AI Weekly Digest: Mar 20-27, 2026 — TurboQuant Shakes Memory Markets, MCP Hits 97M, Manus Founders Barred from Leaving China

This Week in AI (March 20–27, 2026) A week of infrastructure-shaking research, geopolitical drama, and record-breaking funding. Here are the stories that matter. 🔬 Research & Breakthroughs Google TurboQuant — The Compression Breakthrough That Crashed Memory Stocks Google unveiled TurboQuant (to be presented at ICLR 2026), a compression algorithm that reduces LLM memory requirements by 6x and achieves up to 8x faster attention by quantizing key-value caches to just 3 bits — with zero accuracy loss. The announcement immediately impacted markets: Micron, Samsung, and Western Digital stock prices dropped as investors reassessed demand forecasts for AI memory chips. If models need 6x less memory, do we really need all those HBM fabs? Think of it as the "Pied Piper moment" for AI infrastructure — suddenly, the bottleneck shifted. "Societies of Thought" — Published in Science A fascinating paper published in Science revealed that when reinforcement learning rewards models solely for reas