Hardware
Drone Swarms Go to War: Ukraine experiments with small groups of low-contact, high-autonomy drones that strike on initiative
Swarms of drones that coordinate with one another autonomously have become a battlefield staple in Ukraine.
Hardware
Machine Learning Research
Qwen3-Next Accelerates: Alibaba’s new model uses hybrid attention layers and a sparse MoE architecture for speed and performance
Alibaba updated its popular Qwen3 open-weights models with a number of fresh, speed-boosting tweaks.
Machine Learning Research
10 Million Tokens of Input Context: ATLAS, a transformer-like architecture, can process a context window as large as ten million tokens
An alternative to attention enables large language models to track relationships among words across extraordinarily wide spans of text.
Hardware
Proactive AI Assistance for Phones: Inside Magic Cue, Google’s new AI assistant for Pixel 10
Google’s latest smartphone sports an AI assistant that anticipates the user’s needs and presents helpful information without prompting.
Business
OpenAI Turns to Oracle for Compute: A new $30 billion, 4.5 gigawatt data center offshoot of the Stargate Project
OpenAI is working with Oracle to build its next chunk of processing power, a $30 billion outgrowth of the partners’ $500 billion Stargate project and a sign of OpenAI’s ongoing thirst for computation.
Business
China Reconsiders U.S. AI Processors: Nvidia and AMD must reassure China their high-end GPUs don't pose security risk
Nvidia and AMD, having obtained the U.S. government’s permission to resume selling AI processors in China, received a cool welcome there.
Hardware
Meta’s Smart Glasses Come Into Focus: Meta reveals further details of Aria Gen 2 smart glasses for multisensory AI research
Meta revealed new details about its latest Aria eyeglasses, which aim to give AI models a streaming, multisensory, human perspective.
Business
Amazon’s Constellation of Compute: Amazon plans to spend tens of billions on AI infrastructure with Project Rainier
Amazon revealed new details of its plan to build a constellation of massive data centers and connect them into an “ultracluster.” Customer Number One: Anthropic.
Machine Learning Research
Low Precision, High Performance: Researchers at Microsoft and Tsinghua researchers propose 1.58-bit AI model that rivals full-precision competitors
Reducing the number of bits used to represent each parameter in a neural network from, say, 16 bits to 8 bits shrinks the network’s size and boosts its speed. Researchers took this approach to an extreme: They built a competitive large language model whose weights are limited to three values.
Tech & Society
AI Uses Energy, AI Saves Energy: The International Energy Agency examines the energy costs and potential savings of the AI boom
AI’s thirst for energy is growing, but the technology also could help produce huge energy savings over the next five to 10 years, according to a recent report.
Machine Learning Research
How DeepSeek Did It: Researchers describe training methods and hardware choices for DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models
DeepSeek made headlines late last year, when it built a state-of-the-art, open-weights large language model at a cost far lower than usual. The upstart developer shared new details about its method.
Machine Learning Research
4-Bit Efficiency, 16-Bit Accuracy: Microsoft researchers show that heavily quantized versions of Llama can perform as well as near-full-precision
Using an 8-bit number format like FP8 during training saves computation compared to 16- or 32-bit formats, but it can yield less-accurate results. Researchers trained models using 4-bit numbers without sacrificing accuracy.