AI News: Claude for Chrome, Nano Banana, Meta Poaching Gone Wrong, Apple Using Gemini, and more!

AI Model Releases and Advancements - Anthropic released Claude for Chrome as a research preview, allowing Claude to control the Chrome browser [1] - Nvidia released Neatron Nano 9B V2, a 9 billion parameter reasoning model, achieving a score of 43 on the artificial analysis intelligence index [1] - Google released Nano Banana, a Gemini 2.5% Flash Image model, demonstrating superior performance in image editing [1] - Nouse Research released Hermes 4, an open-source hybrid reasoning model in 70 billion and 405 billion parameter versions, emphasizing creativity and uncensored interaction [2] - Microsoft released Vibe Voice, an open-source text-to-speech model, with performance on par with advanced voice mode [20][21] Talent Movement and Company Strategy - Meta Super Intelligence Labs experienced departures of key staff, including researchers and engineers, following Meta's push to compete with OpenAI and Google [1] - Bert Mayor, who spent 12 years at Meta and helped develop PyTorch, joined Anthropic [1] - Apple is in talks to use Google's Gemini AI to power a revamped Siri [3][4] AI Infrastructure and Economic Impact - AI infrastructure spending is propping up the economy, with global spending projected to reach $375 billion in 2025 and $500 billion the following year [16][17] - Nvidia is publishing papers on making LLM inference 50+ times faster through post-neural architecture search [9] Agentic Coding and Flight Search - Grock Code, a small version of Grock, is available in coding platforms like Windsurf and Cursor at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.5 per million output tokens [2] - Kiwi.com released a flight search MCP server, allowing agents to search for flights with detailed parameters [6][7] AI in Weather Prediction - Google's AI model accurately forecasted the strongest Atlantic storm this year, potentially becoming the gold standard for predicting severe weather [13]