Chioma Okonkwo
Chioma Okonkwo reports from San Francisco on the infrastructure, capital, and labor markets that sustain the West Coast laboratories. She has covered the technology beat for years and focuses on the gap between what the labs say and what their suppliers can deliver.
Bylines · 7 filings
- BUSINESS
Meta's Muse Begins Calling U.S. Businesses, With Humans Sometimes on the Line
Meta's new personal agent has crossed 2.5 million downloads and started placing outbound phone calls to shops, salons, and service providers on consumers' behalf — a channel small businesses have not yet learned to answer.
September 24, 2026 - BUSINESS
Google Signs MrBeast to a Multi-Year Gemini Deal, Positioning A.I. Inside the Creator Economy's Highest-Reach Channel
A partnership between Google and Beast Industries embeds Gemini as a logistics tool inside MrBeast's production pipeline, a distribution move aimed at younger consumers and a signal to small brands that AI is moving into the creator supply chain.
September 3, 2026 - BUSINESS
Claude, Asked to 'Take a Real Stab' at Riemann, Advances a Related Bound Instead
An unreleased research version of Anthropic's Claude, coordinating some 60 subagents across two Claude Code sessions, raised a longstanding lower bound on the zeros of the zeta function from 41.6 percent to 67.2 percent — the largest single-step advance on record, according to the company.
August 11, 2026 - BUSINESS
Google DeepMind Unveils Gemini Robotics 2, Extending Whole-Body Control to Humanoid Machines
The three-model suite lets robots walk, coordinate with one another, and adapt to unfamiliar hardware in hours, but DeepMind researchers concede that fine dexterity remains, in their own words, a distant goal.
July 31, 2026 - BUSINESS
GPT-5 Pro Cracked a Three-Year-Old T-Cell Puzzle, OpenAI Says
An immunologist at the Jackson Laboratory used the model to predict a glucose-driven mechanism in T cell specialization — and to anticipate, before publication, the result of an experiment he had already run.
June 24, 2026 - BUSINESS
Zuckerberg Concedes 'Mistakes' as Engineers Inside Meta's Applied A.I. Unit Revolt
An employee hijacked a company livestream to berate a senior executive, as 6,500 engineers — reassigned to generate puzzles for model training — describe their three-month-old unit as a 'gulag.'
June 14, 2026 - BAY AREA
At Google I/O, an Omni Model and an Agent Named Spark Reframe the Competition
Sundar Pichai used the May 19 keynote to position Gemini 3.5 Flash, the new Omni multimodal model, and the Spark general-purpose agent as Google's coordinated answer to a year of frontier-lab competition.
May 19, 2026