AI News

AI News Brief: Panasonic Energy recently revealed that while it’s best known for supplying EV batteries to Tesla, the main driver of its growth has now shifted to the data center market. The Japanese supplier is repositioning its cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, originally built for EVs, as backup power equipment for data centers, tapping into the massive electricity demand surge driven by AI. Panasonic Energy expects data center battery sales to reach $5.5 billion this fiscal year…

AI news brief: PrismML is a still relatively unknown AI lab that has only closed a $22.25M seed round, but its technical approach and team pedigree are drawing serious attention. Founded by a group of Caltech researchers, CEO Babak Hassibi is a Caltech professor specializing in compression; advisors include a Databricks co-founder and the director of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab.

AI News Brief: Google DeepMind launched the ‘DeepMind Institute’ on Wednesday, aiming to broaden public discussion around AGI (artificial general intelligence). The institute’s board includes DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Google executive James Manyika, and DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis, with Legg also serving as editor-in-chief.

AI News Flash: Crusoe announced Thursday it closed a $3.9 billion Series E round (actually Series F), pushing the company’s valuation to $30.9 billion. The round was co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Founders Fund, GIC, Nvidia, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Radical Ventures, and TPG, among others.

AI news brief: Pinterest is testing a new AI feature called Restyle that lets users preview furniture, decor, and lighting placement in photos of their own room. Users simply upload a photo of their actual living space, and the system uses AI to apply different styles of home goods into the image, showing what the redesigned room would look like, helping users judge before buying whether a product fits their space’s style and dimensions.

AI News Flash: Baseten teamed up with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI on Wednesday to roll out a new safety infrastructure standard for open-weight models, launching its research division Base Labs at the same time. The move comes as concerns over open-weight model safety are heating up—a technique called ‘abliteration’ can strip a model’s built-in safeguards, making it dangerous. The scale of the problem isn’t small: over 6,000 abliterated models are already listed on Hugging Face, the platform that hosts open-source models.

AI News Brief: Japan, the Korean won, and the new Taiwan dollar have strengthened recently, driven mainly by the AI and semiconductor industry boom, with South Korea and Taiwan serving as key hubs in both sectors. The report notes that strong chip and tech exports riding the AI wave have let the Taiwan dollar and Korean won outperform other Asian currencies that drew capital mainly through rate hikes aimed at curbing inflation. In contrast, the Indian rupee and Philippine peso failed to strengthen meaningfully despite their central banks raising rates to fight inflation, showing that high interest rates alone…

AI news flash: Huawei unveiled more than 10 AI computing infrastructure chips on Thursday, spanning a new generation of AI accelerators, CPUs, and high-speed interconnect chips — widely seen as the Chinese tech giant’s latest move to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI industry. See the original article for full details.

AI news brief: China’s electronics sector H1 earnings are half AI boom, half slump — here’s the rundown. In the first half of this year, a quarter of listed Chinese companies posted losses, yet overall group net profit still grew by roughly 20%. This split mainly comes from chipmakers riding AI-related demand to sharp gains that lift the aggregate profit figures, while other non-AI-related sectors are sliding into decline and dragging down individual company performance. In other words, AI chip demand is…

AI News Brief: Monkey, please screen this source text first for anything worth translating — the content is very thin, mostly author bios, with no substantive news mechanism or figures to expand on. Producing a summary that meets the requirements directly. Harvard Law School PhD candidate Guo Ran and Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA), co-authored an article examining how the US should build its own data strategy for the AI era, while cautioning against directly copying China’s model.