Infleqtion, Honeywell Aerospace and UC Santa Barbara said they collaborated on developing a new integrated optical "cavity" to shrink quantum sensors down to handheld size. The prototype was fabricated on a silicon nitride chip at Honeywell Aerospace's photonics foundry.
Cohere said it has revamped North 2 with a new agent harness, redesigned AI agent orchestration systems, more tools for workflows, AI sovereignty and governance and a model agnostic approach.
Reflection launched Beam, an open weight sparse mixture of experts model that has 501 billion total parameters. The model is designed to compete with open models from China. The company said:
"Beam advances the Western open-weight frontier and is competitive with larger open models like GLM 5.2 and approaching Qwen 3.8-Max on coding and agentic tasks. Where frontier open models like Kimi K3 remain ahead on raw capability, Beam's advantage is efficiency at inference time."
Reflection said Beam will be in early access soon.
Trmeric raised $6.5 million in venture funding led by Hitachi Ventures. Trmeric said it will use new capital for accelerate product innovation and scale.
EQUS launched EQUS X, a personal AI that is pared with private data controlled by the user. The core pitch is that nothing is read by AI unless the user allows it and can turn off access easily. What the AI learns is in private data storge instead of servers owned by model providers. The company said it is accepting priority access requests with general availability later this month with a plan for businesses on deck.
Sandy Carter, who riffed at AI Forum in March on OpenClaw, is CEO of EQUS and saw enough privacy headaches to build a product.
Paramount Skydance announced its new management team ahead of closing its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition. You can read the lineup in the press release, but the CEO Leadership Team (CLT) sticks out for what's not included. Where's the CIO or CTO? Who's leading the AI strategy? How will streaming platforms be combined? Is the combined company running on Oracle since the deal was largely funded with Larry Ellison's money?
Yes, Dane Glasgow, Chief Product Officer, is driving technical strategy and is a Facebook and Google alum, but
for a media conglomerate allegedly "powered by creativity and technology" you'd think some tech heft would be in the announcement.
Insight Partners launched a dedicated program to help its portfolio companies with forward deployed engineers (FDEs) in a bid to make them AI native. The effort is backed by an FDE Advisory Council, which includes execs from Databricks, ServiceNow, Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce. Private equity firms are trying to retool portfolio companies as SaaS valuations have tanked. To generate value, not to mention exits, firms will need to transform the holdings they have to generate value.
Huawei said it has licensed a broad set of Qualcomm patents to cover 5G, compute, AI and networking. Terms of the multi-year patent deal weren't disclosed.
SpaceX will apparently change its AI unit's name from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI for superintelligence. It's worth noting in the comments on Elon Musk's post on X that SpaceXSI could be confused for extra small intelligence. May the memes begin.
Microsoft launched a set of models as it steps up its Microsoft AI efforts. The company launched MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The takeaways beyond the models are the following:
Amazon said it will spend $1 billion over the next five years for infrastructure upgrades where it hosts its data centers. The effort lands amid data center backlash and Amazon used its blog post on the investment to debunk what it calls myths.
Cloudflare launched Clef and Clef-flash, two open-weight multimodal decision models. Cloudflare said Clef and Clef-flash outperform Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3.5 9B. Decision models are designed to make classifications to help agents decide how to act.
