Huawei is building a 7nm fab in Shenzhen for its smartphone and Ascend chips, its first effort to manufacture its own high-end chips.

The Guanlan site is part of a sprawling network of new chip manufacturing sites all working on various elements of Huawei's push to become a semiconductor champion, from equipment to fabrication.

Huawei wasn't considered a serious player in chip manufacturing before it was sanctioned in 2019. The move kickstarted massive investment to localise chip technology, aided by state funds and led by the tech giant. The Guanlan network is part of this effort.

Cisco's Foundation AI released Foundation-Sec-8B

Built on Llama 3.1, the LLM matches Llama 3.1-70B & GPT-4o-mini on multiple security tasks

It will help with use cases like threat detection, vulnerability assessment, security automation, and more.

Carnegie Mellon University started company with only AI employees

They got OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc models and gave them job roles. They were retarded and costed a fuckton. Claude 3.5 was the best employee and only did 24% of its tasks.

Paper.

Google DeepMind presented Evaluating Frontier Models for Stealth and Situational Awareness:
- 5 evals of ability to reason about and circumvent oversight
- 11 evals for measuring a model’s ability to instrumentally reason about itself, its environment and its deployment

No SotA model currently shows concerning levels of either capabillity.

Anthropic launched a new "AI for Science" program

Under the initiative, the company will provide up to $20,000 in free API credits (for 6 months) to researchers in “high-impact” scientific fields like drug discovery, genomics, and agriculture

𝐀𝐌𝐎 is a universal whole‑body controller that unleashes the 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥  kinematic workspace of humanoid robots to the physical world.

AMO is a single policy trained with RL + Hybrid Mocap & Trajectory‑Opt.

Rethinking Memory in AI

Great overview of memory in AI agents with a more structured and dynamic perspective on research and ideas.

It's not just about simple storage and retrieval operations, it's also about maintaining, updating, and optimizing memory.

When building AI agents for more complex long-horizon tasks, you quickly start to see limitations in current memory solutions. The good news is that there a lot of devs and companies thinking and building around these ideas already.

Great read for devs and researchers.

Google released an updated Gemini 2.5 Pro

With this update, you can create even more complex web apps from a single prompt.

Future House launched an AI agent Finch that can do bioinformatics analysis, including repeating analysis from research papers.

It is multimodal and results in a complete jupyter notebook (python or R) that ends in a concrete conclusion. Starting with closed-beta now. Sign up here.

HuggingFace launched Computer Use in smolagents

As vision models become more capable, they become able to power complex agentic workflows. Especially Qwen-VL models, that support built-in grounding, i.e. ability to locate any element in an image by its coordinates, thus to click any item on a screenshot.

At the TOKEN2049 conference in Dubai, Eric Trump expressed strong support for Bitcoin, describing it as “digital gold” and revealing that both he and his father, President Donald Trump, hold significant amounts of the cryptocurrency.

He predicted that Bitcoin would experience exponential growth in the coming years.

OpenAI launched a new initiative "OpenAI for Countries" to help governments build democratic AI infrastructure through partnerships that include building in-country data centers, providing customized ChatGPT to citizens, evolving security and safety controls, and raising national startup funds, with a goal to pursue 10 projects with individual countries or regions in the first phase as part of their Stargate project.

Mistral introduced Le Chat Enterprise a customizable and secure agent-powered AI assistant for businesses:

- Integration with your company knowledge (starting with Gmail, Google Drive, Sharepoint…)
- Ability to add frequently used documents for better-informed outputs
- Enterprise-grade features: agents, coding assistant, web search, global news coverage…
- Secure deployment: on-prem, in your cloud, or as a service.

Robinhood said to plan blockchain to trade US assets in Europe

Robinhood is evaluating whether to use Solana or Arbitrum as the backbone of a new service that will let European retail investors trade US stocks.

Stripe unveils groundbreaking innovations: Transforming the Future of Payments

Stripe has just concluded its product keynote, unveiling a comprehensive suite of transformative solutions that promise to reshape the global financial landscape.

Here's a look at the game-changing innovations that will revolutionize how businesses handle payments worldwide.

AI-Powered Payment Intelligence

Stripe has deployed the industry's first Payments Foundation Model, trained on tens of billions of transactions, which is already delivering significant fraud reduction.

The enhanced Optimized Checkout Suite now leverages over 100 signals to personalize checkout experiences in real-time. A/B testing confirms an impressive 11.9% average revenue increase for businesses using this technology.

Global Financial Infrastructure
The introduction of Stablecoin Financial Accounts marks Stripe's largest international expansion ever, enabling businesses from 151 countries to store stablecoin balances and utilize standard fiat money movement rails worldwide. This integration of stablecoins with traditional financial systems creates unprecedented global access.
Multi-currency support for Stripe accounts eliminates the need to convert all balances to a single currency, allowing businesses to store, convert, and operate seamlessly across different currencies—positioning Stripe as a comprehensive financial home.

Expanded Payment Ecosystem
Businesses can now access more than 125 global payment methods through Stripe, including stablecoins and real-time payment systems like Pix and UPI. The platform's Stripe Terminal now supports third-party hardware, beginning with Verifone, while Klarna integration with Link enhances the consumer payment experience.

Customizable Business Solutions
New tools for business flexibility include:

1. Stripe Workflows for building and executing multi-step processes
2. Stripe Scripts for extending payment logic
3. An AI-powered Dashboard agent that creates products and generates payment links through natural language commands.

Stripe introduced stablecoin financial accounts. Hold a stablecoin balance. Send and receive funds with fiat and crypto rails. Accessible from 101 countries.

Material? Robot? It’s a metabot.

You can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field.

Researchers describe how they drew inspiration from origami to create a structure that blurs the lines between robotics and materials.

The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material’s physical structure rather than its chemical composition.

In this case, the researchers built their metamaterial using a combination of simple plastics and custom-made magnetic composites.

Using a magnetic field, the researchers changed the metamaterial’s structure, causing it to expand, move and deform in different directions, all remotely without touching the metamaterial.

Meta introduced LlamaFirewall: An open source guardrail system for building secure AI agents

Mitigates risks such as prompt injection, agent misalignment, and insecure code risks through three powerful guardrails.

GitHub.
Paper.

Alibaba/Qwen team has created ZeroSearch, a way to do searching thru AI w/o accessing real world search engine APIs like Google.

Chinese ppl are already using AI apps like DeepSeek & Yuanbao to do search instead of Baidu.

Improved AI searching capabilities will only move users away from Baidu.

Long term, improved AI search that don't use Google API could significantly hurt Alphabet revenue globally.