US officials have allegedly begun probing Apple's agreement to integrate Alibaba‑powered AI features into iPhones in China, per a report by The New York Times. Lawmakers and Trump administration staff have directly questioned Apple executives about "what data would be shared with Alibaba" and "any commitments to Chinese regulators," to which executives had been "unable to answer most of those questions." Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that the deal is "extremely disturbing" given Alibaba's role in China's military‑civil fusion strategy. Apple has not publicly confirmed the partnership, but Alibaba has.
MIT has publicly distanced itself from a paper on AI productivity by former PhD student Aidan Toner‑Rodgers, after an internal review by The Institute's Committee on Discipline found the validity of the data to be unreliable and lacking any confidence in the accuracy of the research. The late 2024 study claimed AI‑assisted teams achieved "44% more new materials," "39% more patents," and "17% more product innovations," but after garnering wider media coverage, those claims were put under scrutiny. MIT has since asked both the author and arXiv to withdraw the unreviewed paper, though it remains up as of writing.
OpenAI has launched Codex, an agentic coding tool in research preview that allows developers to delegate routine programming tasks to an AI agent. Accessible via the ChatGPT sidebar alongside the existing Codex CLI tool, Codex runs in isolated containers preloaded with a user's codebase that can follow custom instructions in an optional "AGENTS.md" file. Built on codex-1, a fine‑tuned o3 variant trained with reinforcement learning, Codex transparently documents its reasoning and test iterations. Codex is currently available to OpenAI's Pro, Enterprise, and Team subscribers, with free usage expected in the coming weeks.
During Taipei's annual Computex event, Nvidia made several announcements, from its Isaac GR00T‑Dreams for generating vast robotics training data, NVLink Fusion to build semi‑custom servers, to RTX Pro Blackwell servers to make the shift from CPU workloads to GPU ones. The company also launched DGX Cloud Lepton, a global cloud network of GPUs with partners like CoreWeave, Foxconn, and SoftBank, for more scalable AI development. These moves come off the back of recent US export rule rollbacks and US President Donald Trump's recent Saudi deal to supply hundreds of thousands of AI processors.
Google has released a standalone NotebookLM app for Android, its AI-powered note-taking and research assistant previously only available on desktop, a day ahead of its annual Google I/O event. The app offers features such as smart summaries, interactive Q&A on documents, and Audio Overviews - essentially AI-generated podcasts with background playback and offline support. Users can create and manage notebooks, upload sources directly from their devices, and enjoy light/dark modes synced to system settings. An iOS version is also expected on Tuesday, with further details expected during the conference itself.
