Wayve Technologies, a U.K.-based artificial intelligence startup backed by SoftBank, has tapped Japan as the next location in its global expansion. On Tuesday, it announced the opening of a test center in Yokohama, making Japan its fourth market after the U.K., U.S. and Germany as it looks to work with major carmakers in developing AI-driven autonomous driving technology. "The platform we provide can give a safer and more reliable driving performance than any single manufacturer can build on their own," Chief Executive Officer Alex Kendall said during an interview.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conducts a news conference to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network survey.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying "disease" that "destroys," as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by "environmental factors," a still-speculative thesis that's clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines. Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism.

Nvidia has announced that its 5060 line of GeForce RTX GPUs will be available for purchase beginning on April 16. The line includes two models: The RTX 5060 Ti, which comes in 8GB and 16GB VRAM variants, and the RTX 5060, which will only come in an 8GB VRAM option. With the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti, Nvidia is making high-tech features more accessible for gamers who can't afford a 2,000 GPU. In particular, the new 5060 GPUs offer DLSS 4 support and full ray tracing capabilities for enhanced visuals and higher frame rates. "The RTX 5060 family offers gamers next-generation performance and AI-enhanced visuals starting at 299," said Vice President of GeForce Marketing Matt Wuebbling in an Nvidia press release.

Meta plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems, the company announced today. Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta. The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes.

OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI's application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI's most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. GPT-4.1 scored 55 percent on SWE-Bench, a widely used benchmark for gauging the prowess of coding models.

Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence models and software, announced today that it has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind the bug-eyed, two-armed, humanoid robot called Reachy 2. Hugging Face plans to sell the robot and will also allow developers to download, modify, and suggest improvements to its code. "It's really important for robotics to be as open source as possible," says Clément Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face. "When you think about physical objects doing physical things at work and at home, the level of trust and transparency I need is much higher than for something I chat with on my laptop." Simon Alibert and Rémi Cadene are research engineers in AI and robotics at Hugging Face. In videos shared by Pollen Robotics, Reachy 2 can be seen performing tricks like tidying coffee mugs and picking up fruit.

'The Big Weekend Show' co-hosts discuss Tinder user traffic peaking during'Dating Sunday.' A New Jersey woman is accused of hiring a man she met on Tinder to kill her police officer ex-boyfriend and his daughter, according to authorities. Camden County Prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay charged Jaclyn Diiorio, 26, with two counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of third-degree possession of a controlled dangerous substance in connection with the alleged crime. Diiorio, of Runnemede, allegedly told a confidential informant she met on Tinder that she wanted her ex, a 53-year-old Philadelphia Police Department officer, and his 19-year-old daughter killed, Gloucester New Jersey Township Police said in a news release. The informant and Diiorio allegedly exchanged several phone calls and text messages after meeting on the dating app and later in person at a Wawa, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital.

Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you're inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. Samsung has yet to announce pricing for Ballie, though with the uncertainty around the Trump administration's recently announced tariffs, you can't blame Samsung, can you?

Samsung's Ballie might soon be the smartest thing rolling around your living room. The tech giant announced today that it's partnering with Google to bring Google Cloud's generative AI technology to its Ballie AI companion home robot. If you're not familiar, Ballie first rolled out at CES 2020. As it moves, Ballie can manage lights and temperature, interact with smart appliances, send video updates of pets or loved ones, project videos or websites on the wall, play music, answer phone calls, and more. ZDNET's Senior Editor Sabrina Ortiz got an up-close look at Ballie last year, calling it "a serious attempt at making a robot assistant without being overly ambitious."

Hours after I published our Friday newsletter, debating the price of Nintendo's new console, the company announced it would delay US pre-orders for the Switch 2 as it wrestled with a new set of tariffs introduced by President Trump. "Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," Nintendo told Engadget. It added that the console is still set to launch on June 5, however. Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of new tariffs on a swath of countries, including Japan (Nintendo's base of operations), China and Vietnam. Those last two countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54 percent and 46 percent.