Good morning. It’s Monday, September 29. Today we are covering:
Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
What Salt Typhoon Shows About the Cyber Power of China’s Spy Agency
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp · Hugging Face
Tech-Bubble Fears Rise in New Investor Poll
Engineers manage to reboost ISS after early Dragon abort
Let’s dive in
Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word
By Tom Warren via The Verge
Microsoft introduced “vibe working” with Agent Mode in Excel and Word, which plans and executes creation tasks step‑by‑step (like a live macro) using OpenAI’s GPT‑5; a new Office Agent in Copilot chat (powered by Anthropic models) can also generate PowerPoint decks and Word docs with web research and live slide previews.
In testing, Agent Mode for Excel scored 57.2% on SpreadsheetBench, beating Shortcut.ai, a ChatGPT .xlsx agent, and Claude Files Opus 4.1 but trailing human accuracy (71.3%); Microsoft says outputs are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable, and Word’s Agent Mode turns drafting into interactive “vibe writing.”
Availability/strategy: Available today (Sep 29, 2025) via the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers—web only at launch with desktop “coming soon” (and Office Agent U.S.-only); Microsoft remains committed to OpenAI while expanding use of Anthropic via AWS for Copilot chat.
𝕏: Microsoft is launching what it calls “vibe working” in Excel and Word today. A new Agent Mode is coming to Office apps, alongside an Office Agent that’s powered by Anthropic models. - Tom Warren (@tomwarren)
What Salt Typhoon Shows About the Cyber Power of China’s Spy Agency
By Chris Buckley via The New York Times
In 2023, U.S. officials found Chinese state-controlled malware inside critical infrastructure; C.I.A. director William J. Burns secretly warned Beijing, yet intrusions escalated, culminating in Salt Typhoon—a yearslong breach that may have touched nearly every American and dozens of countries, enabling China to identify and track targets’ communications and movements.
The Ministry of State Security (M.S.S.) now leads China’s most sophisticated cyber operations, shifting from sloppy contractors to stealthy, strategic campaigns that exploit weaknesses, move laterally across networks, exfiltrate data, and erase traces—a posture that both deters rivals and positions Beijing to disrupt U.S. power, communications, and water systems in a crisis.
Under Xi Jinping, the M.S.S. was purged, centralized, and elevated (minister Chen Yixin), with architect Wu Shizhong leveraging the state-linked China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center and rules that funnel newly found software vulnerabilities to an M.S.S.-run database, incentivizing firms with quotas and payments and building a robust offensive talent pipeline.
𝕏: China’s hackers have stolen data that gives them the capability to “identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world.” An incredible threat especially in combination with the CCP’s connections to organized crime. - Michael Ron Bowling (@mrbcyber)
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deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp · Hugging Face
Hugging Face
DeepSeek-AI released DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, an experimental step beyond V3.1-Terminus, introducing DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) to boost long-context training/inference efficiency while keeping output quality essentially unchanged.
With training configs matched to V3.1-Terminus, results are at parity or slightly better on select benchmarks (e.g., AIME 2025 89.3→88.4, BrowseComp 40.1→38.5, Codeforces 2121→2046), indicating sparse attention delivers efficiency without broad performance trade-offs.
Deployment options include updated Hugging Face inference code, SGLang, and day-0 vLLM support; open-source kernels arrive via TileLang, DeepGEMM, and FlashMLA; the repo and weights ship under the MIT License.
𝕏: DeepSeek V3.2 breakdown 1. Sparse attention via lightning indexer + top_k attention 2. Uses V3.1 Terminus + 1T continued pretraining tokens 3. 5 specialized models (coding, math etc) via RL then distillation for final ckpt 4. GRPO. Reward functions for length penalty, language consistency, rubric based rewards - Daniel Han (@danielhanchen)
Tech-Bubble Fears Rise in New Investor Poll
By Alexander Osipovich via Wall Street Journal
An investor survey cited by the WSJ rates tech stocks at 7.4/10 on a “no bubble” (1) to “extreme bubble” (10) scale—higher than last year but still below 2021, when near-zero rates turbocharged valuations.
Today’s perceived froth is tied less to policy and more to AI enthusiasm, with market leaders like Nvidia and Oracle highlighted as beneficiaries of the rally and sentiment upswing.
Published Monday, Sep 29, 2025, the poll signals elevated—but not peak—bubble risk, implying investors see stretched pricing in mega-cap tech without the excesses of the 2021 run-up.
𝕏: The AI infrastructure boom feels like the dot-com spree—only magnified. Billions poured into chips & data centers assume a future of $400B in annual consumer spending just to break even. Who else feels like this is a massive bubble? - John Webber (@TheWebberBrief)
Engineers manage to reboost ISS after early Dragon abort
By Richard Speed via The Register
NASA and SpaceX successfully reboosted the ISS with a 15-minute Draco thruster burn from a Dragon freighter, following an earlier 19:22 burn aborted when fuel tanks failed to swap.
The maneuver sets up Soyuz MS-28 crew rotation on November 27, 2025 from Baikonur, marking the first flight for Christopher Williams; the crew is slated to stay aboard until mid-2026.
While Dragon reboosts reduce U.S. reliance on Russia, the station remains interlinked—key ESA computers reside in Zvezda—and the ISS is still aiming for a 2030 controlled reentry, contingent on a SpaceX deorbit vehicle ready by 2029.
𝕏: Dragon and its new “boost trunk” performed a 15 minute burn yesterday, providing 1.62 m/s of delta-v to the ISS for station-keeping (a job typically performed by Roscosmos via the Zvezda Service Module or visiting Progress vehicles). - Jon Edwards (@edwards345)
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