Huawei launched the OceanStor M900 and Nvidia introduced CMX Context Memory Storage to manage inference KV Cache in tiered storage, reducing repeated computation on cache hits. Sources say SSD requirements for this workload are not standardized: some plans have moved from 3 DWPD to 9 DWPD, and the industry may need 6–12 months to reach a common product standard.
BASAL Intelligence (本溯智能), founded by Tsinghua AIR's first PhD graduate Li Jianxiong, has raised funding led by Fifth Source Capital, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital and WestSummit Capital participating. The company is pursuing an action-native, in-context embodied foundation model that lets robots adapt to new scenes in minutes from a few human demonstrations and self-attempts, rather than retraining.
Caterpillar and CoreWeave are working to cut the time needed to train construction machines from months to hours, according to Caterpillar's Brandon Hootman. Caterpillar's ecosystem holds about 18 petabytes of federated machine, dealer and customer data, and a single machine can generate terabytes of LiDAR, camera and control data in a day. The partners use AI models, working with Nvidia, to annotate incoming field data so it can feed simulation and training within the same workday.
Refugees in Kenya's Kakuma camp are doing AI-related microwork, such as research for RWS's AOP Connect platform, where pay comes as discretionary "rewards" of up to $500 rather than guaranteed wages. Interviews with more than two dozen refugees found most earn far less than the maximum, and entry-level remote tech work is shrinking. Refugees who are unable to legally work in Kenya say they accept these gigs despite opaque pay criteria.
Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a $1.8 billion effort covering data, lab equipment, and compute. Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing a combined $300 million, and the US Department of Energy is investing over $500 million over five years. Commercial funders get one year of exclusive access to data they paid for, while government-funded data will be public without that restriction, and a first dataset is expected in about a year.
Baiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Cowboy Space, says the company is developing an energy grid in orbit. Its first satellite, Reason 1, reached orbit on a SpaceX rideshare, and the team is communicating with it daily.
Prima Mente and AlzData are launching the Alzheimer's Translation Challenge, a global AI competition to discover new therapeutic hypotheses for Alzheimer's disease. The challenge centers on a 150M cell atlas of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia across different genetic backgrounds under combinatorial perturbations, with multi-modal readouts. Top teams will have their hypotheses tested in Prima Mente's wet lab, and the data will be available through the AD workbench, Hugging Face, and Prima Mente's modeling platform.
The backstory: Sprinklr manages billions of customer interactions across the world's biggest brands. Their infrastructure had to match that scale. (2/4)
The Alzheimer’s Translation Challenge is led by @primamente and @AlzData, with @nvidia, @huggingface, @nebiusai, Talisman Therapeutics, @ultimagenomics, @Cellanome, @PrimeIntellect, and @boltz_bio. Registration is open now. Competition starts spring 2027: https://primamente.com/challenges
Participants will use the dataset to build AI models, assessed through a series of evals from general benchmarks to more complex tasks. Top teams will be shortlisted, and their experimental hypotheses tested in Prima Mente's wet lab.
Periodic Labs' Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk explain why scientific discovery differs from math and coding, and why experiments remain the ground truth. They describe reinforcement learning grounded in physical experiments, AI-driven materials characterization, and the view that failed experiments can be valuable training data. The transcript was truncated before the discussion of giving lab instruments "140 IQ" was completed.
WER dropped from 85% to 7.65% on Bengali with one fine-tune. Numbers like that are why 80 labs asked to license Monsoon in a week. What I respect most is the rule behind it: @voicearena_ai only builds a dataset if it moves the needle. Most data vendors can't say that.
NVIDIA announced commitments valued at $1 billion over the next five years to build U.S. capacity for super intelligence research in fields including quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The funding will support U.S. higher-education research institutions, American quantum leadership and cloud service providers serving U.S. government mission needs. NVIDIA is also a collaborator on several phase 2 Genesis Mission awards in quantum computing, fusion, accelerator design and microelectronics.
Atomic Canyon's Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant (NIVA), developed with nuclear-industry groups, is now available to the entire U.S. fleet of 94 reactors after pilot testing at Constellation Energy plants. Nuclearn says its products have reached more than 65 U.S. partners, and the article says the industry is turning to AI to help manage regulatory paperwork and a shrinking, aging workforce.
A new poll finds 64% of Americans believe AI is developing "too fast." The source text provides no further details on the survey's methodology, sample, or other findings.
Tian Keyu's unnamed startup has raised nearly $30M from investors including 5Y Capital and IDG at a $200M post-money valuation, Bloomberg reports. The NeurIPS 2024 award-winning researcher leads a 10-person team developing a 200,000-symbol visual vocabulary to help AI process video. Tian claims the approach could cut video-generation costs at least tenfold. A full model release is planned for 2027; the company has no product yet.
A HP survey of nearly 20,000 desk-based workers globally found three in five UK business leaders say AI adoption has created new roles or teams in their organizations. Only 10% said AI is primarily replacing or reducing roles, while 52% of UK workers use employer-provided AI tools daily or weekly, up from 38% last year. Still, 38% of UK knowledge workers worry AI could replace their roles.
NVIDIA's technical blog describes how its team taught robots to assemble GB300 tester trays, a task that currently requires skilled manual labor in factories. The post also discusses lessons about robot learning, mechanical intelligence, and engineering. The source excerpt provides limited detail beyond this.
GitHub reports that one in three pull requests now involves an AI agent, and that public secret exposures rise with the volume of pushes rather than from declining developer care. It introduces a ModernBERT-based classifier with Microsoft Applied Sciences that evaluates candidate secrets in under two milliseconds and could more than double the secrets prevented at push time. The feature is in private preview, with availability for GitHub Secret Protection customers later this month.
