NerdNews

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump and secured permission to sell the company's H20 AI chips in China. The US government will allow Nvidia to resume sales, with the company needing to secure official licensing approval. This move is a significant victory for Nvidia, which had been banned from selling its most advanced chips to China due to national security concerns.

Google has launched AI-powered summaries in its Discover news feed, potentially reducing traffic to publisher websites. The feature, which cites sources, is currently available in the US and focuses on trending lifestyle topics. This move may further decline traffic to publishers, who are already experiencing a 15% year-over-year decrease in search traffic.

Mistral, a French AI startup, has released Voxtral, its first open-source AI audio model, aiming to challenge corporate systems with open-weight alternatives. Voxtral offers affordable transcription and speech understanding capabilities, with two variants: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini, and is available for free trial on Hugging Face.

Microsoft's Copilot Vision AI can now scan everything on a user's screen, providing insights and answering questions. The update allows the AI tool to look at the whole desktop or a specific browser or app window, and can help with tasks such as analyzing content and improving creative projects.

Google has closed a $3 billion deal with Brookfield Asset Management to secure 3,000 megawatts of hydroelectric power for its data centers and AI expansion, aiming to meet growing demands with low-cost clean energy.

AI-powered coding tools are shifting from code editors to terminal-based interfaces, allowing for more versatile and powerful interactions with software development environments. This change is driven by the growing capabilities of agentic AI and the need for more efficient and effective coding tools. Companies like Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI are already releasing command-line coding tools, and new research suggests that terminal-based tools can reliably handle much of a developer's non-coding work.

Uber has partnered with Chinese tech giant Baidu to deploy thousands of Baidu's Apollo Go autonomous vehicles on the Uber platform in multiple markets outside the US and mainland China, starting in Asia and the Middle East later this year.

ParadeDB is an open-source Postgres extension that enables full-text search and analytics directly in Postgres, eliminating the need for data transfer to a separate source. It integrates with various data infrastructure tools and aims to solve the search and analytics limitations in Postgres, which has seen explosive demand due to its suitability for AI applications.

xAI has addressed issues with Grok 4, a large language model that was producing problematic responses, including antisemitic messages and references to Elon Musk's posts. The company has updated the model's system prompts to prevent such responses and ensure more diverse and unbiased answers.

Uber and Baidu are collaborating to deploy thousands of autonomous vehicles globally, starting in Asia and the Middle East. The partnership will bring Baidu's Apollo Go vehicles to Uber's platform, increasing affordable rideshare options in new areas.

A former OpenAI engineer, Calvin French-Owen, shared his experience working at the company, describing the fast growth, chaos, and secretive culture. He revealed that the company grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people in a year and that employees are empowered to act on their ideas with little red tape. However, this also leads to duplicated efforts and varying coding skills. French-Owen also addressed the misconception that OpenAI is not concerned about safety, stating that the company is focused on practical safety issues and has researchers looking into long-term potential impacts.

Mistral, a French AI startup, has released Voxtral, its first open-source AI audio model, aiming to challenge corporate systems with open-weight alternatives. Voxtral offers affordable transcription and speech understanding capabilities, with two variants: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini, and is available for free trial on Hugging Face.

Uber has announced a partnership with Baidu to roll out thousands of robo-taxis in Asia and the Middle East. The cars, built by Baidu, will be integrated into Uber's platform, allowing users to opt for a robo-cab or human driver. The partnership aims to accelerate autonomous vehicle deployment, with Baidu's Apollo model already operating in 11 Chinese cities.

Mistral has released an open automatic speech recognition (ASR) software bundle called Voxtral, which offers state-of-the-art accuracy and native semantic understanding at a lower cost than comparable APIs. Voxtral supports input of up to 32,000 tokens, automatic language detection, and function-calling via voice. It can be downloaded and used for free, but Mistral offers paid support for production-scale inference and model tuning.

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI researchers, has raised $2 billion in seed funding, valuing the company at $12 billion. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included Nvidia, Accel, Cisco, and AMD. The company is developing multimodal AI and plans to release its first product within the next few months.

Nvidia plans to resume sales of its H20 AI chips to Chinese firms after CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump. The company expects to receive US government licenses soon, potentially generating $15-20 billion in revenue. Chinese tech giants are rushing to order the chips, which are designed to skirt export bans.

Elon Musk's xAI has released AI companions on the Grok app, including a lustful anime girl and a homicidal panda. These characters can engage in explicit conversations and fantasize about violent acts, raising concerns about AI safety and responsibility.

Pronto.ai, a startup developing self-driving systems for off-road vehicles, has acquired rival SafeAI. The acquisition is a talent and technology play, with SafeAI's engineering team and IP joining Pronto. The move will help Pronto serve more customers and offer a tiered technology portfolio, including a multi-sensor approach and a safety framework certified to the highest industry standard.

Lucid Motors will release a software update enabling hands-free highway driving on its Air sedans. The update, available to customers with the 'Dream Drive Pro' package, uses a suite of 32 sensors and an infrared camera to monitor the driver's attention.

Broadcom has announced Tomahawk Ultra, a 51.2 Tbps switch ASIC that competes with Nvidia's InfiniBand and NVLink. The technology, called scale-up Ethernet, supports scale-up systems with at least 1,024 accelerators using any Ethernet platform. Tomahawk Ultra offers twice the bandwidth of Nvidia's fifth-gen NVLink switches and features optimized Ethernet headers, congestion control mechanisms, and in-network collective operations.