Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla has signed a $16.5 billion contract with Samsung Electronics to manufacture the next generation of Tesla's AI6 chips at its new Texas mega fab. A filing by Samsung details that the contract deal would last through 2033, meaning a rather long partnership between the two giants. Musk also noted that Tesla will help optimize Samsung's production line and hinted the deal could grow larger, and although Samsung's stock jumped over 6% on the news, its upcoming quarterly earnings report on Thursday is expected to be anything but stellar.
Chinese AI companies have launched two new major alliances aimed at building a domestic tech ecosystem as US export curbs continue gutting Nvidia's high-end chips to the mainland. The news broke ground at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, unveiling the "Model-Chip Ecosystem Innovation Alliance" and the "Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce AI Committee." Huawei also debuted a chip cluster system that may rival Nvidia's top offering, as firms showcased new AI hardware, software, and open-source tools.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly developed an AI tool that it hopes will cut half of the federal government's regulatory mandates, says The Washington Post. The article claims that the "DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool" is supposed to analyze ~200,000 federal regulations and axe the ones no longer required by law. A cited presentation alleges that work is already underway, yet a White House spokesperson has told The Washington Post that "no single plan has been approved or greenlit."
A late-night post on Threads saw Mark Zuckerberg announce former OpenAI scientist Shengjia Zhao as Meta's chief scientist of its recently formed Superintelligence Labs. Zhao will set the lab's research agenda, working directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang as the company scrambles to get back on its feet after the lackluster launch of Llama 4. The company has been on a rampant spending spree to acquire top talent as of late, poaching dozens from Apple, OpenAI, and others, with further plans to pour "hundreds of billions of dollars" into compute infrastructure.
On Monday this week, Microsoft released what it calls Copilot Mode for its Edge browser, an experimental AI feature that helps with research, content creation, and the usual agentic browser tasks. Once turned on, users can navigate the web with Copilot or query the AI about page content, such as asking for suggestions on turning a non-vegan recipe into a vegan one. Copilot is also able to monitor multiple tabs for context, but for the time being, it doesn't accept voice input. Copilot Mode is a free and opt-in feature available to Edge users now in countries with access to Copilot.
AI data analyst startup Julius AI has bagged $10 million in seed funding earlier this week, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and angel investors such as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson. Founded by Rahul Sonwalker after leaving Y Combinator in 2022, Julius acts like a data scientist that users can "just talk to" to have it analyze and visualize massive datasets. Sonwalker's Julius now boasts over 2 million users and says it generates more than 10 million visualizations and is even used in a Harvard Business School data science course.