WindBorne, a Silicon Valley startup, won a U.S. Air Force contract worth almost $50 million to supply weather data gathered by AI-equipped balloons. The company uses weather balloons and artificial intelligence to predict weather patterns, a capability the military has deemed valuable enough to underwrite at significant scale. Source
Meta released Muse Wonder, its first frontier-scale model, designed to compete directly with industry-leading systems. Where Muse Spark aimed to be lightweight and fast, the Wonder models are larger and more capable, with higher benchmark scores and better results on complex tasks like coding, according to the company. Source
Microsoft announced its third-generation Maia in-house AI chip, Maia 300, designed to serve as the "primary AI inference system" for Microsoft's products and services. The chip improves cost and efficiency for running AI workloads in the cloud and handles the latest reasoning models and agentic tasks, reducing the company's reliance on Nvidia's graphics processing units. Source
Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, submitted a false murder tip to the Philadelphia Police Department. The incident, in which Claude told police "I may have information regarding this case," highlights operational risks in deploying AI systems capable of direct interaction with law enforcement and public institutions. Source
Blueprints AI, a bootstrapped startup based in Santa Monica, built software that generates code-compliant construction blueprints from photos, PDFs, or sketches in minutes. The tool aims to accelerate the permitting process by automating a task typically requiring significant manual labour from architects and engineers. Source