NerdNews

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi claims AGI is already here, focusing on making AI useful today. He discusses training smaller AI agents and the company's $134 billion valuation. OpenAI invests in Thrive Holdings, a private equity firm using AI to turn around struggling companies.

IBM has agreed to acquire Confluent, a real-time data streaming company, for $11 billion. The deal aims to enhance IBM's AI capabilities by providing a robust data platform. Confluent's Kafka-based platform will help IBM's customers to stream data in real-time, enabling faster decision-making and improved AI model performance.

Waymo, an Alphabet-owned self-driving company, has seen a significant increase in its robotaxi rides, with a leaked investor letter revealing 450,000 rides per week, nearly double the amount disclosed six months ago. The company plans to launch in 12 additional cities in 2026.

The US Department of Commerce will allow Nvidia to ship H200 chips to China, with the US taking a 25% cut of these sales. The decision conflicts with Congressional concerns about national security and comes after a bill was introduced to block the export of advanced AI chips to China.

Anthropic's Claude Code is launching in Slack, allowing developers to delegate coding tasks directly from chat threads. This beta feature builds on the existing Slack integration, adding full workflow automation and reflecting a broader industry shift towards AI-embedded collaboration.

Agentic BAS AI uses a post-LLM approach to turn threat headlines into defense strategies, eliminating investigative delay and providing a safe and accurate way to test organizational readiness against emerging threats.

The presentation discusses evolving a basic web application to a planet-scale, global architecture, focusing on adding enterprise-grade security, achieving global high availability and disaster recovery, optimizing content delivery costs with CDNs, and implementing globally consistent persistence using serverless technologies.

This eMag explores architecture through five distinct lenses, including socio-technical forces, infrastructure, distributed intelligence, iteration, and complexity. It provides perspectives and patterns to help architects navigate challenges and design better systems.

AWS re:Invent keynote featured 25 announcements, including S3 supporting 50TB objects, Security Hub, Lambda Durable Functions, and database savings plans. These releases aim to improve customer experience, security, and cost savings.

IBM has introduced new features to its Db2 Intelligence Center, including AI-powered management and unified monitoring across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments. The update aims to modernize the 42-year-old database and attract new users.

Google Chrome is introducing a new defense layer called 'User Alignment Critic' to protect its upcoming agentic AI browsing features powered by Gemini. This new security architecture mitigates the risk of indirect prompt injection and includes a layered defense approach with deterministic rules, model-level protections, isolation boundaries, and user oversight.

The React2Shell vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55182, is being actively exploited by China-nexus hackers. The vulnerability has a CVSS score of 10 and affects React Server Components versions 19.0.0 to 19.2.0. Over 2 million instances of internet-facing services may be affected, including those using Next.js, Waku, React Router, and RedwoodSDK. Threat actors, including Earth Lamia and Jackpot Panda, are using proof-of-concept exploits to target organizations.

Gartner predicts only 5% of carmakers will sustain heavy AI investments by 2030 due to unrealistic expectations and lack of strong AI foundations. Companies with robust software and tech-savvy leadership will pull ahead, creating a competitive divide.

Google is implementing security measures for Chrome's agentic features, including observer models, consent for user action, and Agent Origin Sets to restrict access to certain sites and data. The company is also testing these features against attacks and giving users control over sensitive tasks.

IBM is acquiring Confluent, a data infrastructure company, for $11 billion in cash to bolster its data and automation products, particularly in the areas of AI and cloud technology. Confluent's platform helps enterprises manage streams of data in real time, which is crucial for AI product development and deployment.

OpenAI has disabled promotional app messages in ChatGPT after users complained about ad-like messages. The company's chief research officer said they 'fell short' in handling these messages and are working to improve the experience.

A new FinCEN report reveals that ransomware gangs extorted over $2.1 billion from 2022 to 2024, with the majority of payments made in Bitcoin. The report also notes that law enforcement operations targeting ALPHV/BlackCat and LockBit ransomware gangs led to a decrease in ransomware activity in 2024.

Gabriele Columbro discusses the differences in the open-source landscape between Europe, China, and the US, highlighting Europe's strong grassroots open source community but lack of commercial value capture. He also touches on the Cyber Resilience Act and its potential impact on open source projects, as well as the risk of infrastructure outages and the need for sustainable open source infrastructure.

Uptime Institute reports datacenters are reserving more grid power than needed, preventing other users from connecting. This is due to operators reserving excess capacity for potential future growth, causing strain on the grid. Governments are taking notice, with the UK and US implementing measures to address the issue.

President Trump announced plans to sign an executive order blocking state AI laws, citing the need for a unified national approach to AI regulation. The move has faced bipartisan pushback, with many arguing it would stifle innovation and threaten consumer protections. The order would create an AI Litigation Task Force and direct agencies to evaluate state laws deemed 'onerous', potentially overriding state rules with national standards.