NerdNews

Fiverr is laying off 250 employees, about 30% of its staff, as it shifts to become an 'AI-first company'. The move aims to make the company leaner and faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure. Fiverr has already integrated AI into its customer support and fraud detection programs, and CEO Micha Kaufman believes this will lead to greater productivity with a smaller team.

YouTube has announced several AI-powered tools for creators, including automatic video editing, voiceover generation, and music creation. The platform is also expanding its Veo 3 integration and introducing a conversational AI partner for analytics insights. Additionally, new features such as collaboration and A/B testing for titles are being introduced.

Autodesk is rolling out AI tools that can reshape the way designers work. The AI can understand geometry, materials, and structures, and can interpret plain language to produce CAD geometry. It can also instantly recalculate connected elements in complex projects, allowing designers to experiment without fear of breaking the model.

Autodesk unveiled FaceAnimator and MotionMaker, AI-driven tools that generate facial and lip-sync animation and motion capture, aiming to cut production time and give animators control over performance and style. These tools are part of a wider AI initiative at Autodesk, which also includes natural-language assistants and Flow Studio for visual effects.

Kaggle Game Arena is a platform that evaluates AI models by testing their performance in strategic games, providing a controlled environment for models to compete against each other. The initial lineup includes eight leading AI models, with plans to expand to other games and test different aspects of strategic reasoning.

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.

Lloyds Banking Group is using AI agents as judges to assess the output of other AI models in GenAI workflows, ensuring accuracy and compliance with FCA guidelines. The bank is working with Aveni to develop FinLLM, a financial services-specific large language model, and is testing it in its audit team.

National Grid is partnering with Emerald AI to test dynamic management of datacentre energy demands using AI. The trial will use Emerald AI's Conduction platform and Nvidia GPUs to adjust energy consumption in real-time, aiming to reduce the burden on the UK's power grid and support the growth of datacentres.

Microsoft is adding an auto AI model selector to Visual Studio Code, favoring Anthropic's Claude 4 over OpenAI's GPT-5. This move indicates Microsoft's preference for Anthropic's models for coding and development, despite its significant investments in OpenAI.

iOS 26 brings a new design language called Liquid Glass, improved Phone and Messages apps, live translation, and more. The update is available for iPhone models from 2019 or later. New features include a redesigned Phone app, polling in group chats, and enhanced audio recording for AirPods.

Impulse Space is developing a same-day delivery system for satellites, reducing transit time to geostationary orbit from months to hours. The company's Helios kick stage uses a methane-oxygen engine to propel spacecraft to their final destination. Impulse has announced partnerships with Anduril, Astranis, and Infinite Orbits to demonstrate its technology.

CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, has raised $60 million in a Series B round, valuing the company at $550 million. The startup helps companies save time on code review, which has become more time-consuming with the rise of AI-generated code. CodeRabbit's platform can identify bugs and provide feedback, acting like a coworker, and can cut the number of humans working on code-review by half.

Google has launched a new experimental Windows desktop app that allows users to quickly search for information from their computer files, installed apps, Google Drive files, and the web using an Alt + Space shortcut. The app features a Spotlight-like search bar and has Google Lens built-in for additional functionality.

Waymo has been granted a permit to start testing its autonomous vehicles at San Francisco International Airport. The company will begin testing in three phases, starting with autonomous mode with a trained specialist behind the wheel, followed by testing passenger service with employees and airport staff, and finally offering paid rides.

Meta's Connect 2025 conference is expected to feature new smart glasses with a display, a wristband for controlling the glasses, and potential updates on the metaverse and AI. The company may also announce new Quest VR headsets or license its Horizon OS to other hardware companies.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince predicts AI will drastically change the internet, potentially leading to a dystopian scenario where a few AI companies control all information, or a future where content creators are employed by these companies, resembling a patronage system. However, he also sees a possibility where AI companies license content from creators, similar to Netflix, which could help maintain a vibrant internet ecosystem.

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal have filed a joint lawsuit against Hailuo AI, alleging brazen copyright infringement across dozens of protected works. The lawsuit claims that Hailuo's AI-powered image and video generation platform pirates and plunders the studios' copyrighted works on a massive scale.

Microsoft and Cloudflare have shut down RaccoonO365, a phishing service that stole over 5,000 Microsoft credentials. The service, which was sold on a private Telegram channel, allowed users to bypass multi-factor authentication and gain persistent access to victims' systems. Microsoft seized 338 websites associated with the service and identified the alleged leader, Joshua Ogundipe.

OpenAI will apply new restrictions to ChatGPT users under 18, including limiting conversations on sexual topics and self-harm. The changes come after lawsuits and a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the harm of AI chatbots. Parents can set 'blackout hours' and link their account to their child's for alerts.