Daily Digest

FBI Doubles Down on AI for Investigations and Operations The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is significantly expanding its use of artificial intelligence in key areas, including criminal investigations, intelligence analysis, and internal operations. According to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) latest public inventory, the number of AI use cases reported by the FBI has more than doubled to 50. These AI applications encompass machine learning, computer vision, and generative AI, primarily aimed at labor-saving tasks like translation, transcription, and summarization. The 2025 DOJ AI Use Case Inventory reveals a sharp increase in the FBI’s AI tools for law enforcement, jumping from 15 to 27 in just one year, reflecting a broader 30.7% increase in AI adoption across the entire DOJ. ...

AI and CRISPR Identify New Kidney Cancer Drug Targets Researchers in the UK and Korea have developed a new machine learning pipeline to identify novel drug targets for clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), a common type of kidney cancer. The innovative framework integrates single-cell RNA sequencing with CRISPR screens and protein network analysis to pinpoint tumor-specific vulnerabilities. This AI-driven approach identified 96 potential drug targets and 39 existing FDA-approved compounds for repurposing. Preclinical tests revealed that several of these drugs, including Ribociclib and Dasatinib, were significantly more effective than current standard treatments across all tested renal cancer cell lines. This research, published in npj Drug Discovery, focuses on targeting the tumor’s intrinsic weaknesses. ...

AI & Machine Learning News This week’s digest covers major advancements in AI, from NOAA’s new AI-driven weather models to NVIDIA’s open-source tools for autonomous vehicles and Mobileye’s strategic move into humanoid robotics. Sources: NOAA Deploys New Generation of AI-Driven Global Weather Models NVIDIA’s Alpamayo: Open-Source AI for Autonomous Vehicle Reasoning NVIDIA has announced its Alpamayo family of open-source AI models and tools aimed at accelerating the development of safe and reasoning-based autonomous vehicles. The initial release, Alpamayo 1, is a vision-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters designed to help AVs understand and reason through complex and unpredictable driving scenarios. This “chain-of-thought” reasoning allows the vehicle to explain its driving decisions, a key factor for safety and scalability. Rather than running directly in the vehicle, Alpamayo models will serve as large-scale ’teacher’ models for developers to fine-tune their own AV stacks. The open-source nature of these tools, announced at CES 2026, is intended to foster innovation across the autonomous driving ecosystem. ...

Zara’s AI Integration Revolutionizes Retail and Supply Chain Management Fast-fashion giant Zara is embedding artificial intelligence into its core retail workflows to boost efficiency and market responsiveness. By leveraging generative AI, the company can adapt and extend existing product imagery, significantly cutting the time and expense of traditional photoshoots. This fashion technology allows for rapid creation of visual variations tailored to different markets. Beyond creative applications, Zara’s AI strategy extends to crucial operational areas, including demand forecasting, real-time inventory management, and delivering personalized customer experiences. This deep integration of AI is designed to optimize Zara’s entire supply chain, solidifying its leadership in the competitive fashion industry. ...

Anthropic Launches Bloom: An Open-Source Framework for AI Model Evaluation Anthropic has launched Bloom, an open-source agentic framework engineered to automate behavioral evaluations of advanced AI models. This innovative tool enables researchers to define a specific behavior and then automatically generate numerous test scenarios to measure its frequency and severity. The primary goal of Bloom is to accelerate the creation of high-quality safety and alignment evaluations, which are often labor-intensive and can quickly become obsolete as AI models advance. Anthropic has already utilized Bloom to build and release benchmark results for four key alignment-relevant behaviors across 16 different frontier models. The framework also integrates with popular tools like Weights and Biases for large-scale experiments and complements Anthropic’s other open-source evaluation tool, Petri. ...

Google DeepMind to Launch AI-Powered Automated Science Lab in UK for Superconductor Research Google DeepMind will establish its first automated research laboratory in the UK in 2026, expanding its partnership with the UK government. The lab will utilize AI and robotics to accelerate scientific discovery, with an initial focus on developing new superconductor materials. This advanced facility will be fully integrated with Google’s Gemini AI. The partnership aims to reinforce the UK’s position as a global leader in science and technology. As part of the collaboration, UK scientists will receive priority access to some of DeepMind’s cutting-edge AI models, including AlphaGenome for DNA sequencing. The initiative will also explore using AI for cleaner fusion energy, developing safer AI educational tools, and enhancing public service efficiency. ...

New AI System Enhances At-Home Balance Training for Physical Therapy Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new machine learning model to support home-based balance training for physical therapy patients. The system utilizes data from four wearable sensors to predict how a physical therapist would assess a patient’s performance on balance exercises. This AI-driven feedback can help patients make faster progress and maintain their abilities after their formal therapy sessions have concluded. The model was developed by training convolutional neural networks with sensor data and evaluations from physical therapists, achieving nearly 90% accuracy in predicting patient balance ratings. The technology aims to make balance training more accessible, particularly for those in rural areas, and to assist physical therapists in making healthcare decisions. ...

MIT Unveils BoltzGen: A Generative AI for Designing Therapeutic Molecules In a major leap for drug discovery, scientists at MIT have introduced BoltzGen, a generative AI model capable of creating novel protein binders from scratch. This innovative tool is designed to address diseases that have long been considered difficult or impossible to treat, marking a significant shift from predictive biology to generative engineering in medicine. How BoltzGen Unifies Design and Prediction BoltzGen stands out by unifying protein design and structure prediction into a single, powerful process. The model incorporates specific constraints to ensure that the molecules it generates are not only novel but also functional and stable, adhering to the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. Unlike previous models that were often limited to specific protein types, BoltzGen is engineered as a more general-purpose tool, capable of creating a much wider range of therapeutic molecules. ...

OpenAI Releases GPT-OSS, Its First Open-Source Large Language Models In a significant move for the AI and open-source software communities, OpenAI has released GPT-OSS, its first-ever family of open-source large language models. Licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0, this release introduces two powerful models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. Both are engineered for efficient inference and strong reasoning, leveraging a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. The larger gpt-oss-120b model rivals OpenAI’s proprietary o4-mini and operates on a single 80GB GPU. Meanwhile, the compact gpt-oss-20b model, comparable to o3-mini, is optimized for on-device AI applications, requiring as little as 16GB of memory. Complementing the models, OpenAI also launched ‘Harmony,’ an open-source project defining a new prompt template format. ...

Tech News Digest for July 30, 2025 A roundup of today’s top stories, featuring Anthropic’s massive new funding round, the emergence of powerful open-source AI from China, and significant progress in the fields of quantum computing and autonomous systems. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Anthropic Reportedly Raising $5B at a Staggering $170B Valuation Generative AI company Anthropic, known for its AI assistant Claude, is reportedly in the process of closing a $5 billion funding round that would value the company at $170 billion. This new valuation would place Anthropic ahead of Elon Musk’s xAI, though still behind OpenAI. The round is said to be led by Iconiq Capital, with potential participation from the Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore’s GIC. This funding surge highlights the intense investor interest in the generative AI space and the escalating valuations of its key players. ...