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The Buzz - ■
Mistral launched Mistral Forge at Nvidia GTC, enabling enterprises to train custom AI models from scratch on proprietary data - ■
The platform differentiates from OpenAI and Anthropic, which primarily offer fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches - ■
Mistral's bet targets enterprises demanding full model ownership and deep customization beyond surface-level adjustments - ■
The launch signals intensifying competition in the lucrative enterprise AI market, where customization could be the key differentiator French AI startup Mistral is making a bold bet on enterprise customization with Mistral Forge, a new platform that lets companies train AI models from the ground up using their own data. Announced at Nvidia's GTC conference, the move puts Mistral on a collision course with OpenAI and Anthropic, who've largely focused on fine-tuning pre-trained models. It's a strategic gamble that enterprise clients actually want to build, not just tweak, and it could reshape how companies think about AI ownership. Mistral just threw down a major challenge to the AI establishment.
Arizona's attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi on Tuesday in a dramatic escalation of the legal battle over prediction markets. Why it matters: Kalshi allows users in all 50 states to risk money on event contracts — including what it calls "100% legal sports trading" — but detractors say it usurps state gambling regulations. Driving the news: Arizona AG Kris Mayes, a Democrat, hit Kalshi with 20 counts, including charges for operating an illegal gambling business and providing election wagering.
Two weeks into its senseless, unlawful, unpopular and grossly mismanaged war on Iran, the Trump administration has locked in on a familiar target: the media. President Trump and his cabinet are failing, flailing and saying the quietest parts at max volume. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr have lashed out at critical coverage with bogus charges of “fake news,” “hoaxes” and even “TREASON” in a desperate attempt to cover up their blunders by blaming the messengers. They hope they can silence critics and dodge hard questions by appealing to their billionaire bosses and threatening those who aren’t yet on board with blocked mergers, revoked broadcast licenses and canceled government contracts. Will this finally be the moment that media execs stand up to censorship and politicians wake up to the dangers of media coercion and consolidation? We desperately need them to stop capitulating and start pushing back.
The advocacy group leaders highlighted major settlements and accomplishments as reasons for expanding budget.
“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions...have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” the FCC Chair posted on X
Amagi has published its latest report into regional FAST viewership alongside a special survey looking at AI in Media Operations. Asked to evaluate 20 end-to-end content operations tasks, respondents across broadcast and streaming identified information-driven workflows such as metadata enrichment, context tagging, subtitling and translation. Srinivasan KA, co-founder and president, global business, Amagi, commented, “The industry is entering a phase where AI is no longer just about experimentation — it’s about embedding intelligence directly into operational workflows. Media companies that integrate applied AI across ingest, localisation, scheduling, and monetisation will unlock meaningful gains in speed, efficiency, and scalability.”
- The Trump Administration’s insistence on low-cost BEAD proposals has left a $21 billion slush fund of leftover BEAD monies
- The NTIA is currently trying to decide what to do with these non-deployment funds
- Meanwhile, an industry consultant predicts there will be defaults in the BEAD program
Many stakeholders in the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program are too polite to call the program a “dud.” But they’re starting to question whether BEAD — since the Trump administration changed the rules in mid-2025 — is going to make a real difference in closing the digital divide. There are concerns about the large amount of BEAD funds that are leftover. People are also questioning whether satellite will provide enough bandwidth over time. And at least one industry consultant predicts there will be defaults in the BEAD program. First, there’s concern that only about half of the $42.5 billion that was allocated for BEAD is going toward connecting households. The remaining non-deployment funds are still in limbo-land.
ZDNET's key takeaways - Nvidia's NemoClaw aims to make OpenClaw agents more secure.
- OpenClaw agents are highly capable, but come with risks.
- The company also launched a multi-lab open-source model coalition.
"What's your OpenClaw strategy?" Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked rhetorically to the crowd at Nvidia GTC, the company's annual AI conference, on Monday. The company is full steam ahead on AI agents -- and it's hoping its latest release can fix OpenClaw's security problem. During the keynote, Huang announced Nvidia's new NemoClaw stack, which is built to shore up the OpenClaw agent platform, the viral open-source assistant framework that has impressed users with its autonomous capabilities.
We studied the performance of 14 of the largest municipal networks from December 2024 through December 2025, and compared their performance to each other and to their ISP competitors. Key Takeaways: - When compared to their broadband competitors, eight municipal providers in the U.S. that we monitored using Ookla Speedtest data beat their broadband competitors in median upload speeds and one municipal provider, Sherwood Broadband, outpaced the competition in median download speeds. We monitored a total of 14 municipal providers, however, one provider —EBP— did not have any competitors with enough test samples to compare its performance against.
Washington (March 15, 2026) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, today sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, urging him to resign over his latest social media post threatening to revoke broadcasters’ licenses if they do not cover the illegal war with Iran with Donald Trump’s preferred narrative. Senator Markey highlights this post as an extraordinary abuse of FCC authority and a clear violation of the First Amendment, as well as the Trump administration’s latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media.
The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since February 28, 2026. Brent crude broke $100 a barrel, the IEA took the unprecedented step of releasing 400 million barrels from strategic reserves, and the entire market is focused on oil prices and what happens at the pump. But I spend my time picking apart energy bottlenecks for AI data centers, and what I see behind the oil headlines looks more consequential — and far less priced in — than a temporary fuel cost spike. My thesis: the Hormuz crisis shifts the US data center buildout timeline by 12 to 24 months on a significant share of projects — not through a single channel, but through five parallel supply chain shocks with different delay lags, several of which reinforce each other. The probability-weighted estimate of a material delay sits around 50%. That’s not a tail risk. That’s a coin flip.
