Author: Art Ryan

Key Highlights: There’s a big leadership shakeup about to happen inside Amazon’s artificial intelligence team. Yesterday, the company’s CEO, Andy Jassy yesterday announced that Rohit Prasad, the head of artificial general intelligence (AGI), will leave Amazon next year. Jassy describes the moment as an “inflection point” for its AI goals. Rohit Prasad has been the man behind Amazon’s AI efforts For those unaware, Prasad has been with Amazon since 2013. Ever since AI came onto the scene, he has been the man behind Amazon’s AI efforts. To give you an example, Alexa went mainstream as a popular voice assistant under…

While many sectors use AI mainly for back-office tasks, telecommunications involve live infrastructure where problems can escalate quickly and manual coordination often fails. As 5G densification, growing traffic, and increasing service complexity challenge old operational models, operators are bringing AI agents into production. This move helps stabilize networks, cut operating costs, and protect profit margins. AI agents in telecom are used carry out workflows that cross various operational areas. They monitor real-time network data, spot issues, link data from radio access networks and core infrastructure, and initiate fixes without waiting for human approval. These agents work within live systems, rather than on the organization’s periphery. According to a report from Google…

OpenAI has hired former U.K. Treasury chief George Osborne to lead the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s work with governments. Osborne will join the company as “Head of OpenAI for Countries” and “lead our work helping governments build for the future with AI,” OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in a Tuesday (Dec. 16) post on X. “We increasingly hear from countries wanting to understand how AI fits into their economic strategy and ability to serve citizens in domains like healthcare, education and more,” Lightcap said. In his own post on X announcing the move, Osborne said that he will be based in London and that he believes OpenAI is “the most exciting and promising…

Data analytics/artificial intelligence (AI) firm Databricks is reportedly raising $4 billion in a new funding round. This Series L round would value the company at $134 billion, up 34% from its last session of funding during the summer, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (Dec. 16). Ali Ghodsi, Databricks’ co-founder and CEO, told the WSJ the company plans to use the new funding to invest in its core data-analytics products and AI software, while also letting its workers engage in secondary share sales. The company, among the most valuable private firms in Silicon Valley, also plans to hire around 600 fresh college graduates…

The threats snowballed in 2025. Cyberattacks stopped being episodic crises and instead became a persistent condition of doing business. A persistent and costly condition. So much so that one of the world’s largest cyber insurance firms, Beazley, announced last month it was reducing its U.S. cyber business in order to maintain underwriting discipline and rate adequacy in the face of unsustainable rates in the cyber market following several high-profile breaches. Still, Beazley may not have much luck elsewhere around the globe. In the U.K. alone, cyber insurance claim payouts are up 230% from the year prior. There was the $2.5 billion-plus Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack this fall, which is thought to be the most economically…

BBVA said it has formed a strategic partnership with OpenAI to embed generative artificial intelligence (AI) directly into the bank’s core operations, moving beyond pilot programs and positioning AI as a default organizational layer across the company. The Spanish banking group said it will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its global workforce and work with OpenAI to co-develop AI systems spanning core banking functions, including internal productivity, software development, risk analysis and customer engagement. The partnership formalizes a shift BBVA has been building toward over the past year with OpenAI pilots. Unlike many banks that continue to test generative AI for specific use cases, BBVA is taking an enterprise-wide approach. BBVA Chair Carlos Torres Vila framed the move as a continuation of…

Rivian Automotive unveiled a custom artificial intelligence (AI) chip and a comprehensive autonomy platform designed and engineered in-house. The announcement, made at the company’s first “Autonomy & AI Day” in Palo Alto, California, marks a departure from reliance on third-party computing solutions such as Nvidia’s processors. Rivian said its new silicon and software architecture will power next-generation driver assistance and automated capabilities, starting with its upcoming R2 vehicle line and future vehicles beyond. Rivian’s announcement highlights a broader shift in the EV industry toward vertical integration of hardware and software. The company described the custom chip as engineered specifically to meet the demands of…

Key Highlights: Although Meta might not be making progress with its Llama Large Language Model (LLM), there is something it’s working on and is quite serious about. Here, I’m referring to Meta’s Segment Anything family. Speaking of which, the company has unveiled SAM Audio. That’s a new AI model that promises to make sound separation feel almost as intuitive as pointing at something on a screen and saying, “That, I want that.” Meta’s SAM Audio model can isolate audio using three different kind of prompts At its core, SAM Audio is designed to isolate specific audio elements from messy, real-world recordings. Imagine…

Nvidia announced on Monday (Dec. 15) the debut of the Nemotron 3 family of open models designed to power transparent, efficient and specialized agent-centric AI across industries. The lineup includes Nano, Super and Ultra models that leverage a hybrid latent mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to deliver higher throughput, extended context reasoning, and scalable performance for multi-agent workflows. Developers and enterprises can access these models, associated data and tooling to build and customize AI agents for tasks ranging from coding and reasoning to complex workflow automation. Open-Source Models Explained Open-source AI models are large pretrained neural networks whose weights and code are publicly available for download, inspection, modification and redistribution. By contrast with closed or proprietary models controlled by a single provider,…

Artificial intelligence (AI)-focused cybersecurity firm Resemble AI has raised $13 million. The new funding, announced last week, will help Resemble protect organizations amid what it says is a surge in deepfake cyberattacks, what it dubbed the “deepfake crisis.” “The numbers tell a stark story,” the company said in a news release. “Deepfake-related fraud caused $1.56 billion in losses in 2025 alone, and its predicted generative AI could enable up to $40 billion in US fraud losses by 2027. Bad actors are using increasingly sophisticated AI tools to create deepfakes that are nearly impossible to distinguish from authentic content, putting organizations at unprecedented risk.” Resemble said its…

