Cisco Bets $9B on AI Networking, Cuts 4,000 Jobs
Cisco reported record quarterly revenue of $15.8B and immediately announced 4,000 layoffs, raising its FY2026 AI infrastructure order target from $5B to $9B.
Sophie Zhang
AI Infrastructure & Open Source Reporter
Sophie is a journalist and former systems engineer who covers AI infrastructure, open-source models, and the developer tooling ecosystem. She spent three years as a site reliability engineer at a cloud provider in Seattle before transitioning to tech journalism, which gives her writing an unusual level of technical depth - she understands distributed systems, GPU clusters, and inference optimization from the inside.
She studied Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia and later completed a science communication fellowship at MIT. Her engineering background means she can read a model card, spot a misleading benchmark, and explain why quantization matters - all in the same paragraph.
At Awesome Agents, Sophie covers AI infrastructure news: new model releases, open-source launches, developer tools, deployment trends, and the hardware that makes it all run. She has a soft spot for underdog open-source projects that punch above their weight and a sharp eye for when a "breakthrough" is really just better marketing.
Based in Seattle, WA.
Articles by Sophie Zhang
Notion 3.5 Turns the Workspace Into an Agent Hub
Notion 3.5's Developer Platform adds Workers, live database sync, and first-class Claude Code and Cursor support - turning the workspace into an AI agent orchestration layer.
Google Turns to SpaceX for Orbital AI Data Centers
Bloomberg reports Google is in talks with SpaceX to launch its Project Suncatcher satellites - TPU-equipped spacecraft designed to run ML workloads in low Earth orbit.
Vapi Raises $50M After Amazon Ring Picks It Over 40 Rivals
Vapi closes a $50M Series B at $500M valuation after Amazon Ring routed 100% of its inbound calls through the platform, chosen over 40 competing voice AI vendors.
OpenAI Daybreak Turns Codex Into Enterprise Security
OpenAI's Daybreak initiative packages GPT-5.5 and Codex Security into a managed cybersecurity program with 20+ partners - a direct answer to Anthropic's Project Glasswing.
Pwn2Own 2026 Capacity Overflow, Hackers Drop 0-Days Solo
Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hit a hard submission cap for the first time in 19 years. Rejected researchers are now publishing working zero-days directly, breaking the contest's secrecy norms.
AI2 Fires Up $152M Blackwell Cluster for Open Science
AI2's federally backed OMAI compute cluster is now running on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra hardware and has already shipped OLMo, Molmo 2, and MolmoAct models fully open to researchers.
Cerebras IPO 20x Oversubscribed Signals AI Chip Crunch
Cerebras Systems raised its IPO price to $150-$160 per share after investors placed over $10 billion in orders on a $3.5 billion offering - 20 times oversubscribed.
AI Coding Agents Breached - Attackers Took the Keys
Six research teams disclosed exploits against Codex, Claude Code, Copilot, and Vertex AI. Every attack went after credentials the agents carried - not the models themselves.
ZAYA1-8B: Open Reasoning Model Rivals Claude on AMD GPUs
Zyphra's ZAYA1-8B matches Claude 4.5 Sonnet on HMMT 2025 math benchmarks at just 760M active parameters, trained entirely on AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs under Apache 2.0.
OpenAI's Realtime API Goes GA with Three New Models
OpenAI's Realtime API exits beta with GPT-Realtime-2, Translate, and Whisper - three specialized voice models splitting reasoning, translation, and transcription into distinct endpoints.
DeepMind's AlphaEvolve Recovered 0.7% of Google's Compute
Google DeepMind's May 2026 AlphaEvolve impact report shows the system running in production across infrastructure, quantum computing, genomics, and commercial partnerships spanning logistics to fintech.
