Welcome back to review week! Like the biggest hit from Nvidia GTC, there are many stories to share starting this week. The NASA astronauts finally returned home. Rippling’s lawsuit. Google bought the Wiz. Let’s get to that!
Google will ultimately do that. Google made its biggest acquisition in history this week when it confirmed Wiz was buying for $32 billion. Google says it will position Wiz as a provider of “Multicloud.” This means that Wiz is not a Google-only shop. Last year, Google provided Wiz with a $23 billion business. I think it’s safe to say no at times.
Speaking of acquisitions, Xai, the AI company of Elon Musk, bought Hotshot, a startup working on video generation tools with AI. The acquisition could indicate that Xai plans to build its own video generation model to compete with Openai’s Sora, Google’s VEO 2 and more.
Nvidia GTC: Nvidia’s biggest meeting of the year ended Thursday. The company has announced two individual AI supercomputers. Groot N1, a basic model of humanoid robots. New GPUs called Blackwell Ultra, Vera Rubin and Feynman. And more.
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The gloves are off. The HR company is suing Deal, another player in the space, on Rippling, claiming to support and take over false use of occupational secrets, unlawful interference, unfair competition, and violations of fiduciary duties. Deal denies the allegation.
Welcome to Earth: Two NASA astronauts, left behind by the International Space Station for over nine months, are finally back on Earth. Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore splattered at the SpaceX Dragon Capsule in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday after 17 hours of return from the ISS.
Pixel Newness: Google released a new pixel this week called 9A. The $499 smartphone has an upgraded 6.3-inch Actua display. According to Google, it is 35% brighter than the Pixel 8a. But the actual update here is for design. It dumps the camera bar on the back.
Hacking: The Pennsylvania Education Association (PSEA), the largest organization for educators in Pennsylvania, says hackers have stole sensitive personal information from more than half a million members. PSEA said that the member’s account number, pins, passwords and security codes were also accessed during the violation, according to a letter sent to the affected individual.
Decent! The 12th graders have built a website called Minecraft Bench (MC-Bench). This confirmed what attacks two AIs on each other to build better pieces in Minecraft. MC-Bench is technically a programming benchmark. This is because the model is asked to write code to create a prompt build.
It actually works very useful: Google is switching between ways to find emails in your inbox. Rather than displaying everything in chronological order, use AI to consider factors like remency, most clicked emails, frequent contacts, and more when surfing emails based on search queries. Toggles allow you to toggle between “most relevant” or “latest” emails on the search results page.
Humanoids of the House: The hype around humanoid robots of the House has appeared to have reached new heights. Norwegian Robotics Company 1X is taking advantage of this and has announced that it will be testing its humanoid robot Neo Gamma in “hundreds to thousands” homes by the end of the year.
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Nvidia on Top: Nvidia sits above the AI world, but faces priorities from US tariffs, Deepseek and Top AI customers. At GTC this year, the company tried to assure participants and the rest of the world that they see.
Wayve Rides The Wave: Wayve, launched in 2017, has raised over $1.3 billion over the past few years, and plans to license self-driving software such as Uber to self-driving software. Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall sees his commitment to bringing the technology of self-driving car startups to the market.