August 7 brought a big leadership shuffle at the top of AI: Demis Hassabis moved to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet while Jeff Dean exited after 27 years, and Google confirmed it's killing off Google Assistant on mobile starting September 4 in favor of Gemini. OpenAI pushed GPT-5.6 Luna out as the default model for Free and Go tier ChatGPT users and lifted text-chat limits, while AMD moved to buy inference chip startup Taalas and Anthropic was reported building out its own chip team. On the infra side, Netflix detailed a new TimeSeries Abstraction for tiering petabyte-scale Cassandra data and AWS added native vector search to DynamoDB. Meanwhile a self-propagating npm supply-chain worm (Shai-Hulud) hit over 1,280 packages including Keyv, a fresh reminder that open-source dependency hygiene is still a live fire.

• Hassabis becomes DeepMind chair/Alphabet chief scientist as Jeff Dean exits after 27 years
• Google Assistant on mobile shuts down Sept 4, replaced by Gemini
• GPT-5.6 Luna is now default for Free/Go ChatGPT users, text-chat limits removed
• AMD to acquire inference chip startup Taalas; Anthropic reportedly assembling its own chip team
• Shai-Hulud npm worm variant compromises 1,280+ packages including Keyv