Adobe has taken a stake in business avatar firm Synthesia, which creates clones for corporate videos using generative AI. The investment of an undisclosed sum through Adobe Ventures was interpreted by one media outlet as a bet that the UK startup’s technology “will transform video production.” Adobe couched the move as a strategic alliance. The investment became public along with Synthesia’s announcement that it surpassed the $100 million mark for what the privately held company says qualifies as recurring annual revenue. Nvidia is also an investor. Continue reading Adobe Investment in Synthesia Could Fuel AI Video Production

A new open-source code reasoning model called DeepCoder-14B-Preview has hit the market. Built atop DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen2.5 using reinforcement learning (RL), it aims to provide more flexibility by combining high-performance code generation with reasoning capabilities for real-world applications. Its performance is said to be comparable to OpenAI’s o3-mini, “but with a smaller footprint,” say its developers, the research-driven AI companies Together AI and Agentica. “We democratize the recipe for training a small model into a strong competitive coder,” explains Together AI. Continue reading Researchers Debut Preview of DeepCoder Reasoning Model

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI

Meta Platforms has released its first Llama 4 models, a multimodal trio that ranges from the foundational Behemoth to tiny Scout, with Maverick in between. With 16 experts and only 17B active parameters (the number used per task), Llama Scout is “more powerful than all previous generation Llama models, while fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU,” according to Meta. Maverick, with 17B active parameters and 128 experts, is touted as beating GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash across various benchmarks, “while achieving comparable results to the new DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding with less than half the active parameters.” Continue reading Meta Unveils Multimodal Llama 4 Models, Previews Behemoth

Semiconductor giant Intel has reached a tentative agreement with Taiwan’s TSMC and some U.S. firms to create a joint venture that would assume operating responsibility for Intel’s chip fabrication plants here. TSMC will reportedly hold a 20 percent stake in the JV, while Intel and the other investors would control the remaining 80 percent. This specific JV is limited to Intel’s foundry unit, which posted a 2024 operating loss of $13.4 billion in 2024 and is not expected to break even until 2027. New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at last week’s Intel Vision conference that he will spin off all non-core units. Continue reading TSMC Reportedly Ready for Joint Venture with Intel Foundries

During Nvidia’s GTC AI Conference in San Jose earlier this month, VP and GM of Media & Entertainment Richard Kerris presented the Nvidia Media2 initiative that builds on the company’s Blackwell GPU foundation to enable real-time AI solutions for all aspects of media production workflows. His talk showcased a broad range of generative AI breakthroughs in real-time ray tracing and VFX, video search and summarization, and musically-based sound effects (SFX). Kerris also shared insights on the media industry’s reception to AI thus far and humbly implored the audience to consider using such technology as an effective new tool for storytelling. Continue reading Nvidia Forges AI Initiative to Streamline Production Workflows

Just prior to the start of the weekend, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI is acquiring his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) “in an all-stock transaction,” valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion less $12 billion in debt). The merger has the potential to create a powerful GenAI-powered content platform. The billionaire purchased Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion, following months of legal skirmishes. According to Musk, X currently touts more than 600 million active users, while “xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.” Continue reading Elon Musk Announces xAI Corporation Will Purchase X Social

China’s Ant Group is using local semiconductors to train AI at a cost that is 20 percent less than companies typically spend, according to reports. Ant used domestic chips — from companies including Alibaba, an investor in Ant, and Huawei — to launch a unique Mixture of Experts (MoE) training approach that produced results commensurate to training with Nvidia H800 chips. Ant is the latest Chinese company to focus on low cost training, joining a competition triggered by DeepSeek, which in January announced it could build AI comparable to the models released by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for billions less. Continue reading Ant Group Stacks Chips to Reduce Development Costs for AI