Google launched its first test satellite carrying four TPUs into orbit last week as part of Project Suncatcher, a moonshot exploring whether machine learning infrastructure could one day operate in space. The test aims to determine whether Google's AI hardware can withstand the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of orbit.
📊 Data is the most important thing, really stoked to see these kinds of partnerships for it. If you have high-quality, specialized data that you'd like to license or sell to improve products at @Google, check out the link below (and thank you!): https://contentpilot.google.com
Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global Industrial AIoT Platforms. The company says its Azure platform, including Azure IoT, Azure Arc, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft Foundry, connects cloud and edge operations to apply AI-powered reasoning and close the loop between insight and action.
China's booming artificial intelligence sector has kept local researchers at home, but it has not yet attracted overseas scientists despite a government push to recruit them.
Shashank Gupta — Applied Scientist 👇 https://x.com/shashank_bits/status/2107254305074102599
Cisco SVP Rakesh Chopra discusses the "Scale-Across" approach to networking AI training workloads spread across multiple data centers. He describes how Silicon One architecture and Intelligent Collective Networking aim to manage synchronized GPU traffic over long-distance fiber links. The interview covers power efficiency and hardware-accelerated MACsec and IPsec security.
ML4 was trained on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in our European datacenters -- our cluster in Bruyères-le-Châtel built using our Series B fundraise. We are investing heavily in infrastructure, with our Series C and D clusters coming online soon. This additional compute will let us train longer, pursue more ambitious post-training, and iterate faster. We expect large and rapid improvements in the weeks and months ahead. 2/n
OpenAI is rolling out text watermarking for EU AI Act compliance, with opt-in access for API customers globally on select models starting today. Watermarking stays off by default in the API, while an invisible watermark will be added to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text in the European Union over the coming weeks. Access to the text watermark detector is initially limited to approved researchers and expert organizations, and the image and audio verification tools remain publicly accessible.
AMD Agent Computers Power the Next Generation of Hollywood Studios Emmy-winning Light Sail VR uses private, local AI on Ryzen AI Max and Radeon AI PRO R9700, overseeing up to 9 projects all at once, leaving more time for storytelling. https://bit.ly/4AKhZjC
Smartphone prices have risen about 15% globally this year, and newly launched models cost roughly 25% more than last year, as a memory chip shortage driven by AI data center demand raises manufacturing costs. Shipments of sub-$100 smartphones fell almost 60% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to IDC, and Chinese makers are cutting entry-level projects in favor of pricier devices. GSMA warns the trend could widen the digital divide.
PromptArmor reports that a malicious Skill can make Databricks Genie Code display a phishing modal and exfiltrate tenant data without human approval. The attack exploits Skills loaded from users' personal workspaces and a display interface that lacks egress controls, and Databricks, after disclosure on August 16, 2026, said users are responsible for ensuring uploaded Skills contain no malicious content.
Recently, Alibaba T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 during the Apsara Conference 2026. Zhenwu V900 features 216 GB of memory capacity and 1,200 GB/s of interconnect bandwidth. The V900 is slated to be "3x" the performance of the Zhenwu M890 and will start shipments in Q1 2027. (1/3)🧵
Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick have unveiled Trillium Labs, a new non-profit focused on the open science of frontier AI. The lab plans to build open post-training recipes and expand into open infrastructure to study topics such as RSI, reward hacking, and multi-agent systems. It is hiring, fundraising, and seeking compute, with support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences.
Google AI announced that its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite, built with Planet, has launched into orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission. The initial mission will gather data on how Google TPUs handle the physical stress and extremes of spaceflight. The post says low Earth orbit systems could generate up to 8x more solar power than on Earth, and that future work may link multiple satellite constellations for scaled machine learning.
Micron reported fiscal Q4 revenue of $54.23 billion, up 4.8X year on year, with net income of $37.7 billion. Its Cloud Memory unit, dominated by HBM, posted $16.28 billion in sales at an 83 percent gross margin.
Google's prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher, built with Planet, launched into orbit on the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX. The team confirmed contact and says the satellite is operating as expected. Over the coming weeks, it will gather in-orbit data on how Google's TPUs handle spaceflight stress, radiation, and thermal extremes, and a peer-reviewed paper detailing the research is available in Joule.
Congrats to the @Fulcrum_inc team on Echo! Final training runs were done entirely via Fireworks' serverless training API, on a Kimi K3 LoRA (rank 32). Make sure to read their writeup, which includes the "persona post-training" approach and how they landed a $4.5k total training cost.
LlamaIndex held Tuesday-night events in New York and San Francisco on document processing for AI agents, with the New York room filling a waitlist and San Francisco drawing almost 600 attendees. The talks focused on the problem that agents often receive document text without its layout, so they must guess which figures, such as a monthly rate versus a total on an invoice, mean what.
ESM-2 came out in 2022. It's still downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month. That only works because someone keeps maintaining the software underneath it. @huggingface 🤝 @os4science are teaming up to find those libraries and back the people behind them 🧬 https://os4science.org/news/hugging-face-open-source-for-science-fund/
Microsoft says its Circular Centers now operate eight facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific to decide the next life of decommissioned Azure hardware. Last year, Microsoft achieved a 92% reuse and recycling rate for decommissioned servers and components. Since 2014, Azure cores per rack have increased about 13-fold while power for the same task fell roughly 90%.
Excited to share i’ve joined @ProximalHQ here in SF! I think that there is a ton of interesting open problems related to data and post training at large. There is no better team to work with than the one we have and I am extremely excited to share our work :)