TechCapsules

Snap is spinning off its internal generative AI video team into a new company called Dotmo, citing high costs of conducting such work internally. Dotmo will focus on developing AI models for interactive gaming experiences and will retain close ties to Snapchat. The initial team will consist of current Snap staff, and while Dotmo won't be directly funded by Snap, the company will receive a large equity stake in exchange for a technology license and talent. This [...]

Microsoft has become the primary supplier of OpenAI models in China, selling the technology to the country's largest internet companies, including ByteDance, Ant Group, Meituan, and Tencent. The arrangement hands Microsoft a unique position, as it sells OpenAI models to Chinese firms that the model's creator, OpenAI, will not deal with directly. Microsoft's Azure AI revenue in China has expanded significantly, tripling in the financial year to June 2025. The company's contract with OpenAI allows it to [...]

The US government's order to suspend access to Anthropic's best-performing AI models for non-US nationals has sparked concern in Europe, but some see it as an opportunity for the region. Uljan Sharka, founder and CEO of Italian AI model maker Domyn, views the move as a "huge opportunity" for Europe. The ban may unveil the ground truth and prompt European companies to develop their own AI models. This could lead to increased innovation and investment in the [...]

A US-led coalition pushed for AI rules at a G7 lunch, aiming to cut China out of chip and model access. Macron and Modi warned of dependence risks, with India being hit hardest due to its lack of frontier chips and models. India leads the world in daily AI use, but funds are flowing into data centers from companies like CPP, AirTrunk, and Meta-Reliance. The country's limited access to chips and models is fueling calls for state [...]

Elon Musk has announced that xAI's model, Grok, will be capable of creating full movies by the end of 2026. A trailer for Homer's The Odyssey, created using Grok Imagine Video 1.5, showcases the AI's rapid strides in video generation. The 2-minute-plus trailer features 36 consistent shots, realistic special effects, and emotional depth, demonstrating Grok's capabilities in scale, physics, and cinematic workflow. Musk believes Grok will be "watchable" by the end of 2026 and "really good" by

Loft Orbital's YAM-9 spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first publicly disclosed execution of a vision-language model in orbit. Aboard the spacecraft, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 performed natural language queries, classified Earth imagery, and produced plain-English summaries without transmitting raw pixels to the ground. This achievement marks a significant shift in the value layer of Earth observation, moving from ground-based processing to onboard inference capabilities. The model, running on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics processing unit, utilized a [...]

Chinese firm Alibaba has unveiled its first embodied AI model family, the Qwen-Robot suite, which links large language models with real-world robotic actions. The suite comprises three models focused on navigation, manipulation, and world modeling for robots operating in physical environments. Developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, the Qwen-Robot suite enables machines to perceive, reason, and interact with the real world, joining a growing global push to advance embodied AI beyond traditional chatbot applications. The models are currently [...]

The US has held off adding China's AI startup DeepSeek and over 100 other companies to a trade blacklist, despite being flagged as national security risks. DeepSeek, which has supported China's military and intelligence operations, and memory chipmaker CXMT, were approved for addition to the Entity List last year. The list, which restricts US companies from shipping goods to listed companies without a license, has not been updated since October. The delay is seen as an effort [...]