This week:
- Mega-investments redefine AI power balance
- AI agents build and inhabit their own worlds
- Open AI infrastructure and chip race intensifies
- Autonomous platforms face new security and energy risks
Top stories
Nvidia–OpenAI mega-investment debate
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly dismissed speculation about friction and a stalled $100B investment in OpenAI, clarifying that such a deal was "never a commitment" but new OpenAI funding could still be Nvidia’s largest ever. Multiple outlets covered ongoing negotiations amid a broader scramble for compute and capital.
Google DeepMind launches Project Genie 3-D world builder
Google's DeepMind began rolling out Project Genie, an experimental AI that lets users generate and explore infinite, interactive 3-D worlds from text or photos, sending game-maker stocks tumbling and fueling debate about AI disruption in gaming and simulation.
Moltbook / OpenClaw: AI agents build their own social network
AI agents powered by the viral assistant OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) are now building Moltbook—a Reddit-style social network where 32,000 bots exchange jokes, tips, and surprisingly human-like commentary, raising new questions about agentic autonomy and cybersecurity.
Ricursive Intelligence raises $300M Series A to optimize AI-chip design
Ricursive Intelligence, founded by ex-Google researchers, closed a $300M Series A at a $4B valuation less than two months after launch; the company aims to use frontier AI to speed up and optimize next-generation AI chip design.
Waymo seeks $16B at $110B valuation
Waymo is reportedly finalizing a $16B funding round, targeting a $110B valuation as robotaxi and autonomy bets escalate in scale and capital intensity.
Also this week
Industry moves
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SpaceX filed for federal approval to launch 1 million solar-powered data-center satellites in pursuit of a Kardashev II-level network.
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ServiceNow and Anthropic expanded their partnership to deploy Anthropic’s AI models more deeply into enterprise workflows.
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Blue Origin paused its commercial space tourism flights to focus on lunar lander development, aiming for a moonshot by the end of the current US administration.
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Tesla reported its first annual revenue decline, with Elon Musk doubling down on humanoid robots and autonomy as the future.
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Waymo moved ahead with funding ambitions amid intensifying robotaxi competition.
AI infrastructure & chips
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Microsoft unveiled its Maia 200 inference accelerator targeting lower costs for large language model workloads in Azure datacenters.
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Ricursive’s fast-rising valuation underscored surging investor interest in AI-native chip design automation.
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The US saw a boom in fossil-fuel-driven data center construction, propelling new debates about whether AI growth signals a bubble or a sustainable long-term boom.
Research & models
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Anthropic published research on risks of user “disempowerment” from AI chatbots, alongside a 20,000-word CEO essay arguing against heavy-handed regulation.
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DeepSeek released DeepSeek-OCR 2, an open-source document-understanding model that significantly cuts token usage and outperforms Google’s Gemini 3 Pro on benchmarks.
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Google Chrome launched agentic “Auto-Browse” features, automating tasks like shopping and trip planning, reflecting the shift toward AI-powered search.
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AI2 released open-source coding agents (the SERA family) to automate code workflows using only supervised training and synthetic data.
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Moonshot AI rolled out Kimi K2.5, a state-of-the-art open multimodal agent that handles images and video with 100-parallel-agent orchestration.
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Ant Group’s embodied AI division open-sourced LingBot World and released a new VLA model for robotics control at scale.
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Google and Nvidia showcased new open AI models for high-resolution weather and climate prediction.
Risks & policy
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Researchers demonstrated that printed signs can “prompt-inject” instructions to autonomous vehicles, steering them into dangerous behaviors.
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Prompt-injection vulnerabilities in AI vision systems were highlighted in both cars and drones, underscoring growing security challenges.
Until next week.