🗞️ THE WEEKEND RECAP

Top Stories You Might Have Missed

🤖 California Passes AI Safety Bill: Lawmakers approved SB 53 requiring stricter AI safeguards, but Gov. Newsom could still veto it amid industry pressure and regulatory debate.

🔮 5 Years to Home Robots? Robotics expert Sergey Levine says LLMs with “common sense” are the breakthrough—predicts fully autonomous household robots could arrive within five years.

📰 Penske Sues Google Over AI Search Summaries: Rolling Stone and Billboard’s parent alleges Google’s AI Overviews repurpose its journalism without permission, siphoning traffic and ad/affiliate revenue.

💸 xAI Cuts 500 Annotation Jobs: Musk’s AI startup reportedly laid off hundreds from its data-labeling team, signaling cost pressures as rivals race to scale training pipelines.

⚡ Replit Ditches GPT for Speedier Bots: Amjad Masad says Replit built its own computer-use model after GPT-5 and Claude proved too slow and pricey — claims it runs up to 15x faster.

🏛️ Albania Appoints AI Minister to Fight Corruption: Meet Diella—an AI bot now handling all public tenders, aiming to make Albania’s procurement process 100% corruption-free. Not everyone’s buying it.

💰 Micro1 Raises $35M at $500M Valuation: As Scale AI loses key clients, Micro1 steps in—boasting $50M ARR and a Stanford-vetted talent pool to fuel AI’s growing hunger for expert-labeled data.

🛠️ ChatGPT Gets Write Access with MCP Tools: Devs can now build connectors to update Jira, trigger Zapier, and automate workflows directly in chat—marking a big leap beyond search-only actions.

✨ Claude Gets Memory and Incognito Mode: Anthropic’s Claude now remembers project details for teams and adds a privacy-focused incognito chat, aiming for smarter, safer workplace AI use.

🚀 SK hynix Beats Rivals to HBM4 Launch: Its new chips double bandwidth, cut power use by 40%, and will power NVIDIA’s next-gen AI data centers—cementing SK hynix’s lead in high-performance memory.

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⚜️ SOVEREIGNTY

ASML Bets Big on Mistral AI, Fueling Europe’s Bid for Tech Sovereignty

Dutch chipmaking titan ASML has invested €1.3 billion in France’s Mistral AI, now Europe’s most valuable AI startup at €11.7 billion. While ASML is best known in semiconductor circles, its backing of Mistral signals a rare intra-European tech alliance, and a potential model for digital sovereignty.

The move also highlights Europe’s growing urgency to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants, as AI becomes critical infrastructure. ASML’s machines may etch microchips, but this investment draws sharper lines in the geopolitics of innovation. → Read the full article here.

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📺 MEDIA

David Ellison Eyes Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger to Build AI-Powered Media Empire

David Ellison, son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is bidding to merge Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery—two of Hollywood’s biggest studios and streamers—into a single media giant. Backed by AI-fueled Oracle billions, the deal would collapse the number of major studios, reshape the streaming landscape, and hand Ellison control of CNN alongside a raft of cable networks.

While pitched as a revival strategy, the plan risks deepening industry consolidation, undercutting creative labor, and pushing cable-era nostalgia onto a disappearing audience. It’s Murdoch 2.0—only with more cash and a cloud contract with OpenAI. → Read the full article here.

🏥 HEALTHCARE

Meet Nurabot: Foxconn’s AI Nurse Aims to Ease the Global Healthcare Crunch

Facing a projected shortage of 4.5 million nurses by 2030, Foxconn’s AI-powered “Nurabot” is being tested in Taiwan as a robotic assistant for repetitive nursing tasks like medication delivery and patient escorting. Built with Kawasaki’s robotics and NVIDIA’s AI, Nurabot reduces nurse workload by up to 30%, freeing staff for more critical care.

The goal isn’t to replace nurses, but to extend their capacity amid aging populations and labor shortfalls. Still, challenges remain—from tight hospital layouts to the need for ethical safeguards and real-world evidence that robots truly lighten the load. → Read the full article here.

🤖 MODELS

How AI Makes Movies: The Science Behind Video-Generating Models Like Sora & Veo 3

Today’s AI video models—like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3—use a hybrid of diffusion and transformer architectures to turn static-like noise into seamless video clips. The process starts in “latent space,” where frames are compressed into mathematical representations and refined step-by-step by diffusion, guided by large language models.

Transformers ensure consistency across time and space, helping preserve details like lighting and object placement across frames. The newest frontier: synchronized sound, with Veo 3 now generating audio and video together. It’s dazzling—and energy-intensive—tech that’s rapidly reshaping how media is made. → Read the full article here.

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Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team

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