A fully driverless Maserati MC20 Coupe just hit 197.7 mph (318 km/h) at the Kennedy Space Center, shattering the autonomous land speed record. Powered by algorithms from Politecnico di Milano and Indy Autonomous Challenge, the team pushed the AI software to its absolute limit to stress-test systems and eventually improve high-speed highway safety.
Apple is reportedly facing major AI rollout delays, with a ChatGPT-like conversational Siri pushed back to iOS 20 at best. Internal data also indicates that real-world Apple Intelligence usage is 'extremely low', leaving iOS 19 with few significant AI upgrades.
Meta just unveiled Aria Gen 2, its next-generation smart glasses built for machine perception and robotics research. The 75-gram frames run SLAM and multi-modal tracking entirely on-device via custom silicon, packing new nosepad sensors to isolate the wearer's voice and pulse. Why it matters: It provides AI researchers with a wearable testbed to collect egocentric data for training embodied AI and assistive tech.
Microsoft just introduced Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini, a pair of lightweight models built for edge hardware and Copilot+ PCs. The 5.6B multimodal variant natively ingests speech, vision, and text in a single architecture, topping open speech recognition leaderboards while staying compact enough to run smoothly on-device.
Mark Engineering just launched the Mark 1, a $129 smart bookmark made of Grade 5 titanium designed to track your reading. The device features a small screen and a rotary knob that syncs reading progress to a companion app, generating summaries, key quotes, and reading statistics. It's a fresh attempt to digitize paper books, though detailed specs and potential subscription plans remain unconfirmed.
Qualcomm just unveiled Dragonwing, a dedicated brand targeting industrial IoT, networking, and enterprise infrastructure. The lineup includes the IQ series packing 100 INT8 TOPS for rugged environments and the Q series optimized for edge AI and Wi-Fi 7. Qualcomm is keeping Snapdragon for consumer gadgets while sending Dragonwing to challenge Nvidia and AMD in factories.
IBM just open-sourced Granite 3.2 under the Apache 2.0 license, bringing experimental reasoning features and its first official vision language model. The new 2B and 8B Instruct models let developers toggle reasoning via a simple API parameter to save compute, while Granite Vision 3.2 2B targets enterprise document understanding.
Alibaba's Tongyi Lab just released Wan2.1, an open-source video generation suite that beats top models like Sora on key benchmarks while running 2.5x faster. It supports bilingual text rendering and video-to-audio, and includes a lightweight 1.3B model that runs locally on an RTX 4090 GPU.
Qwen just unveiled QwQ-Max-Preview, a preview of its upcoming reasoning model built on Qwen2.5-Max that targets math, coding, and autonomous agents. The team also pledged to open-source the full QwQ-Max under Apache 2.0, along with a smaller QwQ-32B designed for local device deployment.
Apple just announced that Apple Intelligence is coming to Apple Vision Pro in April with the visionOS 2.4 beta. The initial rollout brings Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, Genmoji, and smart notifications to spatial computing. It kicks off in U.S. English, expanding to more languages later this year.
Figure just introduced Helix, a vision-language-action model that drives full upper-body control for humanoid robots. By decoupling slow scene comprehension from a 200Hz reactive action policy, it lets robots pick up unfamiliar household items and even coordinate across two units entirely on onboard, low-power GPUs.
Hugging Face just launched SmolVLM2, a family of lightweight multimodal models coming in 2.2B, 500M, and 256M parameters. The 500M version delivers video understanding comparable to the 2.2B model at a fraction of the memory footprint. With day-zero MLX and Swift support, these models can run completely offline on an iPhone or inside a free Google Colab.
Google just released PaliGemma 2 mix checkpoints, tuning its vision-language model across a mixture of tasks for instant out-of-the-box use. It handles OCR, captioning, and segmentation based on prompt syntax, and anyone already using original PaliGemma mix checkpoints can upgrade directly without changing their setup.
Apple just introduced the iPhone 16e, packing its flagship A18 chip and first in-house C1 modem into a more budget-friendly frame. The device offers full Apple Intelligence capabilities like Clean Up and Writing Tools, bringing on-device AI features to a much wider audience.
Rabbit just unveiled a research preview of its Android agent, showcasing an AI system that directly operates phone apps and controls device settings. The agent demonstrated multi-step tasks like coordinating between WhatsApp, YouTube, and Google Docs, though Rabbit notes speed and accuracy optimizations are still in progress.
Microsoft just overhauled the AI Hub inside the Windows Store to help users discover AI experiences built for their machines. The redesigned hub tailors recommendations based on your hardware, spotlighting NPU-accelerated tools like djay Pro and Camo Studio for Copilot+ PCs alongside compatible apps for standard Windows 11 users. It is rolling out first to Copilot+ PCs in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
Alibaba just confirmed a major partnership with Apple to power generative AI features for iPhones sold in China. Apple previously explored talks with Baidu and DeepSeek before landing on Alibaba to navigate strict local regulations. It's a critical move for Apple after an 11% drop in Chinese sales spurred by the absence of Apple Intelligence.
Tim Cook just teased a Feb. 19 Apple product launch, which Bloomberg reports will be a new budget iPhone. The entry-level model is expected to feature the A18 chip to run Apple Intelligence, ditch the home button for Face ID, and debut Apple’s first in-house cellular modem. Bringing Apple Intelligence down to the lower-end lineup shows Apple is serious about expanding its AI footprint fast.
Lyft is teaming up with Intel's Mobileye and Japanese conglomerate Marubeni to launch a robotaxi fleet in Dallas as soon as 2026. The ridehail platform is sticking to an asset-light playbook, letting Marubeni own and manage the cars while Mobileye supplies the self-driving tech, all in a bid to keep pace with Uber.
AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington just created an open-source reasoning model called s1 for under $50 in cloud compute. By distilling thinking steps from Google's Gemini into a Qwen base model using 1,000 curated questions, s1 matches frontier reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 on math and coding tests.
