News

It’s no secret that AI will replace many professions, and taxi driving is high on that list. The recent news about Chinese tech companies moving into the European market confirms this isn’t a distant future—it’s happening now, and China is proving to be exceptionally good at AI-driven mobility. The News: Baidu and Lyft Target Europe The core development is a strategic partnership between Chinese tech giant Baidu and ride-hailing service Lyft. They are set to deploy Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles (AVs) in Germany and the United Kingdom, with plans to launch as early as 2026. This isn’t a small pilot; the goal is to scale to a fleet of thousands of robotaxis across Europe. ...

The vast majority of AI development is concentrated in a handful of languages, leaving a significant capabilities gap for much of the world. NVIDIA is addressing this imbalance with a new suite of open-source models and tools designed to expand high-quality speech AI, with an initial focus on 25 European languages. This initiative moves beyond simply releasing models; it provides the foundational components for building localized, multilingual AI applications. The goal is to empower developers to create robust tools like multilingual chatbots, real-time translation services, and intelligent customer service bots for languages often overlooked by mainstream tech, including Croatian, Estonian, and Maltese. ...

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempt to acquire Mira Murati’s new startup, Thinking Machines Lab, wasn’t just a standard M&A play. When Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, declined the offer, Meta switched tactics to a full-scale talent raid—and failed spectacularly. This isn’t just industry gossip; it’s a critical signal about where the real value lies in the AI talent war. Meta reportedly approached the startup’s employees with staggering offers. Co-founder and leading researcher Andrew Tulloch was allegedly offered a compensation package worth as much as $1.5 billion over six years. Other offers to researchers ranged from $200 million to a reported $1 billion for a single individual. ...

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas’s launch of the Comet web browser is a critical case study in product strategy for the current AI landscape. He launched it knowing the underlying models weren’t ready for his full vision of an “operating system for the AI era.” This wasn’t a mistake; it was the entire point. The New Go-to-Market: Build for the Future Model The core insight here is a fundamental shift in product development. As Srinivas states, “You’ve got to position your product and your technology with the assumption that the models are eventually going to be great and also going to be affordable.” ...

Scientists at the Norwegian Institute of BIOeconomy Research (NIBIO) have achieved a significant milestone in sustainable energy, converting carbon-based gases like CO2 directly into biomethane with 96% purity. The core of their innovation is the strategic engineering of biofilms—complex communities of microorganisms that adhere to a surface. Unlike traditional biogas plants that rely on general decomposition, this process uses the biofilm to perform a targeted conversion of gas streams into nearly pure methane. ...

OpenAI just made a significant move by releasing GPT-OSS, its first truly open-source large language model family since GPT-2. With a permissive Apache 2.0 license, this isn’t just a minor release; it’s a fundamental shift that puts real power back into the hands of developers. The family includes two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b, designed for high-performance inference with strong reasoning capabilities. Why This Is a Game-Changer For years, the most powerful models from OpenAI have been locked behind APIs. This meant dealing with rate limits, opaque pricing, and sending potentially sensitive data to a third party. GPT-OSS changes that equation entirely. ...

Elon Musk has once again stirred the AI world, making a bold claim against OpenAI and Microsoft shortly after the ChatGPT-5 release. He asserts that his Grok-4 Heavy model from xAI already outperforms its new competitor. The Benchmark Battle According to Musk, the numbers speak for themselves: Grok-4 reportedly scored 15.9% on the Arc-AGI2 test, while ChatGPT-5 achieved 9.9%. He also noted that his model was already “smarter” two weeks before the GPT-5 launch, a sentiment he claims is echoed in positive user feedback. ...

A recent MIT experiment has provided one of the cleanest and most elegant demonstrations of a core quantum principle, revisiting the famous double-slit experiment and the historic debates between Einstein and Bohr. This wasn’t about proving Einstein ‘wrong,’ but about refining our understanding of measurement itself. The findings confirm a foundational concept: the act of observation is not passive. Gaining information about one property of a quantum system, like a photon’s path, directly impacts and even erases another, like its wave-like nature. ...

Google has officially moved its asynchronous coding agent, Jules, out of beta and into public availability. The key upgrade is its new engine: Gemini 2.5 Pro, which Google claims enhances its ability to generate high-quality code by first developing a structured plan. From Beta to Public Launch The public launch follows a substantial beta period where thousands of developers tackled tens of thousands of tasks, resulting in over 140,000 code improvements. This feedback has been used to refine the platform, leading to several key enhancements: ...

Anthropic has rolled out a genuinely practical feature for developers: automated security reviews integrated into Claude Code. As the pressure to build and ship faster mounts, integrating security directly into the development workflow isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. This new functionality is a pragmatic step in that direction. A Two-Layered Approach The solution operates on two levels, addressing both individual developer workflows and team-wide policies. ...