News

Snapchat Opens Qatar Office To Deepen Gulf Presence

The new Doha base anchors Snap’s regional expansion as Qatar steps up its digital and creative drive.

Published

1 year ago

October 28, 2025

snapchat opens qatar office to deepen gulf presence

Snapchat has opened a new office in Doha’s Msheireb district, marking its first base in Qatar and a stronger foothold in the Gulf. Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel joined Sheikh Jassim bin Mansour bin Jabor Al Thani, Director of the Government Communications Office (GCO), at the launch.

The move plants Snap at the center of a market where engagement runs deep. Snapchat users in the Gulf open the app more than 45 times a day, while about 85% use its augmented reality features daily. From the new Doha hub, Snap aims to work more closely with creators, entrepreneurs and local partners as Qatar pushes ahead with its sweeping Vision 2030 goals.

“We welcome Snap Inc.’s expansion in Qatar and its continued contribution to the country’s digital and creative economy,” said Sheikh Jassim, adding: “The office is an important step in strengthening our strategic partnership, which began three years ago and has already achieved significant milestones, particularly in development, training, and support for the creative industry”.

The opening follows Snap’s memorandum of understanding with the GCO signed during Web Summit Qatar in February. That deal paved the way for the country’s first Augmented Reality Academy, designed to train new creators and developers in immersive tech. The program will be open to young innovators across the region, part of a broader push to build skills that feed into Qatar’s growing creative economy.

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Hussein Freijeh, Snap’s Vice President for MENA, said the company is “deepening its roots in a market that celebrates creativity and culture”. The new base also expands opportunities for brands and advertisers looking to reach a digitally active audience through more localized storytelling and AR experiences.

Global platforms are increasingly circling Qatar’s fast-growing digital economy, drawn by its investment in creative industries and infrastructure. For Snap, the Doha office signals a long-term bet on one of the region’s most connected markets — and a platform to anchor future growth across the Gulf.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.