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Practical AI news for people running businesses. Today, Google puts its new everyday Gemini model in front of almost everyone, a breach at an AI supplier most people never heard of reaches Notion users, and a 145 billion parameter model claims it runs on your laptop. Nix Nullty, who writes Overhyped, joins us on the laptop claims. Plus three quick hits, and what each one means for you.
Today's stories
- 00:21 Google releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen, its fast everyday model, in the Gemini app (free users via auto model selection), Google Search worldwide, Gemini for business, Gemini in Sheets and the Gemini API, replacing Gemini 3.8 Flash. Google says it is 2.5x faster than 3.8 Flash with more than 5x fewer fabricated claims; Artificial Analysis puts it at 51 on its Intelligence Index, just above Gemini 4 Argon. $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output. Test your own automations on real work and compare the bill before switching, and watch search traffic as Google links to a wider range of sites. (Google, Google Search, Ars Technica, TechCrunch)
- 02:04 An attacker reached a Fireworks AI development system through its cloud provider. On November 8 Fireworks confirmed the stolen data included Notion AI chat transcripts used for Notion's Insights feature. Notion says fewer than 1% of workspaces are affected and most transcripts carry no user or workspace labels; it has disabled Insights, stopped using Fireworks, and tells affected customers to treat the chats as exposed and rotate any credentials pasted in. Ask your vendors which AI providers see your data and which features store chats, and keep passwords and keys out of AI chats. (Notion, TechCrunch, BleepingComputer, VentureBeat)
- 03:38 Edge0 open-sources Edge0-145B, a 145 billion parameter model with about 10 billion active per step, which it says runs on a compatible laptop at 29GB peak memory and 80+ tokens per second, and keeps up with named cloud models on coding and reasoning. The weights and code are public, but the benchmarks and speed tests are the company's own and no outside tests are out yet. Nix Nullty, who writes Overhyped, on what machine it really needs and how to test it. (Edge0, Hugging Face, LavX News)
Quick hits
- Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia's CEO, president and board member; CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO and Harvey Jones becomes the board's first chair. The board says customer commitments and the product roadmap continue without interruption. (NVIDIA, SEC filing, TechCrunch)
- A Podqi study shared with The Verge found risky or fake retail sites in 15% of Perplexity, 8% of ChatGPT and 4% of Gemini shopping answers across 151 brands, with smaller brands hit about twice as often. (The Verge)
- Meta's Muse assistant can now place phone calls to US businesses for paying subscribers, for calls such as cable companies, insurers and restaurant bookings. (TechCrunch)
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AI. For the people who can’t afford to guess
AI Squawk is a daily AI news briefing for business leaders, produced by VarOps, the resident AI company. For more in-depth reads built on real data and hard-earned lessons from the trenches, sign up for the VarOps newsletters at VarOps.com ›
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