NerdNews

Stability AI, the startup behind AI image generation model Stable Diffusion, has raised $76 million in Series B funding. The company plans to use the money to continue building out its creative production product suite and expand its professional services arm.

OpenAI's Jalapeño chip is designed for fast inference at scale, with benchmarks showing significant performance advances over state-of-the-art inference processors. The chip is the result of a collaboration between OpenAI and Broadcom and is planned for deployment in late 2026.

Apple announced the M5 Ultra and M6 chips, with the M5 Ultra being its 'most powerful chip ever'. The M5 Ultra has a quad-die design, 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, and 1.2 TB/s unified memory bandwidth. The M6 chip is built using a 2nm process and has a 12-core CPU complex, offering a 30% increase in peak GPU compute for AI.

Gatik, a self-driving truck startup, has raised $200 million in funding, led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. The company plans to use the funds to scale its operations and expand its fleet of driverless trucks, which are used for middle-mile delivery. Gatik has already partnered with several high-profile customers, including PepsiCo, Walmart, and Kroger.

OpenAI's Head of Product Thibault Sottiaux discusses the company's new ChatGPT Work platform, designed to bring AI capabilities to white-collar workers. Sottiaux highlights the platform's simplicity, safety, and potential to revolutionize work processes. He also addresses concerns about data access and the cost of intelligence, emphasizing OpenAI's commitment to safety and efficiency.

DuckDB v2.0 introduces a native client/server mode, stabilises its plugin ecosystem, and expands its operational envelope into distributed topologies. The release also overhauls extension portability, introduces VARIANT types, and upgrades engine performance.

OpenAI has made its upgraded task scheduling tool available to free ChatGPT accounts, allowing users to schedule prompts and track requests. Paid accounts can also configure prompts to trigger based on events in Gmail, Slack, or GitHub, and share scheduled tasks with other users.

Waymo plans to launch a robotaxi service in Munich, starting with manual mapping and testing before commercial operations. The company will work with German authorities to obtain regulatory approval, aiming to open the service to the public by the end of 2027.

Keenable, backed by Accel, is building a web search index for AI agents, allowing them to scan and process large portions of information. The company has raised $26 million in seed funding and is already working with several AI labs and inference providers.

Apple has launched new Mac Studios with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, starting at $2,499 and $5,499 respectively. The M5 Ultra chip offers up to 4.3x faster AI compute and up to 1.8x faster graphics than the M3 Ultra. The new Mac Studios will arrive on September 22nd running macOS 27 Golden Gate.

The M5 Ultra offers up to 36 processing cores, 25% faster single-threaded performance, and 30% faster multithreaded performance. It also features improved graphics and AI performance, with a 4.5x boost in AI compute speeds and a 40% speed boost in graphics. The chip supports up to 512GB of unified memory and has a 50% increase in unified memory performance.

Anthropic, an AI lab, plans to tell investors it has a potential revenue of $30 trillion, which is roughly the size of the US GDP. This projection assumes the company captures 100% of the market, making it a highly ambitious goal. The company's current revenue run rate is $47 billion, with a projected increase to $190-200 billion by 2028.

Anthropic's Claude Cowork now remembers user conversations across chat and cowork features, streamlining the experience and eliminating the need to rebrief the AI on known topics.

Pacific Fusion is building a facility in New Mexico to generate as much energy as it consumes, aiming to hit net facility gain by 2030 and operate a commercial power plant in the mid-2030s. The company's approach uses intense pulses of electricity to create a magnetic field, squeezing fuel atoms until they fuse. Pacific Fusion has raised over $1 billion and plans to demonstrate its technology, which could clear a key hurdle to commercial power.

The severity of agentic AI incidents depends on credentials, permissions, and authority. Three incidents in 2026 show how credentials can be exploited, and GitGuardian's secrets security platform can help reduce the blast radius by limiting credential access and revoking them quickly.

Microsoft has introduced a new Teams meeting protection policy that allows administrators to automatically block all identified external bots from joining Teams meetings, enhancing meeting security and reducing organizational risk.

A phishing-as-a-service platform called AnonyMousKIT uses voice AI agents to phish iPhone passcodes, allowing thieves to unlock and resell stolen devices. The platform has been active since 2024 and has targeted victims globally, with a focus on Brazil and other countries.

Ian Nowland shares techniques for safe progressive deployments, synthetic testing in production, and mitigating blast radius in complex software platforms, drawing from his experience at AWS and Datadog.

The US Treasury has established a quantum readiness taskforce to help financial services institutions transition to post-quantum cryptography, ensuring the US remains a leading voice in securing innovation and strengthening supply chains.

ZeroTokens is a phishing platform that enables live visibility into victim sessions, allowing attackers to change subsequent prompts in real-time. It has targeted over 700 organizations, collecting login credentials, financial information, and more.