Samsung Electronics has unveiled three new Odyssey game monitor lineup, including the the glasses-free Odyssey 3D, a 27-inch display that achieves an immersive, off-the-screen effect through a combination of advanced eye-tracking and proprietary lenticular lens technology. Also featured is a 27-inch 4K monitor, the Odssey OLED G8 that Samsung says is the first in the industry to deliver a 4K image at a 240Hz refresh rate. The curved G9 series is updated with a 49-inch ultrawide. Samsung also introduced a new professional monitor, the 37-inch ViewFinity S8, a 4K monitor that offers more screen space and meticulous color specs. Continue reading New Samsung Glasses-Free 3D Game Monitor May Cost $2K

Search firm Perplexity AI has renewed its push to acquire TikTok, outlining its vision for “Rebuilding TikTok in America.” As ByteDance approaches its extended deadline of April 5 to sell TikTok or see it banned here in the U.S., Oracle and its cohort of investors have emerged the frontrunners. While the three-year-old Perplexity is a longshot — with observers saying it does not have the cash on hand to purchase the social powerhouse — with deep-pocketed investors including Nvidia, Databricks and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, it likely has access to funding should its offer be accepted. Continue reading Perplexity AI Outlines Pitch to Acquire TikTok, Rebuild for U.S.

Japanese tech investment firm Softbank has agreed to acquire Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere for $6.5 billion, indicating that technology originating in smartphones will eventually become integral to global data centers and the future of artificial intelligence. The eight-year-old Ampere sells chips based on Arm technology, the processor type used in virtually all mobile phones. SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016 and has since been working to ensure the technology becomes used more broadly. Softbank says it will allow Ampere to retain its own name, operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Continue reading Softbank Agrees to Acquire Chipmaker Ampere for $6.5 Billion

Cerebras Systems was founded 10 years ago on the belief that there would be a shortage of processors powerful enough to drive enterprise AI computing at scale. Its solution, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine, is integrated into Cerebras’ CS-3 systems, which will power six new data centers launching this year that the company says will make it “the world’s number one provider of high-speed inference and the largest domestic high speed inference cloud.” Cerebras notes the new facilities will collectively serve over 40 million Llama 70B tokens per second to clients that now include Hugging Face and financial intelligence firm AlphaSense. Continue reading Cerebras Is Moving into Mainstream with New AI Data Centers

Meta Platforms has reportedly begun “a small deployment” of its first in-house chip designed for AI training. The accelerator chip is engineered around the open-standard RISC-V architecture. TSMC produced the working samples now being tested. The goal is to create purpose-specific chips that are more efficient than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, enjoying the cost-savings that would come with wide use and reducing reliance on outside chip suppliers in a tight market. If the tests go well, Meta plans to scale up production for expanded use by 2026. Details of the new chip’s specifications remain unknown at this time. Continue reading Meta Tests New AI Accelerator Chip Designed with Broadcom

Taiwan’s Foxconn, the contract manufacturer that assembles Apple’s iPhones, has built its own AI. Called FoxBrain, the company says the large language model was trained in just four weeks with help from Nvidia, using 120 of that company’s H100 chips. FoxBrain has reasoning and mathematical skills and can analyze data and generate code. Initially built for in-house use, Foxconn says it intends to open source the model and hopes it will become a collaborative tool for its partners and enable advancements in manufacturing techniques and supply-chain management. Continue reading Foxconn AI Trained in Four Weeks, Suggesting Industry Shift

Taiwan semiconductor firm TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, has vowed to add another $100 billion to its existing $65 billion plan to expand its U.S. manufacturing base. The total allocation — $165 billion over the next four years — sees TSMC further building out its advanced semiconductor fabrication complex in Phoenix, Arizona, which has been producing at volume since late 2024. The expansion plays a key role in strengthening the U.S. computer ecosystem by increasing U.S. production of advanced semiconductors, TSMC says, adding that it will “complete the domestic AI supply chain” with advanced packaging investments. Continue reading TSMC Will Boost Its Factory Build-Out in U.S. by $100 Billion