NerdNews

Microsoft plans to invest $30bn in the UK to expand its AI infrastructure and operations, including building the country's largest supercomputer with over 23,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The investment will support 6,000 employees and strengthen the UK's position in AI innovation.

Meta unveiled its new Ray-Ban smart glasses with a display, Oakley Meta Vanguard athlete-focused glasses, and other updates to its VR and AR technologies, including the Hyperscape feature and Horizon TV entertainment hub.

Google is rolling out 'Ask Gemini', an AI assistant in Google Meet, which can answer questions, summarize participant discussions, and highlight key decisions. It's initially available to select Google Workspace customers and will be rolled out to more users in the coming weeks.

OpenAI researchers found that their models often produce false outputs, or 'hallucinations', due to fundamental mistakes in training. The models are rewarded for guessing rather than admitting uncertainty, leading to incorrect answers. The researchers suggest modifying evaluations to reward expressions of uncertainty, which could help suppress hallucinations.

Hugging Face introduces a new integration with GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to access open-source large language models directly within the editor. This update enables seamless switching between providers and models, and provides a free tier of monthly inference credits for experimentation.

Jonathan Lowe explains how to connect an LLM directly to a structured graph database, enabling natural language queries to retrieve and analyze structured data, using sentence embeddings and semantic search.

Hugging Face has released FinePDFs, the largest publicly available corpus built entirely from PDFs, spanning 475 million documents in 1,733 languages. The dataset introduces a new dimension to open training datasets, tapping into a resource long considered too complex and expensive to process. FinePDFs has the potential to advance long-context training and is available under the Open Data Commons Attribution license.

Google's Gemini AI participated in the ICPC World Finals, a coding competition where it solved 10 out of 12 complex problems, earning a gold medal and outperforming 139 human teams. Gemini's ability to tackle multi-step logic problems could make it invaluable in industries like semiconductor engineering and biotechnology.

Meta launches Hyperscape, a technology that allows developers to build photorealistic spaces in virtual reality. It uses Gaussian Splatting, cloud rendering, and streaming to make digital worlds appear on a Meta Quest 3 headset. The capture process takes a few minutes, but rendering takes a few hours.

Safari 26.0 introduces numerous features, including Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animations, HDR images, Digital Credentials API, WebGPU, and improved Web Inspector. It also enhances web app functionality, allowing every site to be a web app on iOS and iPadOS. Additionally, it includes various bug fixes and security improvements.

Meta's new $799 Ray-Ban Display smart glasses feature a 600x600 pixel display, 20-degree field of view, and 5,000 nits of brightness. They also come with a Neural Band for hands-free control and have a battery life of 6 hours. The glasses support prescriptions, have a 12MP camera, and are water-resistant. They will be available for purchase on September 30th.

Microsoft has announced the public preview of Windows 365 Cloud Apps, allowing users to stream individual apps instead of full desktops. This move aims to simplify app delivery and reduce overhead for organizations. Additionally, Omnissa has released new products, including App Volumes Manager and Workspace ONE Vulnerability Defense, to manage and secure endpoint fleets.

Microsoft has announced a $15 billion investment in cloud and AI infrastructure in the UK, including a supercomputer with 23,000 Nvidia GPUs. The investment is part of a $30 billion spending spree between 2025 and 2028, and is seen as a significant boost to the UK's AI industry.

Meta has unveiled a new pair of smart glasses with a built-in display, controlled by a wristband that picks up on subtle hand gestures. The glasses, called Meta Ray-Ban Display, will be available for purchase on September 30 for $799. They feature an on-board AI assistant, cameras, speakers, and microphones, and allow users to access the internet and social media apps.

Meta has announced three new sets of smartglasses at its Connect 2025 event: the second-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the Oakley Meta Vanguard sports glasses, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses with a built-in AR display for $799. The new smartglasses offer improved battery life, camera capabilities, and interactive features.

The UK government's Tech Prosperity Deal promises to increase AI capacity and technology infrastructure. Businesses are expected to spend more on AI, with large businesses spending an average of £400,000 and small businesses spending around £125,000. The deal aims to drive innovation, encourage investment, and build confidence in the UK as a global business hub.

The ShinyHunters extortion group claims to have stolen over 1.5 billion Salesforce records from 760 companies using compromised Salesloft Drift OAuth tokens. The stolen data includes information from the Account, Contact, Case, Opportunity, and User Salesforce object tables.

Meta's new Ray-Ban Display glasses feature a neural wristband for control and typing, with a focus on augmented reality and AI integration. Mark Zuckerberg believes glasses will be the next major computing platform, with the potential to replace smartphones. The glasses have a 20-degree field of view, crisp 42 pixels per degree, and last up to six hours on a charge.

AMD has released ROCm 7, a software platform that promises major improvements in inference and training performance for its GPUs, narrowing the gap with Nvidia's CUDA. ROCm 7 offers a 3.5x uplift in inference performance and a 3x boost in training performance compared to the previous version. The software also introduces AMD's AI Tensor Engine and supports new datatypes, including FP4 and FP8.

The article discusses the debate between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who argue that superintelligent AI will kill everyone, and the 'normalist' camp, who believe AI is a normal technology that can be controlled. The article concludes that both views have flaws and proposes a third narrative, the 'accumulative' view of AI risk, which suggests that AI risks will accumulate gradually, leading to catastrophic consequences.