New Proposed Legislation Would Let Self-Driving Cars Operate in New York State
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she will propose a new law allowing limited autonomous vehicle pilots in smaller cities. Full-blown services could be next.
From brain scans to alloys: Teaching AI to make sense of complex research data
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to analyze medical images, materials data and scientific measurements, but many systems struggle when real-world data do not match ideal conditions. Measurements collected from different instruments, experiments or simulations often vary widely in resolution, noise and reliability. Traditional machine-learning models typically assume those differences are negligible—an assumption that can …
Read more “From brain scans to alloys: Teaching AI to make sense of complex research data”
MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer
Unified multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) that can both understand and generate visual content hold immense potential. However, existing open-source models often suffer from a performance trade-off between these capabilities. We present Manzano, a simple and scalable unified framework that substantially reduces this tension by coupling a hybrid image tokenizer with a well-curated training recipe. …
Read more “MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer”
16 Best Heat Protectant Sprays for Wet and Dry Hair (2026)
I’ve spent almost a year testing dozens of heat protectants for hair. Whether you’re blow-drying, curling, or straightening, these are the best formulas I’ve found.
Best Deals for New Year’s Resolutions: Sleep, Fitness, and More (2026)
Whether you’re hitting the gym or tracking your schedule, these discounts on WIRED-approved gear can help.
AdaBoN: Adaptive Best-of-N Alignment
Recent advances in test-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-N sampling, offer a simple and effective way to steer language models (LMs) toward preferred behaviors using reward models (RM). However, these approaches can be computationally expensive, especially when applied uniformly across prompts without accounting for differences in alignment difficulty. In this work, we propose a prompt-adaptive …
Crossmodal search with Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings
Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings processes text, documents, images, video, and audio through a single model architecture. Available through Amazon Bedrock, the model converts different input modalities into numerical embeddings within the same vector space, supporting direct similarity calculations regardless of content type. We developed this unified model to reduce the need for separate embedding models, …
Read more “Crossmodal search with Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings”
OpenAI Is Asking Contractors to Upload Work From Past Jobs to Evaluate the Performance of AI Agents
To prepare AI agents for office work, the company is asking contractors to upload projects from past jobs, leaving it to them to strip out confidential and personally identifiable information.
Stanford’s AI spots hidden disease warnings that show up while you sleep
Stanford researchers have developed an AI that can predict future disease risk using data from just one night of sleep. The system analyzes detailed physiological signals, looking for hidden patterns across the brain, heart, and breathing. It successfully forecast risks for conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart disease. The results suggest sleep contains early health …
Read more “Stanford’s AI spots hidden disease warnings that show up while you sleep”
Discrete spatial diffusion models data while obeying scientific principles
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a new approach that addresses the limitations of generative AI models. Unlike generative diffusion models, the team’s Discrete Spatial Diffusion approach honors scientific and physics principles. The team validated their model on two challenging scientific applications—subsurface rock microstructures and lithium-ion battery electrodes—with promising results.