Singapore Tech News, Features & Reviews

Meta has banned advertisements promoting TikTok and other ByteDance services on Facebook and Instagram in seven countries, including Indonesia, Japan and Thailand. The restrictions took effect immediately and extend to third-party advertisers directing users to ByteDance platforms. The decision intensifies the competition between two of the world's biggest social media companies as they battle for audiences, creators and advertising revenue across international markets.

Engineers at EPFL have built a motor shaped like a thread, and it turns electrical energy directly into movement. It measures 1 to 3 mm across and is made of two hollow fibres, one nested tightly inside the other. The Swiss team works in the Soft Transducers Laboratory, part of the university's School of Engineering, and it has published the design in the journal Advanced Materials.

Engineers at EPFL have built a motor shaped like a thread, and it turns electrical energy directly into movement. It measures 1 to 3 mm across and is made of two hollow fibres, one nested tightly inside the other. The Swiss team works in the Soft Transducers Laboratory, part of the university's School of Engineering, and it has published the design in the journal Advanced Materials.

Anthropic has launched tools that let people build data dashboards and animations inside Claude, the assistant the company sells to businesses and consumers. The additions are aimed at broadening the range of workplace productivity tasks that the company's subscription product can handle. Reuters reported that both tools arrive alongside a wider release of software Anthropic had been testing with customers during a beta period.

A Chinese robotics firm has taught its dexterous robot hand to sew silk. AGILINK's OmniHand 3 Ultra separated a silk thread, threaded a needle and made stitches in a demonstration of Suzhou embroidery. The hand learned the craft from the embroidery master Fu Xianghong, and AGILINK published the footage on its own channel.

Meta has expanded parental supervision to its standalone Meta AI app worldwide, allowing parents and guardians to understand the topics teenagers have discussed with the AI assistant over the past seven days without seeing their private conversations.

Kazakhstan has introduced a programme utilising free-roaming cats equipped with cameras and GPS trackers to aid in the search for missing pets. A project named GdeKotBot recruits these animals as volunteers, with artificial intelligence subsequently scanning their collected footage for lost animals. This expands an existing digital service connecting owners with spotters.

JBL has launched its Cove whole-home Wi-Fi speaker range in Singapore, introducing three connected speakers that can work independently, as stereo pairs or together as a multi-room audio system. The range consists of the compact JBL Cove M1, portable Cove P1 and larger Cove X1. All three connect through the JBL One app and support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth alongside AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Qobuz Connect and Roon Ready. Music that follows you around t

POWERCHINA's Gonghe project in Qinghai, comprising 900 megawatt of photovoltaic and a 100 megawatt molten salt tower plant with 10,310 heliostats, is now connected to the grid. This development completes China's first three tower solar thermal base.

French artificial intelligence firm Mistral recently announced a new AI model, concluding an approximately five-month interval between its significant releases. The company, established three years ago, stated this model outperforms several competing open-weight systems available in the market.

Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer of Claude AI developer Anthropic, received USD 18 million in compensation last year, according to the company's initial public offering filing. This figure places him within the middle range of top executives at prominent technology firms regarding their annual pay.

Nvidia-backed Reflection AI has launched Beam, its first open-weight artificial intelligence model, as the startup looks to compete with increasingly capable Chinese models from companies including Z.ai, Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Image: AI Generated Beam is designed primarily for coding, reasoning and agentic AI workloads, where AI systems can plan and carry out tasks with greater autonomy. Reflection says the model is competitive with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and is approachi