The Humans in the Loop: GTC 2026 Recap
This Week in AI for Devs: How NVDA Will Take Over the World
Welcome to The Humans in the Loop, your executive summary of AI news for devs. I’m Andrew, the [human] author, and I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please feel free to email me at andrew@heavybit.com with your thoughts. Thanks!
Our top story: NVDA Cashes in Its Chips
The world’s most valuable company is holding its annual tech conference, announcing entries into robotics and robotaxis, plus the DLSS 5 AI-enhanced graphics you’ve seen in those hilarious internet memes. However, NVDA has also provided updates on its Vera Rubin chip generation, which purports to offer 5x inference speeds and 10x lower inference costs (and will apparently power orbital data centers). On the hardware side, the company is looking to go beyond GPUs, unveiling the licensed Groq 3 language processing unit (LPU) optimized specifically for inference, as well as its BlueField-4 STX architecture for storage to address data bottlenecks as part of its proposed 5-layer AI stack: apps, models, infra, chips, and energy. NVDA is also pushing into agentic with NemoClaw, its guardrail-enabled take on the viral OpenClaw agent. But the most interesting development may have been a [purposely provocative] remark in CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech. Specifically, the executive suggested that tokens are becoming so crucial to AI operations that the future of engineering may involve comp packages that include tokens alongside salary. Will the future of hiring involve offers that come down to token allowances? (To say nothing of how engineers would try to game that type of system?)
Next Up: The bottom line in AI news for busy dev teams
💡 Spotlight: Newly Launched AI Startups
- AMI Labs: $1B from Cathay for Yann LeCunn’s world AI model startup
- Armadin: $189M from Accel for AI-native cyber
- Kai: $125M from Evolution for AI-powered IT/OT sec
- Standard Kernel: $20M from Jump for autonomous GPU kernel generation
- Niv-AI: $12M from Glilot data center power optimization
- Manifold: $8M from Costanoa for agentic risk management
- Crafting: $5.5M from Mischief for agentic engineering infra
- NeoLab AI: $5M from “undisclosed VCs” for AI infrastructure
🚀 New Models & Products Spotlight
- Small 4: Mistral’s latest small multimodal offering
- Nemotron 3 Super: NVDA’s newest heavy-duty open-weight model
- GPT 5.4 and 5.4 Pro plus GPT 5.4 Mini and 5.4 Nano: OpenAI’s latest
- GLM-5-Turbo: Z.ai’s latest model optimized for OpenClaw
- Gemini Embedding 2: GOOG’s first natively multimodal embedding model
- Agent 4: Replit’s new model emphasizes creative design
- Unsloth Studio: No-code Web platform for training/running open models
- Claude 4.6’s 1M Context Window: Opus and Sonnet both get the upgrade
💻 Development
[GH] OpenClaw-RL: Async RL
This async framework helps you train OpenClaw agents.
Guide: The Anatomy of an Agentic Harness
LangChain’s new guide explains how harnesses work with models to execute.
[GH] ContextHub: Fetch API Docs
Professor Ng’s latest project makes agents fetch API docs for you.
Reddit: Alternatives to Function Calling
Former Manus backend lead Morro Hsu unpacks how he used Unix-style commands instead of function calls to get better agentic performance.
🤔 Interesting AI Projects, Research, and Updates
LLM Architecture: A Gallery
Researcher Sebastian Raschka unpacks visual architecture maps of the major LLMs on the market.
Claude Uncovers 14 High-Severity Firefox Bugs
Turns out, high-severity sec threats lurk even in popular public software.
[GH] autoresearch: Karpathy’s small-scale autonomous LLM trainer
The AI researcher’s new project sets up training loops on a single GPU.
Blog: MCP Is (Not) Dead
Veteran developer Charles Chen lays out the case for CLI not actually killing off MCP, which will be a reality at the enterprise for some time.
💼 Hiring and Community
Startups Hiring This Week:
- AI Engineer → HumanSignal
- AI Engineer → StackOne
Mid-Markets Hiring This Week:
- Senior PM: AI Ops → MedVidi
- Applied AI Engineer → Kodiak
Enterprises Hiring This Week:
- UX Researcher → ROKU
- Computer Vision ML Engineer → AAPL
OpenAI’s Robotics Lead Departs
In the wake of OpenAI’s recent deal with the Pentagon, robotics lead Caitlin Kalinowski departs on safety concerns.
🏭 Industry News & Trends
META Acquires Moltbook
The Llama vendor has acquired the website on which OpenClaw agents (and more than a few human marketers disguised as such) convene.
OpenAI Acquires PromptFoo
The open-source eval startup will remain open source after the acquisition.
Shocking: AI Vendors Want Enterprise Customers
New enterprise offerings: Mistral’s training tool Forge, MSFT’s Copilot Cowork, and Perplexity’s new enterprise browser. Meanwhile, after its AI tech lead departs, BABA re-organizes its Qwen AI division to nab enterprise revenue.
⚖️ Copyright, IP, Licensing, Regulation, and Safety
AMZN Wins Court Order to Block Perplexity Shopping Agent
The once-viral browser company’s shopping agent has been locked out of AMZN’s popular e-commerce infrastructure.
Anthropic Sues Pentagon
After being classified a supply-chain risk, the Claude vendor has followed through on its plan to pursue legal action.