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC)’s 2025 annual report, released Friday (Dec. 11), was notable for its finding that 20% of student loan are delinquent. But there were other findings as well. The report offers a generally calm assessment of U.S. financial stability. It said that markets and institutions “performed well,” and that core markets and infrastructure remained resilient through a brief spike in volatility in early April. It added a cautionary note: asset prices have rebounded and in some areas remain elevated relative to fundamentals. The report also argued that stability policy is shifting from traditional credit-cycle concerns toward market mechanics and operational resilience.…

Nvidia has acquired SchedMD and said it will continue to distribute that company’s open-source Slurm software. Slurm, a workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, Nvidia said in a Monday (Dec. 15) blog post. The two companies have been collaborating for over a decade, according to the post. With the acquisition, Nvidia will continue to invest in Slurm’s development “to ensure it remains the leading open-source scheduler for HPC and AI”; offer open-source software support, training and development for Slurm to SchedMD’s customers; and develop and distribute Slurm…

Key Takeaways: GPT-5.2 for Professional Productivity and Agentic Workflows OpenAI Introduces GPT-5.2, Designed to Boost Professional Productivity and Agentic Workflows GPT-5.2, OpenAI’s newest model family, is rolling out to ChatGPT users and developers with a clear focus on professional productivity. Rather than positioning the release as a single breakthrough feature, OpenAI is framing GPT-5.2 as a set of models optimized for real-world knowledge work—supporting complex projects that require reasoning, long-context understanding, tool usage, and sustained execution. The GPT-5.2 release includes three variants designed for different types of work: OpenAI says this separation allows users to choose between speed, depth, and…

Key Takeaways: Adobe Brings Photoshop, Acrobat, and Express Into ChatGPT Adobe Integrates Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat Into ChatGPT’s Conversational Interface Adobe has announced that Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat are now available directly inside ChatGPT, allowing users to edit images, design graphics, and manage PDFs using natural-language prompts—without leaving the chat interface. The integration makes Adobe’s flagship creative and productivity tools accessible to ChatGPT’s more than 800 million weekly active users, lowering the barrier to entry for both casual users and professionals who want faster, conversational workflows without having to switch between applications. The tools are free to use…

Key Takeaways: AI Data Centers in Space AI Data Centers Move Beyond Earth as Energy Constraints Tighten The race to scale artificial intelligence is colliding with a hard constraint on Earth: energy. As demand for AI compute surges and terrestrial data centers face years-long delays tied to power limitations, water-intensive cooling requirements, land availability, and permitting, some of the world’s most influential tech and space leaders are looking beyond the planet itself. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and a growing group of startups and enterprises are exploring whether AI data centers can operate in orbit—powered by the sun and freed from…

When Anthropic launched Skills in October, the announcement read like a niche developer feature. Two months later, OpenAI has adopted the same architecture—and the quiet convergence reveals something significant about where AI agents are heading. Skills are deceptively simple: folders containing Markdown files that tell AI systems how to perform specific tasks. But their adoption by both major AI labs suggests the industry has found a common answer to a fundamental question: how do you make AI assistants consistently good at specialized work? What OpenAI Just Did Developer Elias Judin discovered OpenAI’s implementation on December 12 while experimenting with ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter.…

Key Highlights: NVIDIA has been among the top AI companies that is helping other AI giants with its infrastructure and GPU building capabilities that can run datacenters efficiently. Starting today, NVIDIA is also doubling down on open, agentic AI with the launch of Nemotron 3. It’s a new family of open models, datasets, and tools designed to power large-scale multi-agent systems across different industries. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 lineup targets efficiency and scale across AI workloads According to NVIDIA, the Nemotron 3 family includes Nano, Super, and Ultra models. All of them are designed for different workloads. Be it lightweight assistants to complex…

In 2025, enterprises reported meaningful gains from AI pilots, but fragmented deployments quickly ran into rising costs, governance gaps and operational complexity once adoption moved beyond small teams. After two years of rapid experimentation, companies are consolidating disconnected tools into unified AI platforms designed to support core workflows, control inference spending and operate reliably across the organization. The shift marks a turning point in enterprise AI adoption, moving the technology from isolated productivity gains toward infrastructure that must run continuously and at scale. Hidden Cost of AI Fragmentation The rush to pilot generative AI tools has created an unexpected problem…

Standards. Protocols. Alliances. It was a big week as usual in the Prompt Economy with several announcements that show cooperation among some of the power players that will make agentic AI’s infrastructure the commerce and communication engine of the future. The biggest one came from Block, which has joined with Anthropic and OpenAI to launch the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), an open source initiative housed under the Linux Foundation and designed to shape how autonomous AI systems are built and deployed. In a statement published by Block, the company argues that agentic AI is reaching a critical inflection point, where early architectural choices will determine whether the technology evolves as…

Workflow automation platform ServiceNow is reportedly in advanced discussions to purchase cybersecurity startup Armis. The deal, which could be worth up to $7 billion, could be announced in the coming days and comes in the wake of Armis’ preparations for an initial public offering (IPO), Bloomberg News reported Sunday (Dec. 14), citing sources familiar with the situation. PYMNTS has reached out to both ServiceNow and Armis for comment but has not yet received a response. Based in San Francisco and founded by veterans of Israel’s military cyber intelligence forces, Armis deals in identifying and tracking security threats to devices, working with a variety of industries, such as defense, telecom, medical, retail and financial services. According to Bloomberg,…