Pulse on AI dives into a packed slate: Alphabet’s record quarter and 75M daily AI Search users, massive AI capex, and more fuel for Waymo; Meta’s strong Q3 with 3.5B daily users, Meta AI at 1B MAU, a frontier model push, a 49% stake in Scale AI, and an aggressive data center buildout; KVDA-UCT, a new Monte Carlo Tree Search abstraction that boosts sample efficiency in deterministic settings; lawmakers challenging ICE’s face scans over accuracy and civil liberties; ColPali’s vision-language retrieval that makes RAG work on PDFs with complex tables and charts; why unified management is the new baseline for AI-era multi-cloud; Emma Thompson’s call for consent-first AI writing UX; Probabl’s €13M raise to industrialize scikit-learn and classic ML; SoulX-Podcast’s open-source, long-form, multi-speaker voice synthesis; PS5 Pro’s AI upscaling trade-offs; Strawberry Browser’s agentic ‘Skills’; and a snapshot of TechCrunch Disrupt’s AI themes. Three takeaways: infrastructure leads, context builds trust, and ‘boring’ ML and ops still deliver big ROI.
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