The Microsoft Azure Outage Shows the Harsh Reality of Cloud Failures
The second major cloud outage in less than two weeks, Azure’s downtime highlights the “brittleness” of a digital ecosystem that depends on a few companies never making mistakes.
Artificial neurons replicate biological function for improved computer chips
Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and School of Advanced Computing have developed artificial neurons that replicate the complex electrochemical behavior of biological brain cells.
IBM’s open source Granite 4.0 Nano AI models are small enough to run locally directly in your browser
In an industry where model size is often seen as a proxy for intelligence, IBM is charting a different course — one that values efficiency over enormity, and accessibility over abstraction. The 114-year-old tech giant’s four new Granite 4.0 Nano models, released today, range from just 350 million to 1.5 billion parameters, a fraction of …
Breakthrough optical processor lets AI compute at the speed of light
Researchers at Tsinghua University developed the Optical Feature Extraction Engine (OFE2), an optical engine that processes data at 12.5 GHz using light rather than electricity. Its integrated diffraction and data preparation modules enable unprecedented speed and efficiency for AI tasks. Demonstrations in imaging and trading showed improved accuracy, lower latency, and reduced power demand. This …
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AI use makes us overestimate our cognitive performance, study reveals
When it comes to estimating how good we are at something, research consistently shows that we tend to rate ourselves as slightly better than average. This tendency is stronger in people who perform low on cognitive tests. It’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE): The worse people are at something, the more they tend to …
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MiniMax-M2 is the new king of open source LLMs (especially for agentic tool calling)
Watch out, DeepSeek and Qwen! There’s a new king of open source large language models (LLMs), especially when it comes to something enterprises are increasingly valuing: agentic tool use — that is, the ability to go off and use other software capabilities like web search or bespoke applications — without much human guidance. That model …
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Elon Musk’s Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points
The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people.
Beyond electronics: Optical system performs feature extraction with unprecedented low latency
Many modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as surgical robotics and real-time financial trading, depend on the ability to quickly extract key features from streams of raw data. This process is currently bottlenecked by traditional digital processors. The physical limits of conventional electronics prevent the reduction in latency and the gains in throughput required in …
From human clicks to machine intent: Preparing the web for agentic AI
For three decades, the web has been designed with one audience in mind: People. Pages are optimized for human eyes, clicks and intuition. But as AI-driven agents begin to browse on our behalf, the human-first assumptions built into the internet are being exposed as fragile. The rise of agentic browsing — where a browser doesn’t …
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Best GoPro Camera (2025): Compact, Budget, Accessories
You’re an action hero, and you need a camera to match. We guide you through all the models, plus accessory recommendations and hidden software tricks to try.