NVIDIA

Open Weights AI Raises Policy and Safety Questions

An opinion piece examines the debate over "open weights" AI — models whose trained weights are publicly released like open-source software. A recent open letter signed by major tech companies (including Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Intel, Amazon, Meta, and Hugging Face) supports open weights. Supporters argue open weights protect user ownership and innovation; opponents warn the same openness enables misuse (hacking, harassment, bioterrorism) and removes centralized gatekeeping. Anthropic notably did not sign and issued an ambiguous statement favoring only non-dangerous open-weights models. The author takes a neutral stance, arguing preemptive bans would be politically costly and that governments will likely react after initial harmful incidents rather than accept indefinite risks in advance.

Mirendil Signs $100M+ Google Cloud Compute Deal

AI startup Mirendil has entered a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud worth more than $100 million to secure compute capacity for its work on self-improving (recursive) AI. The agreement gives Mirendil access to Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and managed training clusters to support research aimed at AI systems that iteratively improve themselves and automate scientific research in fields like medicine and materials science. Mirendil’s co-founder and CEO Benham Neyshabur said the compute commitment is roughly half of the startup’s recent seed raise at a $1 billion valuation. Google framed the deal as part of its strategy to offer flexible orchestration across different accelerator types, while Mirendil says its systems layer will help customers get more out of Google’s hardware.

Why Google Shouldn’t Be Counted Out

Opinion piece arguing that despite recent leadership changes and talent departures at DeepMind/Google, Alphabet remains highly competitive in AI because of its unmatched data access, scale of compute and distributed-systems expertise, proprietary TPU chips, large financial resources (cited revenue and profit), and broad consumer distribution (Android, Search, YouTube, Gmail, Docs). The author lists seven reasons why Google can persist or outlast competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic and cautions that it is premature to write Google off.