Also: Liquid AI brings small multimodal models to devices, and Anthropic cuts Claude pricing for government Google DeepMind introduced Genie 4, a research preview that generates live virtual worlds you can move through and change with plain language. Unlike a normal video generator, it keeps the scene going as you explore and adds built-in ambient sound and spoken dialogue. Google is starting with trusted testers before broader access for AI Ultra users and early API partners. The useful shift is faster simulation for robotics, game design, filmmaking, and other work that benefits from trying ideas inside a responsive world. Oracle and NVIDIA said Rubin systems are now generally available on Oracle Cloud, and Oracle plans to expand those clusters to multi-gigawatt scale. They are also adding NVIDIA Vera CPUs, which handle the code execution, tool use, and data fetching that happen between model replies. That matters because AI agents do not spend all their time generating words. They also spend time doing ordinary computing work around each step. In plain English, Oracle is building a bigger cloud setup for both the model itself and the busy support work around it. Liquid AI released LFM3, an open-weight family of small models for text, images, video, audio, speech, and rapid decision tasks. The company says developers can fine-tune them on a single GPU, and run some versions on a phone or laptop instead of a remote data center. One model can listen and speak, another can watch video, and another is built to answer many structured questions in one pass. The bigger point is that useful multimodal AI is moving toward cheaper, more private, on-device use. Anthropic expanded its agreement with the U.S. General Services Administration, offering a 40 percent discount on Claude across enterprise, government, and API products, plus rollout help for agencies. Anthropic says hundreds of federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial organizations can buy through the same arrangement and pay only for what they use. This is less flashy than a model launch, but procurement often decides whether AI actually spreads. Lower prices and a standard buying route can move AI from pilots into everyday government work. Sources: deepmind.google · investor.nvidia.com · huggingface.co · anthropic.com This episode includes AI-generated content.
