Author: Frank Salvato

Autonomous vehicle leader Waymo has announced fleet-wide software updates after its driverless robotaxis stalled during a major San Francisco power outage, exposing weaknesses in how the vehicles handled non-functioning traffic signals and overwhelming its remote assistance system; the blackout, caused by a Pacific Gas & Electric substation fire that left about 130,000 homes and businesses in the dark, led to Waymo vehicles blocking intersections, spurring cooperation with city officials to clear streets, a temporary service pause, and commitments to refine emergency protocols and outage awareness in future operations. Sources: https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/24/waymo-updates-fleet-driverless-robotaxis-prevent-future-power-outage-chaos/https://www.webpronews.com/waymo-robotaxis-stall-in-sf-power-outage-highlighting-autonomy-risks/https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-vows-improve-emergency-response-protocols-after-san-francisco-power-outage-2025-12-24/ Key Takeaways In-Depth A major test for driverless technology unfolded…

Chinese robotics firms are dramatically expanding humanoid robot access with novel business models that aim to normalize short-term robot use beyond industrial settings. Qingtianzhu (Shanghai) Technology has launched a 1 RMB (about 14 ¢ USD) “flash rental” service for humanoid robots in 10 major Chinese cities, positioning on-demand rentals via QR code as a way to lower barriers to experimentation and public exposure to advanced robotics. This initiative is part of a broader robotics leasing ecosystem intended to mirror ride-hailing platforms by matching robot demand with inventory across urban centers, shaping a national Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) push that far outpaces Western…

Notion Labs has announced what industry observers are calling its most impactful artificial intelligence advance to date, driven not by adding layers of complexity but by stripping back sophisticated data modeling in favor of simplicity. According to reports, AI engineering lead Ryan Nystrom and his team discovered that eliminating complex schemas and heavy instructioning — and instead using simple, human-readable prompts, minimal abstraction, and familiar markdown formats — significantly boosted AI performance. This architectural refocus underpins the release of Notion’s Version 3.0, featuring customizable AI agents that can execute workflows, build databases and automate tasks with human-like understanding across large…

In 2026, as generative artificial intelligence and agentic AI accelerate across enterprise environments, data itself is shifting from a passive resource to the defining strategic asset that determines success or failure—with semantic structures and context engineering becoming core to AI performance, knowledge graphs and semantic models gaining market prominence, and industry leaders emphasizing the need for governed, context-aware data to make AI both reliable and actionable across sectors. Source coverage consistently highlights that semantic layers and knowledge graphs, which encode business context and meaning into data, are critical to overcoming the chaos of unstructured information and enabling AI systems to…

Brex, the fintech firm known for corporate spend and cash management solutions, is doubling down on AI innovation by shifting away from traditional centralized agent orchestration toward a decentralized “Agent Mesh” architecture that lets narrow, role-specific AI agents communicate in natural language and operate independently to handle expense tasks, compliance checks, approvals, and other finance workflows—a strategy Brex’s CTO says can unlock near-total automation and make manual orchestration obsolete. This builds on Brex’s broader push toward AI-native finance platforms with autonomous agents learning, reasoning, and acting on behalf of users to streamline spend operations and close books faster than legacy…

Nvidia’s reported roughly $20 billion licensing deal for Groq’s AI inference technology — acquiring key talent and IP from the specialized chipmaker while Groq continues operating independently — is reshaping the AI hardware landscape, underscoring a strategic pivot from general-purpose GPUs toward purpose-built inference accelerators and marking a pivotal moment in the industry’s shift to disaggregated inference workloads. Analysis shows inference is now surpassing training in data center revenue and demanding new architectures that split tasks between massive context handling and ultra-low latency generation, pressuring standalone AI ASIC vendors and pushing Nvidia to integrate SRAM-heavy designs into its roadmap to…

Nvidia has launched Cosmos Reason 2, an open and customizable reasoning vision-language model (VLM) designed to bring real-world reasoning capabilities to robots and physical AI agents. This next-gen model builds on the company’s Cosmos family of AI tools to enable robots and vision AI systems to use prior knowledge, physics understanding, and common sense to interpret environments, plan actions, and execute complex tasks much like a human would—a significant development in robotics and autonomous systems. Nvidia’s Cosmos ecosystem, which includes related models and tools for world modeling, data curation, and simulation, aims to accelerate the training and deployment of intelligent…

AI development is rapidly evolving beyond the old model where artificial intelligence sat idle, waiting for human prompts; a new concept called “intelition” describes a shift toward AI functioning as a continuous cognitive partner embedded in business and workflows. According to the latest VentureBeat article, this paradigm reconceives AI from something you invoke with an occasional prompt to something that constantly collaborates with humans across shared models of enterprise logic, memory, and decision-making. Under intelition, AI doesn’t just respond — it participates in outcomes, learns persistently, and reasons within unified data ontologies, potentially redefining competitive advantage for companies that embrace…

A recent Wired investigation shows that the global expansion of billion-dollar data centers—driven by the AI arms race—is reshaping digital infrastructure and economy, with older “big data” facilities increasingly becoming obsolete as new hyperscale installations proliferate. Wired reports that tech giants are investing heavily in expansive data centers to host AI workloads, a trend fueling unprecedented energy and water demand as well as competitive pressures across the industry. Independent reporting by Reuters highlights how soaring electricity needs from AI-focused data centers are forcing older peaker power plants back into service, complicating grid reliability and environmental goals. Additional analysis by Frontier…

Scammers are increasingly using advanced AI to create deceptive deepfake videos, audio messages, and direct messages impersonating pastors and other religious figures to defraud their congregations, solicit fraudulent donations, and spread misleading or incendiary content. These AI-generated impersonations have targeted high-profile clergy like Father Mike Schmitz and numerous local churches across the United States and abroad, exploiting popular online leader content to make the fakes appear convincing. The scams appear in multiple formats on platforms such as TikTok and social media, often urging urgent financial contributions or clicking links to harmful sites, challenging congregants’ ability to discern authentic communications. The…