Generative AI Tools

Waymo Recalls Self-Driving Software Over School Bus Safety Concerns Waymo, the autonomous ride-hailing company, is filing a voluntary software recall after its self-driving vehicles were reported to have illegally passed stopped school buses on multiple occasions. The issue drew public attention following a viral video in September showing a Waymo vehicle bypassing a stopped school bus in Atlanta. Furthermore, the Austin Independent School District reported at least 19 similar incidents. ...

Kodiak’s Autonomous Trucks Hit Milestone with 100+ Driverless Deliveries in Permian Basin Kodiak Robotics and Atlas Energy Solutions have achieved a major milestone in logistics automation, successfully completing over 100 driverless deliveries of frac sand in the Permian Basin. This operation, utilizing two autonomous Class 8 semi-trucks, represents the first commercial use of a customer-owned fleet of self-driving trucks without a safety driver. The trucks navigate a challenging 21-mile route on private, unpaved oilfield roads, handling conditions like dust storms and heavy equipment traffic. Atlas Energy Solutions has praised the reliable service and ordered 100 more trucks, planning to scale the program in 2025 and 2026 as part of a broader strategy to create a fully automated supply chain. ...

Anthropic Unveils Claude Opus 4.5, Setting New AI Benchmarks Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.5, its most advanced and powerful AI model to date. Now accessible via the Anthropic API and major cloud platforms, Opus 4.5 reportedly establishes a new industry standard for complex tasks, including coding, AI agent development, and multi-step computer operations. The model also demonstrates significantly improved performance in everyday business functions like in-depth research and processing documents such as spreadsheets and presentations. Anthropic is positioning this release for enterprise and engineering teams managing sophisticated projects. Claude Opus 4.5 is available on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, and Microsoft’s Foundry. ...

Google Unveils Gemini 3, Ushering in an ‘Agentic Era’ of AI Google has introduced Gemini 3, a foundational model designed to power a new ‘agentic era’ of AI. Unlike previous models accessed through a single interface, Gemini 3 is being deeply integrated across Google’s product suite—including Search, Workspace, Android, and Cloud—to act as a comprehensive ’nervous system.’ This strategic shift focuses on creating AI systems that can execute actions, not just generate responses. To support this, Google is also releasing tools for developers to leverage the model for complex, long-running coding tasks. ...

NTT Sets New AV Safety Standard with Launch of Mobility Subsidiary Japanese telecommunications giant NTT has established a new subsidiary, NTT Mobility, to consolidate its expertise in the self-driving vehicle sector. The new company, launching in mid-December, will offer a comprehensive service for deploying and operating autonomous driving services across Japan. This initiative aims to overcome challenges like ensuring safe autonomous vehicle provision and developing infrastructure suited for Japan’s roads, with a service launch goal of April 2027. Concurrently, an NTT-developed technology for assessing video quality from autonomous vehicle remote-monitoring systems has been adopted as a new international standard. The model, named Parametric object-recognition-ratio-estimation, verifies in real-time if video streams are clear enough for safe object detection, alerting operators when quality drops below critical safety thresholds. ...

University of Alabama Boosts AI Research with New High-Performance Computing Center The University of Alabama is making a significant investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure to accelerate scientific research across various disciplines. To overcome the limitations of computing power, the university is constructing a new High Performance Computing and Data Center. This state-of-the-art center will provide faculty and students with access to the necessary GPUs to conduct high-level scientific and AI research. The university already leverages AI in diverse fields, from developing tools to recognize pain in premature infants to studying dark matter. The new facility, slated for completion in 2026, will dramatically enhance research capabilities and offer students invaluable hands-on experience. ...

AI Roundup: MIT’s Brain-Inspired Chips, AI Weather Forecasts, and Warehouse Intelligence Today’s top stories in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning feature new research from MIT on energy-efficient, brain-inspired computing. In other news, the World Meteorological Organization has endorsed using AI to improve weather forecasts, and Gather AI is strategically shifting its focus to AI-powered warehouse intelligence. Sources: World Meteorological Organization WeRide and Uber Debut Autonomous Robotaxi Service in Riyadh WeRide and Uber have launched an autonomous robotaxi service in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, introducing self-driving vehicles to the Uber platform in the country for the first time. Initially, the service will operate with a safety operator present in the vehicle. The first public routes are established between Roshn Front and Princess Noura University. This initiative aligns with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 for smart mobility. WeRide had previously secured the first robotaxi autonomous driving permit in Saudi Arabia, and this launch follows a similar service introduction on the Uber platform in Abu Dhabi in late 2024. ...

NVIDIA Unveils RLP: A New Era of Reinforcement Learning for AI Pretraining NVIDIA researchers have developed a groundbreaking training objective called Reinforcement Learning Pretraining (RLP), which integrates reinforcement learning directly into the pretraining stage of AI model development. The core concept of RLP treats a short chain-of-thought as an action that is rewarded based on the information gain it provides for the model’s next-token prediction. This innovative method creates a verifier-free and dense reward system that can be applied at scale to standard text streams. Unlike previous methods that depend on sparse signals or external verifiers, RLP’s approach allows for updates at every single token position. Experiments demonstrate that RLP can yield significant improvements in a model’s reasoning capabilities, with one model showing a substantial increase in its average score on scientific reasoning benchmarks. ...

Ant Group Challenges OpenAI with Ling-1T, a Trillion-Parameter Open-Source AI Model Ant Group has announced the release of Ling-1T, a new trillion-parameter large language model, intensifying the global competition in artificial intelligence. This general-purpose model is engineered for complex reasoning and logic-based tasks, demonstrating strong performance in code generation, software development, and competition-level mathematics. According to Ant Group, Ling-1T has shown superior problem-solving skills compared to rivals from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and OpenAI. The company reported that Ling-1T achieved high scores on benchmark platforms such as LiveCodeBench and the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). On the AIME benchmark, the model reached an accuracy of 70.42%, a result comparable to Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro. Ling-1T is the second trillion-parameter model from Ant Group and is part of the company’s Ling AI model family. The release of Ling-1T as an open-source model is a strategic move to promote transparency and collaboration in AI development. ...

AI Developments: MIT Research, Military AI, and Market Shifts This week in AI and Machine Learning, MIT introduced a new AI system designed to accelerate clinical research, while a U.S. Air Force experiment demonstrated AI’s superior speed in battle planning. In the financial sector, new machine learning frameworks are emerging for improved risk management. However, reports also highlight the growing threat of AI-powered cyberattacks and the significant impact of AI on the workforce, evidenced by major layoffs at Accenture. On the hardware front, Huawei is emphasizing the critical integration of 5G-A and AI for the next generation of mobile technology. ...