Pulse on AI: Infrastructure, Interfaces, and Trust: Alphabet’s AI Search, Meta’s Frontier Ambitions, and ColPali’s PDF Breakthrough

Pulse on AI dives into a packed slate: Alphabet’s record quarter and 75M daily AI Search users, massive AI capex, and more fuel for Waymo; Meta’s strong Q3 with 3.5B daily users, Meta AI at 1B MAU, a frontier model push, a 49% stake in Scale AI, and an aggressive data center buildout; KVDA-UCT, a new Monte Carlo Tree Search abstraction that boosts sample efficiency in deterministic settings; lawmakers challenging ICE’s face scans over accuracy and civil liberties; ColPali’s vision-language retrieval that makes RAG work on PDFs with complex tables and charts; why unified management is the new baseline for AI-era multi-cloud; Emma Thompson’s call for consent-first AI writing UX; Probabl’s €13M raise to industrialize scikit-learn and classic ML; SoulX-Podcast’s open-source, long-form, multi-speaker voice synthesis; PS5 Pro’s AI upscaling trade-offs; Strawberry Browser’s agentic ‘Skills’; and a snapshot of TechCrunch Disrupt’s AI themes. Three takeaways: infrastructure leads, context builds trust, and ‘boring’ ML and ops still deliver big ROI.

Sources:

• RiPSIM Gains Strategic Investment from Swisscom Ventures
• 3.5 Bn People Use At Least One Meta App Every Day: Zuckerberg in Q3 Earnings
• ICE’s forced face scans to verify citizens is unconstitutional, lawmakers say
• Grouping Nodes With Known Value Differences: A Lossless UCT-based Abstraction Algorithm
• Beatings, killings, and lasting fear: The human toll of MoD's Afghan data breach
• Soul App Open-Sources SoulX-Podcast: A Breakthrough in Multi-Speaker Podcast Voice Synthesis
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: Day 2
• PS5 Pro Chinese edition goes on sale, raising questions over value and real-world benefits
• Bringing Vision-Language Intelligence to RAG with ColPali
• Why Unified Management is becoming the new baseline for the AI age
• Google-Mutter steigert Gewinn um ein Drittel trotz EU-Strafe
• Probabl lève 13M€ pour bâtir le champion européen du logiciel open source en intelligence artificielle
• Emma Thompson speaks of her ‘intense irritation’ with AI
• This new AI browser lets you set up 'Skills' to take on your everyday tasks - how it works