Monday morning. Beijing.

Alibaba Cloud led a Series B funding round into ShengShu Technology. Two billion yuan. About $290 million. TAL Education and Baidu Ventures took the rest. ShengShu makes Vidu, an AI video generator. Vidu Q3 Pro, released in January, ranks in the top ten globally for text-to-video. The money goes toward something the company calls a general-purpose world model. Vision, audio, touch. The kind of thing you need if you're going to teach a robot how doors open. Or how floors work. The announcement landed Friday, April 10. The press read it as a bet against text-only AI. They were right.

Wednesday. Mountain View.

Google added Notebooks to Gemini. April 8. The feature syncs with NotebookLM. Bidirectional. You drop a source in either app, it shows up in the other. Up to 600 sources per notebook on the Ultra plan. Audio Overviews and Video Overviews stay locked to NotebookLM itself. The integration eliminates one tab switch and confirms a thing Google had been quiet about: Gemini and NotebookLM were always meant to be one product. The rollout went to Ultra, Pro, and Plus subscribers on the web. Mobile coming. Free tier later.

Thursday. Santa Clara.

Intel and Google announced a multiyear AI infrastructure deal. April 9. Google Cloud commits to multiple generations of Intel Xeon, including the Xeon 6 line. Training. Inference. General compute. The two companies have been co-developing infrastructure processing units — IPUs — since 2022, and they're staying with it. ASIC-based. Custom. The IPU offloads networking, storage, and security from the host CPU so the CPU can do its job. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan: "Scaling AI requires more than accelerators — it requires balanced systems." The stock closed up nearly 5%.

Same day. San Francisco.

Waymo and Waze launched a pothole-data pilot. Both Alphabet companies. The robotaxi fleet logs surface defects with cameras, radar, accelerometers, and the vehicle's own physical feedback. The data flows into Waze for Cities — a free platform that municipal DOTs already use. Five metros to start: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area. Around 500 potholes already identified. Waze users in those cities will see them too and can verify. Atlanta declined to use the feed. Phoenix already has its own road-analyzer vehicle. The product nobody asked for, except cities did, repeatedly, for years.

Same day again. Paris.

The PyTorch Foundation accepted Safetensors as its newest hosted project. April 8. PyTorch Conference EU. Safetensors is a tensor serialization format Hugging Face built to solve one problem: model files in the older pickle format could execute arbitrary code when loaded. Safetensors can't. It's already the dominant format for open-weight model distribution. Now it sits alongside DeepSpeed, Helion, Ray, vLLM, and PyTorch itself under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Boring infrastructure. The kind that matters.

Friday. Mountain View again.

Snowflake's blog ran a customer story: Virginia State Police saved $3 million using Snowflake AI. The agency used Cortex to consolidate fragmented data systems and surface waste. Public-sector procurement isn't sexy. Three million dollars is three million dollars.

Friday. Manhattan.

NYU Tisch expanded its partnership with Runway. April 10. The deal pulls Runway's full AI video, image, and audio suite into two programs — ITP and IMA — and into the Hyper Cinema Lab, which is open to students across the university. Free credits. Runway's co-founders met at ITP in 2016. The mainline Kanbar Institute of Film and Television isn't part of the deal — yet. The Washington Square News published an opinion three weeks later titled Keep AI out of Tisch. Contract faculty had recently struck on AI-protection terms. So: a place where the next generation of filmmakers will learn, and a place that just told them the tools are unavoidable. Both true.

Domestic items, briefer:

OkCupid handed three million user photos to Clarifai in 2014. The FTC settlement landed March 30 — Week 14 territory, not this one. The same week the brief covers, OpenAI was running enterprise marketing around ChatGPT for business. No major OpenAI launch in Week 15; the big April announcements — Workspace Agents (April 22), Privacy Filter (April 22), Images 2.0 (April 21), GPT-5.5 (April 23) — all came after. AWS Bedrock AgentCore Evaluations went GA March 31, also Week 14. AWS shipped smaller AgentCore updates through the week; nothing that needed its own headline.

Roscosmos is using AI in its cosmonaut selection — for initial document analysis, not for evaluating essays. The announcement came from cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko in mid-March, not Denis Manturov, and not April. Brief had two attributions wrong on one item. Cut.

The "Gemini generating 3D models at Google I/O 2025" line in the brief refers to a 2025 event. Not Week 15. Cut.

"AI Integration Lead. Workflow Orchestration." — a real trend, covered by Atera, JetSoftPro, and herohunt.ai across the week, but no single announcement to anchor it. Trend piece, not a news item. Trim.

The AI-generated-code-concerns paragraph is the same. A real ongoing conversation. No specific Week 15 trigger. Trim.

VTB Bank deputy on AI pilot-to-production: I couldn't verify a public Week 15 statement. If the source has a date and a name, send it. Otherwise cut.

Final note. The brief opens at sunrise and closes at darkness on April 12. The literal weather in Lower Manhattan that week ran from 50 to 65 Fahrenheit. Rain Tuesday. Clear Friday. The darkness was metaphorical and the digest can do without it.

End of week.