AI news brief: Dan’s Steaks in Singapore, run by former radio DJ Daniel Ong, is a restaurant chain that survived the COVID-19 pandemic and kept serving juicy steaks to hungry Singaporean diners. Now it has been brought down by another force beyond its control: inflation. The owner says rising operating costs are the reason for closing, and the chain is expected to shut down in the coming months…
AI news flash: In this episode of the Tech Latest Podcast, host Brian Chapman talks with Japan tech correspondent Tsubasa Suruga about SoftBank’s high-stakes bet on AI infrastructure. The discussion focuses on SB Energy, SoftBank’s energy arm, turning to renewable energy to power large-scale data center projects with a ‘power first’ approach…
AI news brief: Japanese adult English learners widely believe human teachers remain irreplaceable, even though many of them already use generative AI themselves, according to a Nikkei poll. The survey targeted adult English learners in Japan, many of whom use generative AI tools at least part of the time to support their studies, but most still feel the role of human teachers can’t be replaced by AI. The report cites online English teaching platform RareJob, noting that many students who study with AI materials are actually more eager to seek out opportunities to learn from human teachers.
AI News Flash: OpenAI has been working on strengthening ChatGPT’s performance on low-resource programming languages, rolling out a new round of evaluations focused on software engineering tasks, SQLite-related operations, and COBOL code migration capabilities. Compared to mainstream languages like Python and JavaScript, these languages have long been a weak spot for large language models due to scarce training data. This update adds dedicated benchmarks to examine the model’s real-world accuracy and reliability when writing, debugging, and porting code in these languages, helping identify capability gaps for targeted improvement.
AI news flash: Nvidia rolled out its next-gen open-weight models on Thursday, built for ‘always-on AI agents’ and edge computing, split across two tiers. The enterprise flagship is Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter model that’s smaller than Nemotron 3 Ultra but, according to Nvidia, matches it on instruction-following and tool-use tasks. On the other end…
AI news flash: DeepSeek just rolled out an updated AI model, with the Chinese AI startup claiming the new version beats out US rivals from OpenAI and Anthropic on some benchmarks while still keeping costs low. This update builds on the model it released back in September, and DeepSeek says the improved version outperforms its American competitors across multiple performance metrics.
AI News Brief: Zoom recently announced that enterprise users will be able to verify that the person on the other end of a video call isn’t an AI deepfake through a ‘Proof of Human’ badge. The biometric technology was developed by World, the company backed by Sam Altman, and the system is called ‘World ID for Zoom,’ now live globally on the Zoom Marketplace. It works by cross-checking three pieces of data…
AI News Brief: Anthropic announced it’s setting up a ‘Public Benefit Fund,’ a wholly-owned independent entity within the company aimed at giving it ‘greater flexibility and scale’ to support social good projects. The company is committing 5% of its shares to the fund, with an escalator clause: every time Anthropic’s valuation grows 50%, it’ll kick in another 2% of shares. As for how the money will actually be used, Anthropic has only sketched broad directions so far…
AI news brief: Disney will absorb the majority of Character.AI’s workforce. The chatbot company filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it has now emerged that Disney has agreed to hire most of its employees. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand had already moved over to become Disney’s first-ever CTO, suggesting the relationship was in the works for a while. Character.AI had also previously agreed to sell some assets to Disney for $20 million, and that deal is still going through legal process.
AI News Brief: Developments in EconomyAI, climate issues, and private capital are revealing growing divergence among Asian economies. As the IMF annual meetings wrapped up in Bangkok, Thailand, participants noted that while Asia has shown considerable economic resilience amid energy supply shocks and a worsening cost-of-living crisis, with overall growth holding up well, that resilience is becoming increasingly uneven — some countries are falling behind because they’ve missed the AI wave and other favorable trends.