What Is Going On
Tech force to the rescue. The Trump administration is flipping the script after letting go of thousands of government tech workers. They've announced the launch of the United States Tech Force, aiming to recruit around 1,000 technologists to bolster the government's AI capabilities. This initiative is a response to the global AI race and the need to modernize government systems. The program will welcome early-career software engineers, data scientists, and even some engineering managers from private companies like Palantir, Meta, and Oracle. Participants will get to flex their skills on projects of national importance while earning between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. More here.
Ford's battery power pivot. Ford is mixing things up by launching a battery storage business to power data centers and the electric grid. Moving away from large electric vehicle batteries, Ford plans to repurpose its Kentucky factory to produce lithium iron phosphate batteries and energy storage systems. With a $2 billion investment over the next two years, they're targeting a 20GWh annual capacity by 2027. While commercial grid customers are the main focus, data centers and home storage solutions are also on the radar. More here.
Nvidia's AI evolution. Nvidia is shaking things up with the launch of Nemotron 3, the latest in its AI model lineup. This new release features a hybrid mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, promising more accuracy and efficiency for developers working on autonomous systems. The Nemotron 3 comes in three flavors: Nano with 30B parameters for specific tasks, Super with 100B parameters for multi-agent applications, and Ultra with a whopping 500B parameters for complex projects. More here.
AI Corner
Byte-level breakthrough. The Allen Institute of AI (Ai2) is making waves with Bolmo, a new byte-level language model that's shaking up the AI world. This model family, including Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, operates directly on raw UTF-8 bytes, skipping tokenizers and predefined vocabularies. This means it can handle misspellings and quirky text with ease, making it a dream for multilingual and noisy environments. By avoiding the hefty expense of training from scratch, Ai2 offers a robust, multilingual solution for enterprises looking to streamline AI operations. More here.
Chai's big biotech leap. OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery just scored a whopping $130 million in a Series B round, skyrocketing its valuation to $1.3 billion. Led by General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT, this biotech innovator is on a mission to revolutionize drug development using AI. Chai's latest creation, the Chai 2 model, is making waves with its ability to design molecules from scratch—think custom antibodies with superpowers. More here.
News You Can Use
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NeMo Gym opens. Nvidia released NeMo Gym, a reinforcement learning lab where customers can let their models run in simulated environments to test their post-training performance.
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Ford goes residential. Ford's BlueOval Battery Park Michigan will produce smaller Amp-hour cells for residential energy storage solutions.
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Ai2 goes fully open. Ai2 will release checkpoints, code, and a full paper for Bolmo to help other organizations build byte-level models.