AI Things, Bits and Bites
Mid 2026 AI News in a nutshell. Issue #1. š°
Hey Everyone,
AI Things, Bits and Bites is a new AI news orientated feature Iām experimenting with to quickly catch up with whatās going on in AI. Iām not sure of the cadence of this feature article type yet, but they will follow a shorter newsy format that you can browse, scan and absorb easily. Or, at least thatās the plan. [Edit: these shorter articles would appear around 9:00 AM Eastern time.]
So whatās going on in AI? These are some of the stories Iām watching this week and over the past few days.
Amazon Robotaxi Zoox Enters AV Race
Amazonās robotaxi Zoox has launched its first paid service in U.S. this August. Las Vegas is first. San Francisco and other markets should follow. Itās Sin City to the max, with more robotaxi competitors entering the fray even as Uber is investing again in autonomous vehicles. A lot of consumers totally forgot about Zoox. Paid rides on Zoox became available for the first time ever, with services that launched in Las Vegas this Monday (Aug. 10). Tesla robotaxis that only use cameras have been a huge disappointment. While Waymo is the outright leader in the U.S. Thereās no steering wheel here so more room. The seating feels like public transport with these weird carriage-style seating arrangements.
Autonomous Driving Fleets by Vehicles
Nvidia Organizes Financing Consortium with Wall Street for AI Infra
When you are financing Neo Clouds, why not go all in? Nvidia makes a rather outrageous claim that AI factory compute is becoming an investable asset. Itās a $500 Billion third-party financing gig. Nvidia has cash to spare and will backstop up to $125 ābillion, or 25% of the potential deals. Financial partners include at least Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock (via Global Infrastructure Partners), Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, and KKR. Nvidia has been guilty of some creative circular and vendor financing deals in what we can only assume is a U.S. National defense AI infra mandated project where they think they need all of this compute. We are entering larger and larger gigawatt scale AI clusters of datacenters, even as HBM memory chips and other bottlenecks make said compute way more expensive pushing hyperscaler Capex higher for multiple reasons. Now Datacenters are increasingly being financed on debt including off-balance-sheet margin debt.
Meta Claims to be an Open-Source Good Guy
Mark Zuckerberg wrote an OpenAI or Anthropic-esque āessayā about the future of AI called The Future is for Everyone. While suddenly pretending that Meta isnāt a Metaverse company but a benevolent AI open-source lab. Meta released Muse Glimmer, a neat little model that appears to be yet another pivot in their rather baffling and constantly shifting AI strategy.
Muse Glimmer competes favorable with Alibaba Qwen3.6-27B and has a favorable no strings attached Open-source permission. So at least they finally executed on a frontier model, in a manner of speaking (itās been a while).
