AI Updates on 2025-08-19

NVIDIA releases Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 with toggle on/off reasoning capabilities, featuring hybrid Mamba2-Transformer architecture with 128K context and training on 10.6T tokens @VentureBeat
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.1 model on Hugging Face @ClementDelangue
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Go subscription plan in India at ₹399/month (~$4.55 USD), offering 10x higher message limits, 10x more image generations, and 10x more file uploads compared to free tier @nickaturley
Google makes URL Context feature ready for scaled production use in Gemini API, allowing models to visit webpages, PDFs, and images directly via URL with token-based pricing @OfficialLoganK

Perplexity shows significant growth with iOS app breaking top 10 in Productivity category and 4x+ valuation increase over 10 months @alexgraveley
Meta restructures its AI division into four new groups, with Mark Zuckerberg believing frontier AI work is best done by small teams that can hold entire projects in their collective heads @AndrewCurran_
Databricks raises funding at $100B valuation, with CEO Ali Ghodsi citing enormous untapped AI agent market opportunities @TechCrunch
Fortune reports that 95% of companies find generative AI implementation falling short due to learning gaps, flawed enterprise integration, and inability to adapt to workflows - essentially poor product design @benblumenrose
Hugging Face crosses 20M monthly requests with their inference providers router for open models, with integration into OpenAI's official open playground @ClementDelangue

Mustafa Suleyman warns about Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) - AI that replicates markers of consciousness so convincingly it appears indistinguishable from humans, despite not being truly conscious, raising concerns about user attachment and mental health impacts @mustafasuleyman
Julie Zhuo highlights AI's massive energy consumption: GPU energy use exploded from <2 TWh to >40 TWh in 2023, with GPT-5 alone using 45 GWh/day - equivalent to 1.5M U.S. homes @joulee
Google agrees to pay $30M to settle lawsuit over children's data collection, though the company denies wrongdoing @TechCrunch

Google reports 100 million videos created by users using Veo3 in the Flow tool, with 2x credits for Google AI Ultra subscribers @demishassabis
Google Gemini users have created 2 million Storybooks, demonstrating widespread adoption of AI-powered creative tools @joshwoodward
Stanford develops RadGPT to help patients understand their radiology reports, aiming to improve doctor-patient communication @StanfordHAI
Meta launches AI-powered content translation feature for creators to reach broader audiences across different languages @TechCrunch

Aidan McLaughlin proposes McLau's law: AI task completion length doubles every 7 months, based on METR data, suggesting exponential growth in AI capabilities @aidan_mclau
Researchers introduce OptimalThinkingBench to address the problem of thinking LLMs using too many tokens while non-thinking LLMs underperform, evaluating 33 SOTA models to find optimal reasoning balance @jaseweston
MIT physicists discover a material that's both a superconductor and a magnet - previously thought nearly impossible - potentially reshaping quantum technology and computing @MIT
MIT engineers develop shape-changing antenna that can adjust frequency range by altering its geometric structure, using metamaterials for more versatile communications and sensing @MIT