hits Millions

Full transcript

Alex: Welcome to Daily Tech News for Saturday, October seventeenth, twenty twenty-six. I am Alex, and today we have a giant open A I model from Meta, two carmakers betting their self driving future on Nvidia, and a rough day for data security, with a student breach in California, a utility breach in Texas, and a critical Atlassian flaw already being exploited.

Jordan: I am Jordan. Let us start with Meta, because the numbers here are honestly a little absurd.

Alex: On October fifteenth, Meta released Muse Spark Open, the open weights version of its Muse Spark model. It has about eight hundred sixteen billion total parameters, but only activates roughly forty-two billion for each token. It has a one million token context window, and it takes in text, images, audio, and video.

Jordan: So it is built for coding and for agentic work, the kind of A I that does not just chat with you, but goes off and uses tools and tries to finish a job. And Meta is calling it the most capable U S open weight model to date.

Alex: That is Meta's claim, based on Meta's own evaluations against Chinese open weight rivals. The bigger point is that the open weight race just got a heavyweight U S entry at that same scale.

Jordan: Here is the part that made me laugh, though. This thing is supposed to run locally, on a Mac, but locally turns out to mean a very specific kind of local.

Alex: Right. It is optimized for a Mac Studio with the M five Ultra chip, and it needs at least one terabyte of memory in full form. Quantized versions fit in about three hundred gigabytes, which is still not exactly your laptop on the kitchen table.

Jordan: So the headline is not that everyone can run this at home tomorrow. The frontier of open A I is now multimodal, enormous, and still hungry for hardware.

Alex: Exactly. And speaking of hardware and big bets, Nvidia had a very good day in Europe on October sixteenth.

Jordan: Mercedes-Benz and Volvo both expanded their work with Nvidia on the same day. That feels less like a coincidence and more like a land grab.

Alex: Mercedes is going deeper first. Its software platform will integrate Nvidia's Hyperion compute and sensor architecture, the Alpamayo full stack driving software with A I reasoning, and the Halos safety stack. The stated goal is S A E level four applications and, down the road, automated robo limousines over the next decade.

Jordan: And Volvo, which has worked with Nvidia since twenty seventeen, announced its own expansion, with the technology set to debut in a next generation Volvo model. So two of Europe's best known carmakers are concentrating their automated driving future on one company's stack.

Alex: For datacenter listeners, that pattern should sound familiar. One supplier becomes the default platform, and switching later gets expensive. That is platform lock in, whether the computer sits in a rack or in a car.

Jordan: All right, let us turn to security, because this next story is the one parents are going to feel in their stomach.

Alex: On Friday, the California Department of Education said a hacker accessed data on millions of students through a non profit contractor, Educational Testing Service, which runs statewide assessments in California, including tests for English language proficiency.

Jordan: The data covered all students enrolled in the three previous school years. More than five point seven million students were enrolled in California alone last school year, just to give you the scale.

Alex: The department said an unauthorized party used a compromised login credential to get into a secure file transfer site, and copied files at various times between May twenty-second and September eighteenth of this year. The breach was identified on September twenty-fifth, and the testing service only began notifying students and families on Friday.

Jordan: The information included names, birth dates, addresses, and disability status. That last one is especially sensitive for a child. Now, to be fair and precise, the department said Social Security numbers and sensitive financial information were not accessed, and the testing service has not found that any of the information has been made public so far.

Alex: That matters, but it does not undo the exposure. A compromised credential, in use for months, on a system holding children's records, is basic access control failing for a long time.

Jordan: It is also a vendor story. The contractor lost the data, and the state still owns the fallout. A third party's login hygiene becomes your problem.

Alex: Staying with security, but moving to the enterprise software many of our listeners actually run, the U S Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical Atlassian flaw to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog.

Jordan: Known exploited is the key phrase there. That is not a theoretical warning. That means there is evidence people are already using it.

Alex: The flaw allows an unauthenticated attacker to access specific files in the web application, and it affects eight self managed Atlassian Data Center products, including Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, and Fisheye. Atlassian Cloud products were patched and are not in the affected group.

Jordan: There is a limit, though. An attacker needs to know the exact file name and path in advance, and the flaw does not let them list a directory. Serious, but not a master key.

Alex: Atlassian has released fixed versions, and the advice is straightforward. Patch right away, restrict internet access where you can, and check your logs. If you run self managed Atlassian, this one jumps the queue this weekend.

Jordan: And because today apparently needed one more breach, let us do a quick one from Texas. CenterPoint Energy, the regulated utility that delivers electricity and natural gas, disclosed a breach affecting more than one million people in Texas.

Alex: The state attorney general's database lists one million, sixty-two thousand and sixty Texas residents as affected. The information involved includes names, addresses, Social Security information, and driver's license numbers, and the company said an unauthorized third party got the information through one of its external facing systems.

Jordan: So between California and Texas, we have children, utility customers, names, addresses, and in the Texas case, Social Security information. Different attackers, different systems, same lesson. The boring basics, credentials, external systems, and vendor access, are still where the damage happens.

Alex: Let us end on something lighter and much cheaper. Microsoft announced a fifty dollar Xbox Nano controller, with launch set for next month.

Jordan: Fifty dollars is a refreshingly normal price in a show that started with a model needing a terabyte of memory. Not every tech launch has to be a supercomputer.

Alex: So let us recap. Muse Spark Open pushes open weight A I to a new scale, even if almost nobody owns the hardware to run it. Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are betting their driving decade on Nvidia. California is notifying families after a contractor breach. Atlassian users have an already exploited flaw to patch now. And CenterPoint is dealing with a breach affecting more than a million Texans.

Jordan: My takeaway is that scale was the theme today. Bigger models, bigger platform bets, and breaches that reach millions at once. The teams that do well treat access, patching, and vendor risk as seriously as the shiny launch.

Alex: That is our show for today. Thanks for listening to Daily Tech News, and we will be back tomorrow with the next round of stories.