AI Updates on 2025-05-09

AI Model Announcements

  • Google announced Gemini 2.5 Pro (05-06) which achieves state-of-the-art performance on video understanding tasks by a large margin @JeffDean @sundarpichai @OfficialLoganK

AI Research

  • WebGPT paper from 2021 now looks ahead of its time with the capabilities demonstrated by o3 and AI search @natolambert
  • Stanford researchers developed NNetNav, an open-source AI agent that learns by interacting directly with websites while preserving privacy @StanfordHAI
  • Research shows LLMs can be valuable tools for middle school math teachers to enhance learning experiences for students across diverse skill levels @StanfordHAI

AI Applications

  • Reinforcement fine-tuning is now available for o4-mini, allowing developers to customize model behavior @gdb @OpenAIDevs
  • Deep research capabilities for codebases now available, enabling developers to better understand their code @gdb @OpenAIDevs
  • Qwen Chat introduced Web Dev feature that allows building frontend webpages and apps using simple prompts with just one line of text @Alibaba_Qwen
  • Copilot Assistant is now available on Android, allowing users to access it via long press of power button or swipe to launch voice sessions in context of current activity @Copilot
  • Gemini 2.5 now automatically applies 75% cached token discount, potentially offering significant cost savings for applications running prompts against the same long context @simonw
  • Perplexity on WhatsApp is now more conversational and ignores searching when not needed @AravSrinivas
  • Windsurf Reviews streamlines code review process by taking a first pass at reviewing pull requests @windsurf_ai
  • Zero is an open-source AI-native email client that manages your inbox automatically @garrytan @ycombinator
  • Scout now offers seamless website deployment - users can simply ask it to "deploy my website" @ycombinator
  • YouLearn is an AI tutor that turns learning materials into concise notes, provides an AI tutor to talk to, and creates personalized tests @ycombinator
  • Klavis AI is building open source MCP integrations for AI applications with an API that provides hosted, secure MCP servers @ycombinator
  • MorphoAI offers AI-powered software for robotics and machine engineering to develop hardware at software speeds @ycombinator
  • Sai is an AI lab test analysis and health optimization assistant that lives in the SiPhox dashboard, supporting uploads from any lab @ycombinator

AI Industry Analysis

  • YC partners discuss how AI coding tools are transforming software development, enabling small teams to accomplish what once required armies of engineers @garrytan @ycombinator
  • Rippling raised $450M at a $16.8B valuation, highlighting continued strong investment in AI-powered HR and finance platforms @TechCrunch @ycombinator
  • PyTorch Foundation has expanded into an umbrella foundation with vLLM and DeepSpeed accepted as hosted projects, advancing community-driven AI across the full lifecycle @PyTorch
  • Google signed a deal to develop 1.8 GW of advanced nuclear power, likely to support growing AI infrastructure needs @TechCrunch
  • SoundCloud changed policies to allow AI training on user content, joining the trend of platforms opening content for AI development @TechCrunch

AI Ethics & Society

  • Concerns raised about AI detectors like Pangram Labs being used adversarially without independent assessment of false positive rates @emollick
  • Microsoft Research discusses ethical considerations in healthcare AI, including governance frameworks and bias mitigation @MSFTResearch
  • Yann LeCun counters common misconceptions about LLMs, noting they don't make users lazy but instead encourage learning more and faster @ylecun
  • Concerns expressed about NSF budget cuts potentially harming US technological leadership in AI compared to countries like China that are making massive investments in science @jeffclune @ylecun