Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Tells Trump an AI Slowdown Will Not Happen

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, took a live phone call from President Donald Trump while onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. The impromptu conversation addressed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s weekend call to slow AI development, which Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly endorsed. Trump called the concern a hoax and pledged the United States would not allow an AI slowdown. “You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir,” Huang told the president to audience applause. Recent Gallup polling shows seven in ten Americans oppose new data centre construction in their area, with more than half citing environmental concerns.

Waymo Opens Robotaxi Service in Las Vegas, Its 15th Commercial Market

Waymo opened its robotaxi service to the public in Las Vegas on Monday, deploying dozens of its new Ojai minivan vehicles across a service area covering the Strip south of Highway 589 and the Boulder Junction neighbourhood. Las Vegas is the Alphabet-owned company’s 15th commercial market, reached weeks after Nevada’s Transportation Authority authorized Waymo to operate up to 1,000 autonomous vehicles in Clark County. Tesla, with 5,000 permits, and Uber through partners Motional and Zoox, with 1,000 permits combined, also received Clark County authorizations. Waymo launched public services in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa two weeks earlier as the company accelerates its US expansion.

AI Networking Startup Cornelis Raises $205M to Compete With Nvidia Interconnects

Cornelis Networks, an AI networking startup spun out of Intel in 2020, raised $205 million on Monday in a round led by IAG Capital Partners. The company unveiled Active Compute Fabric, an open-architecture network designed to eliminate idle GPU time caused by chips waiting for data between training steps. The technology allows data centres to mix GPU and accelerator hardware from multiple vendors rather than committing to Nvidia’s closed NVLink ecosystem. Cornelis is already shipping a production version of Active Compute Fabric and expects a next-generation release before the end of 2026, targeting AI infrastructure buyers seeking alternatives to Nvidia’s end-to-end stack.

Pharma Consortium Trains AI on 20,000 Secret Protein Structures, Beating Public Models

A consortium of five pharmaceutical companies, operating under the name AI Structural Biology Network, trained a customised version of OpenFold3 on more than 20,000 proprietary protein structures that individual firms would not ordinarily share. The resulting model correctly predicted the three-dimensional structure of more than 50 percent of held-out test proteins, compared with 33 percent for the public version of OpenFold3 and 40 percent for the competing Boltz-2 model. The collaboration, reported Monday in Nature, demonstrates that industrial-scale private structural data withheld for competitive reasons contains insights not present in public datasets, with implications for drug target identification across the consortium’s member companies.

ClickFix Campaign Hijacks HBO Max Reddit Account to Spread Terminal Malware

Security researchers at Hudson Rock identified a large ClickFix campaign that compromised HBO Max’s Reddit account and used it to post hundreds of fake adverts pointing to a spoofed HBO Max page. The page displayed a fake anti-bot prompt instructing users to paste a one-line string of code into their computer’s terminal or Windows command prompt. Executing the command instantly installed password- and cryptocurrency-stealing malware that evades most antivirus tools because it runs at the operating-system level. Reddit confirmed it locked the compromised account and removed the ads but declined to say how many users were affected. Mac users can install the open-source BlockBlock tool as a defence.

UCSF Brain Implant Decodes Speech and Hand Gestures Simultaneously in Paralysed Patients

UC San Francisco researchers have demonstrated a neural implant that simultaneously decodes intended speech and hand gestures from brain activity in real time. A 253-electrode array placed on the sensorimotor cortex of two paralysed participants — one with a brainstem stroke and one with ALS — enabled an AI system to translate neural signals into both spoken words and gestural movements without degrading either channel’s accuracy. Previous brain-computer interfaces decoded speech or motor output separately. The work, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, expands the set of communication modalities a single implant can restore to patients who have lost voluntary movement.

Kinetic Blocks Opens Beta Marketplace for Humanoid Robot Training Data

Kinetic Blocks, an Oslo-based startup, has opened a restricted-access marketplace for buying and selling humanoid robot training data. The platform, which launched in beta on September 1, connects organisations holding teleoperation recordings, execution videos, and egocentric camera datasets with robotics developers who need them to train models. Co-founders Lars-Fredrik Forberg, Erik Algard, and Christian Rokseth — the latter two early investors in Norwegian humanoid startup 1X Technologies — say they built the marketplace to replace months-long bilateral data licensing negotiations. Kinetic Blocks reviews all applicants, approving only parties that legally own the data they list or are actively training humanoid models. A seed funding round is planned for Q4 2026.

⚡ Tech Pulse