NerdNews

Meta has been accused of submitting a specially crafted, non-public variant of its Llama 4 AI model to an online benchmark, potentially giving it an unfair edge in the rankings. The model was designed to charm human voters and produced verbose results with emojis, unlike the publicly available version. Meta has denied any wrongdoing, stating that they experiment with custom variants and the model was optimized for chat performance.

Microsoft has announced several new features for its Copilot AI, including a memory feature, Shopping, Actions, Deep Research, Copilot Vision, Pages, and Podcasts. These features resemble functions already available on rival platforms like OpenAI and Google. The updates aim to improve the user experience and provide more personalized assistance.

Meta's AI model, Maverick, cheated on benchmarks by being more chatty than usual, highlighting the issue of companies manipulating results to gain an advantage. This incident showcases the desperation of companies to distinguish their AI models and the need for fair, reproducible evaluations.

Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, has gained two new prominent advisers: Bob McGrew and Alec Radford, both former OpenAI employees. The startup aims to build tooling to make AI work for people's unique needs and goals.

Amazon's Nova Sonic is a new AI voice model that can process voice and generate natural-sounding speech, with capabilities including bi-directional streaming, low latency, and high accuracy in speech recognition. It is available through Amazon's Bedrock platform and is claimed to be 80% less expensive than OpenAI's GPT-4o.

A high-severity zero-day flaw in the Windows Common Log File System is being exploited by the RansomEXX ransomware gang to gain SYSTEM privileges on victims' systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-29824, was patched during this month's Patch Tuesday and has been used in limited attacks against organizations in the US, Venezuela, Spain, and Saudi Arabia.

Microsoft's April 2025 Patch Tuesday includes security updates for 134 vulnerabilities, including one actively exploited zero-day. The updates fix 11 critical vulnerabilities, all of which are remote code execution vulnerabilities. The patches also address elevation of privilege, security feature bypass, information disclosure, denial of service, and spoofing vulnerabilities.

Apache Kafka 4.0 introduces KRaft mode, eliminating the dependency on Apache ZooKeeper, streamlining deployment and management. This release also brings a next-generation consumer group protocol, early access to Queues for Kafka, and removes deprecated APIs. KRaft simplifies Kafka's architecture, boosting scalability and paving the way for a self-sufficient future.

Kraken Technology uses serverless cloud solutions to manage energy flow and ensure grid stability. They leverage AWS services like Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway to maintain their solutions efficiently. Their approach includes decoupling systems into microservices, using analytic tools, and integrating electric vehicles into grid management.

Google released an update for Android that fixes two zero-day flaws that may be under limited, targeted exploitation. The bugs, tracked as CVE-2024-53197 and CVE-2024-53150, were found in the System component and kernel, and could lead to remote escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed.

Amazon's autonomous vehicle company Zoox has begun testing its robotaxis in Los Angeles. The company is deploying a small fleet of retrofitted test vehicles to gather mapping data, with plans to start broader autonomous testing this summer and offer public rides later this year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added support for the ML-KEM post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism to AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and AWS Secrets Manager. This addition aims to secure TLS connections from potential quantum threats. ML-KEM is based on CRYSTALS-Kyber, which was selected by NIST as the basis for its post-quantum cryptography standard. Users can activate ML-KEM post-quantum TLS by updating their client SDKs and enabling the feature explicitly.

AMD's Gaia is an open-source project that enables developers to run large language models locally on Windows machines with AMD hardware acceleration, offering improved data sovereignty and reduced latency. The framework supports retrieval-augmented generation and includes tools for indexing local data sources, making it an alternative to cloud-based LLMs.

Amazon's autonomous vehicle unit, Zoox, has begun testing its robotaxi service in Los Angeles, marking its sixth city. The company is deploying manually driven Toyota Highlanders equipped with Zoox's self-driving tech to gather mapping data ahead of broader autonomous testing in LA this summer. Zoox aims to offer public rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year.

Waymo is planning to use data from its robotaxis' interior cameras to train generative AI models, with riders able to opt out of data collection. The company may also share rider data to personalize ads, but will provide an option to opt out of data sharing.

The White House has released revised policies for the use of AI in federal agencies, shifting towards a 'forward-leaning, pro-innovation and pro-competition mindset'. Agencies will appoint Chief AI Officers to promote AI adoption and develop an AI strategy within six months.

John Carmack, co-creator of id Software's Quake franchise, defended Microsoft's AI-generated Quake II demo against criticism from a fan. The demo uses a generative AI game engine called WHAMM to generate each simulated frame of Quake II in real time. Carmack and Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, see AI as a powerful tool in the development arsenal, rather than a replacement for human developers.

Brinc Drones, founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, has raised $75M in new funding led by Index Ventures. The company sells drone systems to police and public safety agencies, and is launching a strategic alliance with Motorola Solutions to integrate its drones into 911 call centers.

Slate Auto, an EV startup secretly backed by Jeff Bezos, aims to produce an affordable two-seat electric pickup truck for around $25,000. The company has raised at least $111 million in funding and plans to start production as soon as 2026. Slate Auto is taking a unique approach by targeting the lower-end market and offering customization options to supplement its low margins.

Blackbird Labs, founded by Ben Leventhal, has raised $50M in funding for its blockchain-based payment and loyalty platform for restaurants. The platform, called Flynet, allows diners to pay for meals and redeem loyalty points via the Blackbird app. The company plans to use the funding to launch its new product, Blackbird Club, and expand into more markets.