NerdNews

Tesla is testing its robotaxis in Austin without safety drivers on board and no passengers. Elon Musk confirmed the news, but the company still lags behind its competitor Waymo in the autonomous vehicle space.

Nvidia is expanding its presence in the AI ecosystem by releasing open-source models, starting with the Nemotron 3 family, to drive reliance on its hardware and counter China's growing dominance in the open-source AI space.

Disney's 3-year licensing partnership with OpenAI includes only 1 year of exclusivity, allowing Disney to sign similar deals with other AI companies after that. The deal brings Disney's iconic characters to OpenAI's Sora video generator, letting users create content featuring over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.

Nvidia may ramp up H200 production due to high demand from Chinese companies, after the US Department of Commerce approved the sale of these chips in China. The H200 chips are used for training large language models and are in high demand.

Nvidia has released its Nemotron 3 models, a series of cutting-edge open models, along with data and tools to help engineers use them. This move is seen as a hedge against AI companies like OpenAI and Google developing their own chips, and could help Nvidia maintain its position in the AI industry. The models come in three sizes and are designed to be customized and fine-tuned by developers.

The article discusses the top phishing trends in 2025, including omni-channel phishing, Phishing-as-a-Service kits, and techniques to bypass phishing-resistant authentication. It highlights the need for security teams to change their threat model and focus on detection and response, particularly in the browser, to combat these evolving threats.

The article discusses three cyber trends that will define 2026: the federated CISO, the agentic AI explosion, and the fight for the right to privacy. The federated CISO involves a shift from traditional security roles to risk brokers, while the agentic AI explosion refers to the increasing use of autonomous agents in cyber attacks and defense. The fight for the right to privacy highlights the need for privacy-preserving age verification and the potential risks of government overreach.

Feast is an open-source feature store that helps address common data challenges in AI/ML lifecycle, such as feature redundancy and low-latency serving at scale. It provides a centralized catalog for accessing and governing data, and supports large distributed computing and horizontal scaling needs. Feast can help with consistency, efficiency, governance, and reliability in AI applications.

IBM has released CUGA, an open-source AI agent that automates complex enterprise workflows with a 62% completion rate. CUGA uses multi-agent orchestration, API integration, and code generation to complete tasks. It is designed to work with Langflow, a low-code platform for AI agent design, and supports various open models.

Zoom has released its AI assistant on the web, allowing free users to access features like meeting summaries and AI note-taking. The assistant can also retrieve information from third-party services and generate daily reflection reports.

Valve is developing a technology to play games on any device without streaming, using an open-source emulator called Fex. This technology allows games to run natively on devices, eliminating the need for internet connectivity. Fex is designed to work with Steam, Valve's gaming platform, and has the potential to expand the platform to more devices, including smartphones.

ASML, a Dutch company, has a monopoly on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, crucial for making advanced AI chips. Their $400 million machines use lasers and molten tin to create EUV light, enabling the production of high-performance AI chips. ASML's transition to 'high numerical aperture' (High NA) technology is critical for the global economy, which is heavily reliant on AI.

GMV has been awarded a contract to develop Beacon, an advanced beamforming antenna and receiver system to improve the resilience of C-band radio navigation signals from low Earth orbit satellites, enhancing signal integrity and protection against interference and spoofing.

Chai Discovery, a biotech startup backed by OpenAI, has raised $130 million in a Series B round at a $1.3 billion valuation. The company aims to transform molecular discovery using AI, specifically designing molecules with desired properties and tackling challenging targets.

Mirelo, a Berlin-based startup, has raised $41 million in a seed round led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz to develop AI that adds soundtracks to match video action, solving the 'silent problem' in AI video creation. The startup's AI model interprets videos to add synced sound effects, and it plans to use the funding to compete in the emerging category, make additional hires, and support its R&D and go-to-market strategy.

Amazon's security boss, CJ Moses, has attributed a years-long campaign targeting energy, telecommunications, and tech providers to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). The campaign, which has been ongoing since 2021, involves stealing credentials and compromising misconfigured devices hosted on AWS to gain persistent access to sensitive networks. The GRU has been exploiting vulnerabilities in devices such as enterprise routers, VPN concentrators, and network management appliances, as well as targeting organizations' collaboration and wiki platforms, and cloud-based project management tools.

Apple and Google have issued emergency patches for zero-day bugs that were being actively exploited in sophisticated real-world attacks. The patches address vulnerabilities in WebKit and Chrome, with Google crediting Apple's security team for discovering one of the bugs. The companies have been light on technical details, but the fixes suggest that attackers were using spyware-grade exploits.

SoundCloud has confirmed a security breach where threat actors stole a database containing user information, affecting 20% of its users. The breach was limited in scope, with no sensitive data accessed. SoundCloud has blocked unauthorized access and is working to strengthen its security.

The ShinyHunters extortion gang has stolen the search and watch history of PornHub's Premium members after breaching analytics vendor Mixpanel. The stolen data includes over 200 million records of personal information, including email addresses, location, and video URLs. ShinyHunters is demanding a ransom from PornHub in exchange for not publishing the stolen data.

Most AI startups make money by selling to businesses, not consumers. VCs believe AI platforms need stabilization for lasting consumer products to flourish, and new devices beyond smartphones may be necessary for growth.