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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.

AI News Brief: In an interview, Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier noted that the intense US-China rivalry in tech and AI is putting universities under a dual squeeze: they need to keep pace with technological progress and keep research and teaching relevant, while also facing increasingly heavy national security compliance demands. He specifically pointed out that universities must confront the real national security concerns tied to ‘high-risk technology’ and ‘dual-use te…

AI news brief: An internal report released by Anthropic on Friday shows major shifts in the company’s workforce makeup and work patterns over the past year. The share of junior employees in technical roles dropped from 21% to 14%, while junior technical hires fell sharply from 27% to just 9%, signaling a clear pullback in hiring fresh grads. Technical staff also shrank from 61% to 56% of the overall workforce, which the company attributes to business teams growing naturally as the company scales, and to coding tools letting non-technical employees build software on their own.

AI News Brief: Meta recently updated its commercial terms to add a clause stating the company can ‘use any content on a business account’s domain, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain’ the integrity of Meta’s products and services. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab called the clause ‘unusual,’ saying it effectively authorizes Meta to scrape the website content of any publisher with a Meta business account and use it to train the company’s AI models…