NerdNews

Elon Musk has announced the Terafab project, a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, to build the largest chip manufacturing facility ever. The project aims to produce a terawatt of computing power each year, with an estimated cost of at least $20 billion. The facility will be located in Austin, Texas, and will produce two types of chips: one for terrestrial purposes and another for space use.

Birgitta Böckeler discusses the shift from vibe coding to autonomous coding agents, highlighting concerns over security and rising costs, and proposes a risk framework to ensure appropriate supervision

Anthropic, an AI developer, has denied claims that it could sabotage its AI tools during war. The company's executive stated that it does not have the ability to manipulate its generative AI model, Claude, once it is running, and that it cannot access or alter the model's behavior. The Pentagon had alleged that Anthropic could disrupt active military operations by turning off access to Claude or pushing harmful updates.

Elon Musk's xAI is being sued for allegedly generating child sexual abuse material (CSAM) using its Grok AI model. A proposed class-action lawsuit claims that xAI intentionally designed Grok to profit from the sexual predation of real people, including children. The lawsuit alleges that xAI's servers hosted and distributed the CSAM content, violating child pornography laws.

OpenAI's own mental health experts have warned against launching 'adult mode' in ChatGPT, citing risks of unhealthy emotional dependence and minors accessing sex chats. Despite this, the company plans to move forward, sparking concerns about the potential consequences.

Gemini's task automation can order food and schedule rides, but it's slow and clunky. It's a first step towards a new way of using mobile assistants, with potential to save time and increase productivity.

Tech companies like Meta and OpenAI are evaluating employees based on how quickly they use up LLM tokens, with some engineers burning through billions of tokens, raising questions about the metric's effectiveness and potential waste of resources.

1min.AI offers a lifetime subscription to its Advanced Business Plan, providing access to multiple AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok in one window. The plan includes an unlimited prompt library, storage, and brand voice options, with 4 million credits per month. It's available for $85 with code MARCH15 through March 29.

Researchers from Stanford and Princeton found Chinese AI models are more likely to dodge or provide inaccurate answers to sensitive questions, with refusal rates of 32-36% compared to <3% for American models. This self-censorship is attributed to manual interventions rather than training data.

Sashiko is an AI-powered code review system for the Linux kernel, able to spot bugs that human reviewers might miss. It works by ingesting patches from a mailing list, analyzing them, and providing feedback to maintainers and developers. Sashiko has been tested with Gemini Pro 3.1 and has a high quality of reviews with a low rate of false positives.

Unity Studio is a browser-based, no-code platform for creating interactive real-time 3D experiences without traditional game-engine development skills. It supports multiple file formats, drag-and-drop system, and visual scripting, making 3D creation more accessible to designers and product teams.

Elon Musk announced plans to build a giant chip factory in Austin, Texas, called Terafab, which will produce chips for Tesla and SpaceX. The factory aims to produce a terawatt output per year to address the growing power demands of AI. Musk claims the project will be the 'most epic chip building exercise in history' and will push the limits of physics and compute.

Cursor, a well-funded US startup, has admitted that its new coding model, Composer 2, was built on top of Moonshot AI's open-source model, Kimi. Although Cursor's VP of developer education claimed that only a quarter of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the company has faced criticism for not acknowledging Kimi in its initial announcement.

Salesforce has acquired the team behind calendar scheduling app Clockwise, but not the app itself. The Clockwise team will join Salesforce's Agentforce team, led by Gary Lerhaupt, who previously co-founded Clockwise. The Clockwise app will be discontinued, and users are being directed to rival scheduler Reclaim.

Blue Origin has applied to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites as part of its 'Project Sunrise'. The company claims that space-based datacenters can help break the bottleneck of building AI infrastructure on Earth and provide a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints. However, the technology for orbiting datacenters is still in development, and the project faces significant challenges, including the need for FCC approval and the development of a reliable network.

AWS has announced several updates for Aurora DSQL, including a new interactive playground, integrations with popular SQL tools, and driver connectors. The updates aim to improve the developer experience and broaden Aurora DSQL's integration with common tools and frameworks.

The FBI and CISA warned that Russian intelligence-affiliated parties are posing as customer support services on commercial messaging applications like Signal to compromise accounts and conduct phishing attacks. The attacks target people with high intelligence value and have compromised thousands of individual accounts, allowing the Russians to read and send messages, and gather info from contact lists.

The US government has disrupted four IoT botnets responsible for record-breaking DDoS attacks, including traffic bursts topping 30 terabits per second. The botnets, named Aisuru, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad, compromised over three million internet-connected devices worldwide, including routers, IP cameras, and digital video recorders. The disruption focused on seizing domains and backend systems used to coordinate the botnets, effectively cutting off instructions to infected devices.

Cursor's Composer 2 model is designed for developers who work inside an IDE and need a model that's fast, cheap, and smart enough. It comes in two flavors: a standard variant and a 'fast' version. The model is competitive but not quite frontier, with standout features including speed and caution. However, it has weaknesses such as lower design quality and literal-mindedness.

Uber invests $300 million in Rivian for 10,000 autonomous R2 robotaxis, with an option to buy up to 40,000 more. Rivian will produce the vehicles in its Georgia factory, with rollout planned in San Francisco and Miami in 2028.