The European Union has published a General Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice designed to help companies comply with the AI Act, which includes copyright protections and transparency requirements for advanced models. The Code of Practice bans training models on unauthorized materials and says companies must comply with copyright-holder requests to omit work from datasets. Developers are required to provide documentation describing the features of their AI models. The AI Act began taking effect in August 2024 and is being implemented gradually, with key transparency, governance and privacy provisions coming into force next month. Continue reading EU Releases AI Practices Code to Help with Legal Compliance

Meta Platforms has restructured its artificial intelligence operations, creating two separate units — an AI Products team headed by Connor Hayes and the AGI Foundations unit jointly run by Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel. The move comes as Meta is delayed getting its latest foundation model Llama 4 Behemoth to market and has also seen several key AI engineers depart. The idea is that dividing a single large organization into two smaller divisions will speed product development and add flexibility as Meta faces tough competition from top companies such as Google and OpenAI, as well as social companies X and TikTok. Continue reading Meta Restructures AI Ops in Wake of Llama 4 Behemoth Delay

Nvidia has teamed up with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX to establish what they’re predicting will be Europe’s largest AI data center complex. The partners have also reached out to French firms with a goal of creating a 1.4 gigawatts capacity campus near Paris. The announcement was made at the Choose France Summit in Versailles in a joint statement with investment firm Bpifrance SACA and regional AI startup Mistral AI. On a related note, Cisco chose France as the location for one of its Global AI Hubs, planting a flag for the development of energy-efficient, AI-ready infrastructure. Continue reading Nvidia, Cisco Plan Massive AI Data Center Projects in France

Artificial intelligence is making big inroads in shopping, with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all announcing AI-enhanced purchasing. Unveiled at the Visa Global Product Drop event, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI “to find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences,” Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said, noting “each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.” That news came a day after Mastercard introduced Mastercard Agent Pay and PayPal emphasized agentic efforts at its Dev Days event last week. Agentic commerce is the use of AI to transact on behalf of a customer or business. Continue reading Visa, Mastercard and PayPal Embrace AI Agentic Commerce

Nvidia has released NeMo microservices into general availability with version 25.4, pivoting its profile from a modular toolkit for creating custom generative AI models to emphasizing it as a platform for building AI agents at scale. As AI agents have become an in-demand commodity, Nvidia is leveraging the fact that NeMo’s capabilities seem purpose built to help them grow and thrive. Built around the Kubernetes open-source container management system, NeMo microservices are offered as “an end-to-end developer platform for creating state-of-the-art agentic AI systems,” according to Nvidia. Continue reading Nvidia Positions Its NeMo Microservices for AI Agent-Building

Google has unveiled three additions to its Gemma 2 family of compact yet powerful open-source AI models, emphasizing safety and transparency. The company’s Gemma 2 2B is a 2.6 billion parameter update to the lightweight 2B parameter Gemma 2, with built-in improvements in safety and performance. Built on Gemma 2, ShieldGemma is a suite of safety content classifier models that “filter the input and outputs of AI models and keep the user safe.” Interoperability model tool Gemma Scope offers what Google calls “unparalleled insight into our models’ inner workings.” Continue reading Latest Gemma 2 Models Emphasize Security and Performance

French startup Mistral AI has released its first large language model for coding. Codestral gives developers looking for a code-native AI tool an option to Meta’s Code Llama, Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q. Fluent in 80 programming languages — including Python, C++ and JavaScript — Codestral can complete code, write tests, and augment partial code “using a fill-in-the-middle mechanism,” while reducing “the risk of errors and bugs,” according to the company. The new LLM is described as open, but its license prohibits commercial use of both Codestral and its outputs. Continue reading Mistral Development Tool Knows 80 Programming Languages

Paris-based startup Mistral AI has made an immediate splash in the world of artificial intelligence, securing partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and others nine months after its launch. The company is offering natural language processing models, including its flagship Mistral Large, which becomes only the second LLM (after OpenAI) to land a commercial berth on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, where Meta Platforms’ Llama 2 is available in preview. Boasting “top-tier reasoning capacities” and sophisticated conversational capabilities, Mistral Large specializes in “reasoning, analysis and generation (RAG), is multilingual and supports up to 32,000 tokens.” Continue reading France’s Mistral AI Makes Its Global Debut on Microsoft Azure