1. The new game pipeline has no artists or animators, and it runs on one desktop GPU AlayaWorld's technical report draws the battle line in its first paragraph.

2. Sold as unlimited, the US Army's AI token supply ran dry in a year An email went out to troops: they were burning through their AI tokens fast. The plan had been pitched as effectively unlimited.

3. Simon Willison's Joke Test Became a Metric AI Labs May Be Quietly Gaming For years, Simon Willison has pasted the same sentence into every new large language model he touches: generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. It started as a joke.

In Brief

• AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and supply chips for the company's expansion. Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct MI450 GPUs on the new Helios rack-scale system.

• Google ties record profit to cloud demand for AI Google reported record profits, crediting companies buying its AI and AI infrastructure services through Google Cloud. The results answer investor questions about whether its heavy AI capital spending pays off.

• OpenAI launched Presence for enterprise voice and chat agents OpenAI released Presence, a platform for deploying voice and chat agents across customer-facing and internal workflows. The product targets enterprises building support and operations automation.

• Monday.com cut 630 jobs to reorganize around AI Monday.com laid off about 630 staff, roughly 20% of headcount, citing a "leaner" operating model built around its AI Work Platform. The cuts hit a profitable SaaS company reorienting its core product.

• Travis Kalanick's Atoms raised $1.7B led by a16z Kalanick's robotics company Atoms raised $1.7 billion, with a16z leading and Uber also investing. The startup pitches industrial AI for manufacturing but has disclosed few concrete deployments.

• Samsung showed smart glasses built with Google and eyewear brands Samsung revealed two smart glasses designs in person, listing a 9-hour battery life and a fall launch. The glasses come from work with Google and eyewear makers Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.

• Google pledged $40M in AI credits to the Genesis Mission Google committed $40 million in AI tokens and cloud credits to the US Genesis Mission for scientific research. The donation funds compute rather than direct cash grants.

• US utilities signed a pledge to shield consumers from AI power costs Nearly 200 utilities and data center developers signed Trump's "rate payer protection pledge" after backlash over rising bills. The voluntary pledge responds to concerns that AI data centers push up household electricity rates.

• Meta built its own watermarking tool instead of adopting Google's Meta introduced Content Seal, an invisible watermark that flags images made by its new AI model. The Verge notes Meta could have used Google's existing SynthID rather than building a parallel system.

• Arcee argued Chinese open models are not inherently dangerous US open source lab Arcee pushed back as debate intensifies over Chinese AI models gaining US enterprise adoption. The lab said the models carry no inherent security risk despite calls to restrict them.

• Alibaba released RynnBrain 1.1 embodied models for robotics RynnBrain 1.1 spans 2B, 9B, and 122B-A10B scales for embodied perception, spatial reasoning, and planning. It adds contact-point prediction across the family and native 3D grounding for the smaller models.

Read the full edition →