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, threatened on Saturday to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over their coverage of the war with Iran, his latest move in a campaign to stomp out what he sees as liberal bias in broadcasts. As the war entered its third week, Mr. Carr accused broadcasters of “running hoaxes and news distortions” in a social media post and warned them to “correct course before their license renewals come up.” “Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not,” he said. Mr. Carr shared a Truth Social post by President Trump that criticized the news media for its coverage of the war with Iran. Mr. Trump referred to a story published by The Wall Street Journal that reported five American refueling planes had been struck in Saudi Arabia, claiming its headline was “intentionally misleading.” He accused the news media of wanting the United States to lose the war.
The investors for the TikTok USDS Joint Venture will pay out the total across several payments, according to a Wall Street Journal report. There may have been some extra incentive for the Trump administration to get the TikTok US deal done. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to receive a total of $10 billion in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the US. The new investors who acquired stakes in the US entity of TikTok already paid a $2.5 billion fee to the administration when the deal closed in January, but WSJ's latest report noted that the group of investors would continue to make payments until the total hits $10 billion.
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Today, the MN House Workforce, Labor, and Economic Development Finance and Policy saw a presentation on AI (artificial intelligence) and Minnesota workforce from the University of Minnesota and about workforce concerns about AI from Northstar Policy Action. The questions from legislators were interesting and reflected issues that have come up in other committee meetings. So, if you have an interest in AI, this is a fairly quick way to learn about what’s happing in Minnesota or at least what’s happening enough to be discussed in policy circles.
A new lawsuit filed Monday joins two others centered around nonconsensual explicit images allegedly made by the AI chatbot. On Monday, three girls filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI alleging that the company’s Grok AI tool was used to generate child sexual abuse material from their photos. This new civil case joins at least two others revolving around nonconsensual deepfakes filed against xAI, which was founded by billionaire Elon Musk. Those earlier cases are centered around nonconsensual deepfakes posted on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk, while this new complaint involves a third-party app that relied on Grok AI to make images.
I work for a few ISPs that are lucky enough to be working in counties that are seeing explosive population and new housing growth. Growth has always been uneven across the country, and I decided to take a look at the parts of the country with the fastest growth. One of the best ways to understand housing growth is to look at permits to build new homes. Historically, 99% of permits to build new single-family homes results in a new home. About 80% of permits for multifamily homes turn into a condominium or apartment. According to the Census Bureau’s Building Permit Survey, the top five states for permits for single-family homes in 2025, as measured in permits per 100,000 residents, were South Carolina (56), North Carolina (48), Florida (45), Idaho (45), and Delaware (43). At the bottom of the list were New York (4), Connecticut (5), Illinois (6), Rhode Island (6), and Massachusetts (6).
Service assurance is officially graduating from an era of dashboards, tickets, and engineers scrambling to find what’s gone wrong to swift root cause analysis and proactive fixes
When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it sought to foster innovation and competition in telecommunications markets, expand the definition of universal service, and modernize regulatory structures for the digital age. Three decades later, architects of the ‘96 Act say it achieved many of those goals, but numerous legal challenges following its passage reshaped how key provisions were implemented. “Litigation shaped so much of what the Act eventually became,” said Mignon Clyburn, a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, speaking Thursday among a panel of former FCC regulators, legal counsel, and policy advisors who helped shape and defend the landmark telecom law. Gathered for an event organized by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society marking the law’s 30th anniversary, the event reflected on both the spirit and letter of the landmark legislation which has shaped much of the modern Internet in the United States. The first major overhaul of telecommunications law in more than 60 years, the ‘96 Act required the FCC to conduct more than 80 separate rulemakings addressing everything from appropriate pricing, to interconnection rules and the unbundling of incumbent telephone networks.
In late 2024 the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law to try and ensure the quality of taxpayer-subsidized broadband. The proposal was well-intentioned. It mandated a certain level of transparency on telecoms to ensure that consumers knew exactly what kind of broadband connection they were buying. The effort attempted to counter historically dodgy practices by bigger providers to jack up their advertised prices using sneaky and misleading below-the-line fees. But four years after Congress proposed the idea, studies began making it clear that ISPs weren’t seriously adhering to the rules, and regulators weren’t really interested in enforcing them anyway.
Daniela Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic with her brother Dario, said uniquely human qualities will actually be more critical in the age of AI, not less. In an interview with ABC News that aired on Saturday, she said the number of jobs that AI could do without help from people is “vanishingly small.” At the same time, even the most cognitively challenging tasks that humans excel at can also be augmented by AI. “I continue to believe that humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs,” Amodei added. “And then I think it will also open the aperture to a lot of access and opportunity for many people.”
SAN JOSE, March 16, 2026 (AP) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday elaborated on his vision for keeping his company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom that he predicted will produce a $1 trillion backlog in orders within the next year. Huang, 63, also touched upon many of the themes that he has been trumpeting since he emerged as one of Silicon Valley's most influential voices during the past few years, including his thesis that the AI buildup remains in its infancy.
Fierce Network recently had an interesting article about Consumer Cellular. This is a cellular MVNO that you might not have heard of. For those not familiar with the term, an MVNO is a cellular company that buys wholesale minutes and data from one of the large cellular carriers and markets the cellular product under its own brand name. Consumer Cellular operates on the AT&T network. The company was founded over thirty years ago, aligns with AARP, and has always marketed to older cellular customers. Consumer Cellular stresses affordable cell plans, and its average revenue per customer is around $30 per month. The most interesting thing about the company is that it is growing while many other MNVOs are shrinking. The company has grown to over 4.4 million customers and is still seeing continued customer growth.
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![[Updated] Carr Threatens Broadcast Licenses Over Iran War Coverage | by George Winslow | TVTechnology.com | Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/OV12WhGO_m6t_N7H4kqu4Tl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
