Media

AI news brief: Nvidia announced a $3.5 billion investment in Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, and as part of the deal, MediaTek will use Nvidia’s technology to help design custom chips for AI companies and hyperscalers, chips that plug directly into Nvidia-centric data center architecture. The move comes as more AI companies and cloud providers—including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—invest in building their own chips to cut their reliance on Nvidia GPUs.

AI news brief: Clipto is a startup headquartered in San Francisco with teams spanning Singapore and Hong Kong, using AI to help users index and search the videos, recordings, images, and meeting notes piling up on their computers—so instead of digging through folders, you can search by describing the content, or just ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to find it for you. The company recently closed a $15M all-equity round, pushing its post-money valuation to $250M…

AI News Brief: Blue Voice is a Boston-based AI startup founded by Harvard Law dropout David Lawrence, along with co-founders Amit Patankar (Harvard MBA, former Google engineer) and Michael Gropman (retired Boston PD deputy superintendent), building real-time policy guidance for frontline police officers. Lawrence started the company after witnessing an officer-involved shooting on campus…

AI News Brief: In its lawsuit against OpenAI, Apple has submitted new ‘shocking evidence’ to bolster its allegations that a former employee stole trade secrets to help OpenAI. This new material surfaced after former Apple employee Chang Liu, now at OpenAI, had his lawyers turn over his old Apple work laptop earlier this month. Apple alleges that while working at OpenAI, Liu used a confidential Apple circuit schematic…

AI News Flash: On Monday, August 31, Instagram announced it’s changing how it labels AI-generated profiles and will start limiting reach for accounts that don’t disclose their AI identity. The platform is renaming its ‘AI creator’ label to ‘AI-generated profile’ to make disclosure clearer, letting users know when the person shown in a profile is AI-generated or substantially AI-created.

AI News Brief: The Pentagon has officially rolled out customized versions of ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok on GenAI.mil, the secure platform available to its 3 million civilian and military personnel. Launched last year as a centralized secure portal that originally offered only Google Gemini, GenAI.mil lets Defense Department employees access commercial frontier AI models without routing sensitive government data through consumer channels; the military-specific version is exempt from data collection mechanisms that are hard to avoid in consumer tech products. The…

AI News Brief: Caterpillar is extending decades of experience in mining automation to broader AI deployment scenarios. The company first entered automation through mining, where labor shortages and hazardous work environments made the sector especially suited to automation technology. It now sells autonomous haul trucks, drilling equipment, underground loaders, dozers, and remote-controlled construction equipment, along with a software suite for command centers, fleet management, and remote terrain intelligence…

AI news brief: Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and several other music publishers have sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI lab of a ‘brazen campaign of illegal plunder, downloading and scraping massive amounts of copyrighted works via BitTorrent.’ The lawsuit…

AI News Flash: Nvidia’s AI advantage is expanding from the GPU itself to the entire system architecture. The mainstream narrative used to be that Nvidia was the sole supplier of top-tier GPUs in the early days of the AI wave, raking in profits as the industry grew—but in recent years, cloud giants like Amazon and Google have started building their own chips, leading investors to question how durable that advantage really is. Nvidia’s stock rose 10x from early 2023 to mid-2025, but has slowed over the past year as GPU competition intensified.

AI News Brief: Vijay Pande left a16z last year, stepping away from the roughly $4 billion biotech investment portfolio he ran, to start VZVC, a much smaller, AI-focused venture fund of his own. In the interview, he talks about how biology is shifting from a ‘discovery’ science to an ’engineering’ science - meaning research is no longer just passive observation and lucky breaks, but something that can be systematically designed, predicted, and built like engineering. He also points out that clinical trial costs remain sky-high and are still one of the biggest bottlenecks slowing down new drugs and therapies.