NerdNews

General Motors will integrate a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant in its cars, starting in 2026. The assistant will be available as an over-the-air upgrade for OnStar-equipped vehicles and will provide a more natural and conversational experience for drivers. It will be able to access vehicle data, provide maintenance alerts, and offer personalized recommendations.

Meta is cutting around 600 jobs from its superintelligence lab as part of an ongoing reorganization. The move is intended to make the team more efficient, with fewer conversations required to make decisions and each person having more scope and impact.

General Motors plans to launch an automated driving system in 2028, allowing drivers to keep their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel. The system, based on Super Cruise, will use lidar, radar, and cameras for perception and will start on highways.

Over 800 public figures, including Steve Wozniak and Prince Harry, signed a statement demanding a ban on AI work that could lead to superintelligence until it can be done safely and controllably. The signers include AI researchers, former military leaders, and CEOs, and the statement comes from the Future of Life Institute.

OpenAI's new browser, ChatGPT Atlas, has raised significant security concerns due to its data collection and AI agent features. The browser's 'Memories' feature collects user data, and its AI agent can browse the web and complete tasks on behalf of the user, making it vulnerable to prompt injection attacks and other security risks.

Gene therapy startup Metagenomi used AWS's Inferentia 2 accelerators to speed up discovery of life-saving therapies, cutting AI costs by 56% compared to using Nvidia GPUs. Metagenomi utilized protein language models like Progen2 to generate millions of potential enzyme candidates, with Inferentia's lower operating cost and greater availability contributing to the savings.

Google is porting its internal workloads to Arm architecture, with 30,000 production packages already converted. The company aims to finish the job so its Borg cluster manager can allocate workloads efficiently on both x86 and Arm servers. This move is expected to save money and reduce energy consumption, with Google's Axion-powered machines delivering up to 65% better price-performance and 60% more energy efficiency than x86 instances.

Snapchat has made its first open prompt AI Lens available for free in the US, allowing users to edit their Snaps using custom prompts or generate new images. The Lens was initially launched in September for paid subscribers but is now available to all users, with plans to expand to other markets.

Sara Hooker, former VP of AI Research at Cohere, is betting against the scaling race in AI development. She co-founded Adaption Labs, which aims to build AI systems that can continuously adapt and learn from real-world experiences, rather than relying on large language models. Hooker believes that scaling LLMs has become an inefficient way to improve AI performance and that adapting to environments is key to true intelligence.

Amazon has announced AI-powered smart glasses for its delivery drivers, providing a hands-free experience with features like package scanning, turn-by-turn directions, and hazard detection. The glasses use AI-powered sensing capabilities and computer vision, and are currently being trialed in North America.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Atlas, an AI browser that prioritizes ChatGPT interactions over traditional web browsing. The browser is designed to keep ChatGPT central, allowing users to ask questions and receive answers directly within the browser. Atlas is currently available on Mac and will be rolled out to other platforms. The browser's features, such as memory and integration with ChatGPT, aim to provide a more personalized experience.

Samsung has unveiled its Galaxy XR headset, a competitor to Apple's Vision Pro, featuring a micro OLED display, pass-through cameras, and a lower price point of $1,800. The headset runs on Google's Android XR operating system and Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 platform, offering various experiences optimized for XR, including Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Photos.

Google Cloud published a guide on securing remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server deployments, emphasizing defense architecture centered on a centralized MCP proxy to enforce access controls and detect threats in real-time.

The report highlights key trends in cloud and DevOps, including the rise of AI agents, platform engineering, and FinOps. It also discusses the importance of developer experience, hybrid and multi-cloud approaches, and the need for consolidation and governance in the industry.

A path traversal vulnerability in Smithery.ai's MCP server hosting service was discovered, compromising over 3,000 AI servers and exposing thousands of API keys. The vulnerability allowed attackers to access sensitive files and execute arbitrary code on hosted servers, highlighting the risks of centralized AI infrastructure and the importance of secure secret management.

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three of its alleged data dealers for trafficking in unlawfully scraped information. The complaint claims that the defendants bypassed Reddit's and Google's defenses to harvest Reddit content and related search results.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has designated Google's mobile platform with strategic market status, allowing for increased scrutiny and potential interventions to ensure fair competition and innovation. This move may lead to more openness in Google's mobile platform, affecting developers and businesses.

Datadog has launched a free web dashboard called Updog that shows the status of dozens of services and tools like AWS, Cloudflare, and Slack. The tool uses AI to identify potential outages and can surface issues before they are officially reported, giving businesses extra time to assess their situation.

Unity's Android XR support enables game developers to launch on the new Samsung Galaxy XR in about a week. This support is available in Unity 6 and later versions, allowing devs to build and ship immersive Unity XR experiences quickly. The addition of Android XR tools has been verified in real production environments, enabling developers to build for the entire Android XR ecosystem.

OpenAI's ChatGPT will stop working in WhatsApp on January 15, 2026, due to a policy and terms change from WhatsApp. Users can migrate their chat history by linking their ChatGPT account under the 1-800-ChatGPT contact profile in WhatsApp.