DAILY INTELLIGENCE BRIEF

The Vault — AI Edition

Monday, May 18, 2026
15 stories
12,822 words
60 min read

Business

5
01

Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1 Billion Series B to Scale AI Drug Design Engine

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed AI drug discovery company founded by Nobel laureate Sir Demis Hassabis, has closed a $2.1 billion Seri

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02

OpenAI Partners With Malta to Offer Free ChatGPT Plus to Every Citizen

Malta has become the first country in the world to strike a deal with OpenAI guaranteeing every citizen and resident free access to Ch

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03

Microsoft AI Chief Predicts All White-Collar Work Automated Within 18 Months

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, has put one of the most aggressive automation timelines on record from any major technology

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04

High Energy Prices Could Derail Europe AI Race With US and China

Europe ambitions to become a serious contender in the global artificial intelligence race are colliding with a stubborn economic

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05

UBS Warns AI Markets Running Too Hot as Intel Drops on Bubble Risk

The AI trade that has powered Wall Street to record highs may be building on borrowed confidence, according to a pointed new warning from UBS

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Llms Genai

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06

GPT-5.5 Instant Becomes Default ChatGPT Model With Major Reasoning Gains

OpenAI has replaced the engine under ChatGPT with a model that hallucinates far less, reasons significantly better at math, and can ri

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07

Four AI Models Ran Radio Stations for Six Months and the Results Were Unhinged

Give four AI models a microphone, a $20 budget, and six months of unsupervised airtime, and you will learn more about the state

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08

Salesforce Opens Entire Platform to AI Agents With Headless 360 API Strategy

Salesforce just told its customers they may never need to open a browser again. At TDX 2026 the company unve

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09

Steven Soderbergh Premieres AI-Enhanced John Lennon Documentary at Cannes

Steven Soderbergh has never been afraid of a fight. With the premiere of John Lennon: The Last Interview at Cann

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Research

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12

Global Data Centers Now Consume 2 Percent of World Electricity as AI Demand Surges

The world data centers have crossed a stark threshold: they now devour roughly 2 percent of global electricity, up from an estimated 1.7 pe

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13

TDFold Reimagines Protein Structure Prediction as 2D Diffusion Task

A team of researchers has reframed one of biology grand computational challenges -- predicting the 3D shape of a protein from

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14

Machine Learning Framework Predicts Spin-Orbit Electronic Structure Across Periodic Table

A new graph neural network called Uni-HamGNN can predict spin-orbit-coupled electronic structures across the entire periodic table with

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15

Training Neural Networks on Random Noise Yields Better Calibrated AI Models

Before an AI model has learned a single useful thing about the world, it is already brimming with misplaced confidence. A new study publi

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Policy

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10

Pope Leo XIV Establishes Vatican Inter-Dicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence

The Vatican announced on May 16 that Pope Leo XIV has approved the creation of an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Inte

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11

Federal AI Spending Surges as Pentagon Dominates US Government Investment

The Pentagon now commands nearly 99 percent of all federal artificial intelligence contract spending, a concentration so extreme that every

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