NerdNews

Microsoft Edge's Copilot AI chatbot can now gather information from all open tabs, providing features like AI-powered podcasts, summaries, and quizzes. The update also includes a 'Study and Learn' mode and an AI writing assistant.

Notion's new developer platform enables custom AI agents, connects with external agents, and allows automated workflows. It includes a cloud-based environment for running custom code and syncing external data sources.

Elon Musk's xAI is operating nearly 50 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center without proper regulation, due to a loophole considering them 'mobile'. The NAACP has filed a lawsuit, citing worsening air quality in the area.

Anthropic's Cat Wu discusses the future of AI, where it will anticipate users' needs before they know what they are. Wu highlights the importance of proactivity in AI development and Anthropic's goal to stay at the forefront of AI innovation. The company has had a successful year, with a potential valuation of $950 billion and increasing preference for its Claude model over ChatGPT.

Amazon has launched 'Alexa for Shopping', a personalized AI shopping assistant powered by Alexa+. It replaces Rufus and offers a voice- and touch-enabled shopping experience, providing tailored recommendations and automating the shopping experience across Amazon and other online retailers.

This article explores the fundamentals of time-series storage design, including normalization, high cardinality, schema evolution, columnar storage, and partitioning. It provides practical guidance on optimizing storage footprint, query performance, and cost, and discusses the trade-offs between different design choices.

A survey by Omdia found that smart diagnostics and predictive maintenance are emerging as top use cases for AI in software-defined vehicles, with predictive maintenance being the top revenue driver. The industry is shifting towards internal data utilization, with OEMs using data to improve ADAS, product development, and diagnostics, rather than selling it to third parties.

A study by Ericsson found that despite confidence in the telecom industry's ability to capture the next wave of growth from AI-driven services and 5G, most communication service providers have not begun implementing the necessary capabilities. The study identified a gap between the industry's ambitions and its ability to execute, with 70% of companies yet to commence implementation of critical technologies such as AI-driven network operations and advanced 5G capabilities.

Analysis of UK Power Networks data shows the impact of AI on datacentre power usage, including increased capacity, GPU deployments, and changes in utilization rates. The data reveals a 'land grab' for power capacity, the deployment of Hopper and Blackwell GPUs, and the effects of heatwaves on smaller datacentres.

Paulo Arruda discusses his experience building multi-agent systems at Shopify, highlighting the evolution of AI adoption, the transition from massive prompts to lean agent microservices, and the development of SwarmSDK for unified orchestration. He shares success stories, lessons learned, and a hypothesis for exposing data to agents through an adapter layer, called llm-fuse.

OpenAI has endorsed the Kids Online Safety Act, which aims to protect children from harmful online content. The bill requires social media companies to implement stronger protections for minors, including allowing them to opt out of 'addictive' features and algorithmic recommendations. OpenAI's endorsement comes as the company faces lawsuits over alleged safety lapses in ChatGPT.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Incognito Chat, a new AI chat feature that offers complete privacy with end-to-end encryption and no logs of conversations stored on servers. This feature will be available on WhatsApp and the Meta AI app, differentiating itself from other AI chatbots by not storing any conversation history.

Rivian's spinoff Mind Robotics has raised $400M to develop industrial robotics for automating factory operations, bringing its total funding to over $1B and valuing the company at over $3B.

Origin Lab, a startup, has raised $8 million to help video game companies sell data to world-model builders, serving as a marketplace for high-quality licensed data to train AI models, bridging the gap between the video game industry and AI labs.

Poppy is a new AI assistant that helps organize your digital life by combining calendar, email, messages, and other sources into a single dashboard. It uses AI to guess what's important to you and provides proactive suggestions, such as suggesting a walk break or recommending restaurants based on your preferences.

Jill Luber, CTO at Elsevier, discusses the role of AI in academic research, including its ability to support researchers in making sense of vast volumes of information, and the risks of fake science and bias. She highlights the importance of human oversight and evaluation in ensuring the quality and accuracy of AI-generated outputs.

The article discusses the importance of building a cloud carbon data supply chain to achieve sustainable cloud computing. It highlights the challenges of measuring and managing the environmental impact of cloud computing due to inconsistent and incomplete data. The article proposes a four-layer approach to building a cloud carbon data supply chain, including data producers, transformation and modeling, governance and trust, and decision and reporting. It also provides steps that IT leaders can take to build the necessary architecture for sustainable cloud computing.

Instructure, the owner of Canvas, has reached an agreement with the ShinyHunters collective after a ransomware attack. The attack affected nearly 9000 educational institutions and stole 275 million records. The company has received confirmation that the stolen data has been destroyed, but warns of potential phishing risks.

Ransomware gang Nitrogen claims to have breached Foxconn, stealing over 11 million files including confidential info from Apple, Google, and Nvidia. The attack affected facilities in North America, but production has resumed.

Anduril, a defense tech company, has raised $5 billion in a Series H funding round, doubling its valuation to $61 billion. The company has now raised over $11 billion from investors and has expanded its contracts outside the US.