Cloud Computing

California Colleges Partner with Google & Microsoft for Free AI Training California’s public university and community college systems are launching a major initiative with tech giants like Google and Microsoft to offer free artificial intelligence training to students. This partnership aims to address the evolving job market, equipping the future workforce with critical AI skills as automation impacts entry-level roles. Governor Gavin Newsom emphasized that the state’s public higher education system is the backbone of economic development. In exchange for providing free AI resources, the tech companies gain a direct channel to millions of potential new users. The program will also include AI training for instructors across California’s 116 community colleges, which serve over 2 million students, meeting the rising employer demand for AI proficiency in tech and non-tech sectors alike. ...

AI Roundup: NASA’s Alien Hunt, DoD Intelligence, and LLM Security Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are making an impact across diverse sectors. A NASA-funded project is now leveraging AI to aid in the search for extraterrestrial life. In the defense sector, a new partnership between SMX and Google Public Sector aims to deliver AI-driven intelligence solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense. Meanwhile, Cloudflare has launched a new initiative focused on enhancing the security of Large Language Models (LLMs). ...

Anscer Robotics Launches LBR 500 AMR to Automate Indian Manufacturing Bengaluru-based Anscer Robotics has launched the LBR 500, a low-bed autonomous mobile robot (AMR) designed to automate material movement using trolleys within Indian manufacturing facilities. Developed in response to the widespread use of trolleys for material handling in local factories, the LBR 500 is engineered for compatibility with a diverse range of existing trolleys. The AMR features a 500 kg load capacity, an 8-hour operational runtime on a single charge, and a top speed of 1.2 meters per second. To ensure safe collaboration with human workers, the robot adheres to ISO 13849 and PLd Category 3 safety standards. Anscer Robotics is also making the technology accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises through a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. ...

Meta and Google Ink Massive $10 Billion Cloud Computing Deal for AI Expansion Meta Platforms and Google have reportedly entered into a six-year cloud computing agreement valued at over $10 billion. This strategic partnership will see Meta leverage Google Cloud’s servers, storage, and networking services to power its expanding AI infrastructure. The deal comes as Meta plans to invest hundreds of billions in building large-scale AI data centers. This agreement marks Google’s second major cloud deal recently, following a similar one with OpenAI, highlighting the surging demand for robust cloud infrastructure to support advanced AI development. To help finance these ambitious projects, Meta is also seeking external partners and plans to offload $2 billion in data center assets. ...

Liquid AI Releases LFM2-VL: Open-Weight Vision-Language Models for On-Device AI Liquid AI has released LFM2-VL, a new family of open-weight vision-language foundation models created for low-latency, on-device deployment. The new models are designed to run efficiently on smartphones, laptops, wearables, and other embedded systems without needing to rely on cloud infrastructure. LFM2-VL is available in two versions: LFM2-VL-450M for highly resource-constrained devices and the more powerful LFM2-VL-1.6B. These models can process both text and images, offering up to twice the inference speed on a GPU compared to similar existing models. The models are available on Hugging Face under a license based on Apache 2.0, allowing for free academic and research use, as well as commercial use for smaller companies. ...

MIT Report: 95% of Enterprise GenAI Projects Fail to Deliver ROI A new report from MIT’s NANDA initiative reveals that a staggering 95% of enterprise generative AI pilot programs are failing to produce a significant return on investment. Despite investments totaling between $35 and $40 billion in the US, only 5% of organizations have successfully deployed AI tools into production at scale. The report, titled “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” is based on interviews with enterprise leaders, analysis of public AI initiatives, and a survey of business professionals. The primary reasons for failure are not a lack of infrastructure or talent, but rather the inability of AI systems to retain data, adapt, and learn over time. The study also found that purchasing AI tools from vendors and forming partnerships has a significantly higher success rate than in-house development. ...

Medallion Raises $43M to Streamline Healthcare Credentialing with AI Platform Medallion, a healthcare technology company, has secured $43 million in new funding for its AI-powered platform, CredAlliance. The platform is designed to streamline the complex healthcare credentialing process for both insurers and clinicians. It manages the entire provider lifecycle—including credentialing, enrollment, onboarding, and compliance—aiming to significantly reduce administrative waste and combat clinician burnout. CredAlliance acts as a unified system for provider data management, enabling customers to efficiently verify credentials and maintain up-to-date network information. This latest investment, led by Acrew Capital, elevates Medallion’s total funding to $130 million and will fuel the expansion of the platform’s capabilities. ...

Google Launches Gemma 3 270M: A Compact AI Model for Specialized Tasks Google has introduced Gemma 3 270M, a new and compact AI model featuring 270 million parameters. This model is engineered for efficient, task-specific fine-tuning and offers robust instruction-following capabilities directly out of the box. Its minimal footprint makes it ideal for on-device and research applications, enabling developers to build and deploy multiple custom models for tasks like text classification and data extraction without requiring significant computational overhead. Google is providing both pretrained and instruction-tuned versions of the model through platforms such as Hugging Face, Ollama, and Kaggle. ...

AI Discovers Stronger, More Durable Plastics in Materials Science Breakthrough Researchers at MIT and Duke University have utilized machine learning to develop significantly more durable plastics, a breakthrough that could lead to longer-lasting products and a reduction in plastic waste. The AI model identified novel crosslinker molecules, known as mechanophores, that can be integrated into polymer materials to make them more resistant to tearing. These mechanophores respond to mechanical force, allowing the material to withstand greater stress before breaking. After the AI model performed a rapid computational analysis of thousands of potential molecules, a task that would have been incredibly time-consuming with traditional methods, researchers synthesized a polymer with one of the identified candidates. The resulting material was found to be approximately four times tougher than plastics made with standard crosslinkers. This AI-driven approach to polymer science not only accelerated the discovery process but also uncovered new design principles for creating more resilient polymers. ...

OpenAI Launches GPT-5, Its Most Advanced AI Model Yet OpenAI has officially launched GPT-5, its latest and most powerful AI system. The company touts the new generative AI model as a major leap in artificial intelligence, showcasing state-of-the-art capabilities in coding, mathematics, creative writing, and health. GPT-5 operates as a unified system, engineered to provide rapid answers for simple queries and engage in deeper, longer ’thinking’ for more complex problems. The model is now available to all users, with premium access and features reserved for Plus and Pro subscribers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman highlighted the model’s evolution, comparing GPT-3 to a high school student and GPT-4 to a college student, while describing GPT-5 as a ‘PhD-level expert.’ This landmark release is a significant move for OpenAI, poised to solidify its leadership in the competitive generative AI industry. ...