AI News Brief: The FAA recently announced it will roll out an AI software system called SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories) to help ease the country’s long-standing air traffic controller shortage. According to The Wall Street Journal, the system was developed by Air Space Intelligence and is a cloud platform designed to reinforce the FAA’s existing air traffic control systems.
AI News Brief: Ahead of the upcoming Trump-Xi summit in Washington, Xi Jinping’s government has publicly rejected Western calls to slow down AI development. The debate was sparked by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s repeated warnings that unchecked high-speed AI development could pose safety risks severe enough to threaten humanity’s survival, putting US-China competition and divergence on AI back in the international spotlight as a key variable ahead of the sum…
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.