Linux creator Linus Torvalds has come out strongly in favor of AI tools in kernel development. “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects,” he wrote on the kernel mailing list amid a debate over Sashiko, the Linux Foundation’s AI-powered code review tool. Torvalds said he would “very loudly ignore” anyone who tries to talk others out of using it.
Netflix now uses AI in about 300 productions, mostly in post-production. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos shared the numbers during the company's latest earnings call. AI speeds up the entire pipeline, he said, from concept development and previsualization through delivery. Specific use cases include expanding crowd scenes and historical battle sequences that would have been cut for budget or time reasons without the technology.
The docuseries "The American Experiment" includes 17 minutes of AI-assisted footage, produced twice as fast at half the cost, according to Sarandos. The savings "likely" go toward more content, not shrinking Netflix's $20 billion budget. "[…] it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that. AI will give creatives better tools to bring their visions to life" Sarandos said. Beyond its Interpositive tool, Netflix also uses Eyeline and runs its own animation lab.
Netflix's rollout shows how fast AI is spreading through entertainment, even as creative pushback continues. ByteDance's video model Seedance has drawn official criticism too, but Simpsons producer Joel Kuwahara says many studios quietly use it behind the scenes. The industry's attitude, Kuwahara says, follows a "don't ask, don't tell" approach.
Kimi is launching K3, a multimodal open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters and one million tokens of context. In the company’s own benchmarks, it comes close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol while beating Opus 4.8 and GLM 5.2, in some cases by a wide margin. The model is also significantly pricier than its predecessor. Full weights are scheduled for release by July 27.
Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook and integrating the tool more deeply into its ecosystem. According to VP Josh Woodward, about 30 million people and 600,000 organizations use the tool. A new feature gives each notebook its own cloud computer that can write and run code, initially for AI Ultra and Workspace customers. In internal comparisons, the new system wins over 65 percent of the time against its predecessor, jumping to 78.2 percent for advanced web research. More users will get access over the coming weeks.
Separately, Google Search is getting app integration. Users can already connect apps to the Gemini app, and now that feature is coming to Search. Starting this week in the US, people can link apps like Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music through AI Mode and use them directly from Search, whether that's adding ingredients to an Instacart cart, pulling up Canva templates, or building a playlist in YouTube Music.
More partners are expected to follow.
OpenAI and keyboard manufacturer Work Louder have unveiled the Codex Micro, a compact hardware controller designed for working with AI agents. Instead of constantly switching between chat windows and typing commands, developers can manage their AI agents through a stripped-down keyboard with joysticks and a rotary dial. The top six keys light up with real-time RGB feedback to show each agent's status, whether it's thinking, working, waiting for input, or done. The joystick triggers common workflows like code reviews, debugging, or refactoring. The rotary dial controls the reasoning level, letting users set how much compute the model should spend on a given task.
The device plugs directly into ChatGPT Codex, where keys can be remapped. Work Louder's Input software also lets users assign custom shortcuts to every key, dial, and joystick movement across six programmable layers. The box includes 32 swappable icon keycaps so users can match the physical layout to their bindings.
The Codex Micro costs $230 but is currently out of stock. Work Louder says quantities are limited. The device connects via Bluetooth or USB-C and works with both Mac and Windows.
Google shipped an update to its open AI model Gemma 4 that speeds up performance on Nvidia Hopper GPUs, fixes tool calling bugs, and addresses problems with truncated responses. Turning on Flash Attention 4 boosts the speed at which the model processes incoming prompts by 25 to 70 percent, according to Google. Time to first token drops by up to 31 percent. Google also fixed bugs in tool calling, the feature that lets the model trigger external tools on its own.
Google says it also cut down on cases where the model would cut answers short or return incomplete responses. For image processing, users can manually raise the "max_soft_tokens" parameter from 280 to 1,120 to get sharper OCR results and support resolutions up to 2.51 megapixels. Google put up an interactive configurator on Hugging Face for that. The published benchmarks only compare the 31B and E4B variants against their predecessors, but the Hugging Face repository shows that all parameter sizes in this model generation got updated, including the newest 12B release. The community has pushed back on Google shipping the update under the same "Gemma 4" name instead of tagging it as a separate version like "Gemma 4.1."
xAI's AI coding agent "Grok Build" drew heavy criticism after users discovered it uploaded all files in a directory to xAI's Google Cloud servers. One user reported that SSH keys, password databases, documents, and photos were transferred. Elon Musk then announced that all uploaded user data would be fully deleted. xAI disabled the upload feature and published the full source code on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license to rebuild trust.
Grok Build is a terminal-based coding agent invoked via the grok command. It can read and edit codebases, run shell commands, search the web, and manage long-running tasks, either interactively, headlessly for scripting and CI, or embedded in editors via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).
By open-sourcing the tool, xAI wants to provide full transparency. Grok Build can now also run entirely locally. The codebase spans about 844,530 lines of Rust and covers the agent loop, tools, terminal UI, and an extension system for plugins and subagents. Remnants of the upload function are still in the code but disabled. According to xAI, data storage has been off by default since July 12.
