The European Space Agency is pressing ahead with its Envision mission to Venus after NASA signaled it likely can't deliver the US-built synthetic aperture radar it had promised under a 2024 partnership agreement. That radar was meant to be the spacecraft's main tool for mapping the planet's volcanic surface through its thick sulfuric-acid clouds at ten times the resolution of NASA's 1990s Magellan mission. ESA's project scientist says development will continue at full pace regardless.
Apple's new foldable iPhone Duo features a 7.6-inch inner display and 5.4-inch outer display, priced at $1,999. CNET compares this to buying a separate iPhone and iPad, finding the combined cost of those devices can be close to or even exceed the Duo's price depending on the models chosen.
Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, alongside new iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods models. The device features a 7.6-inch inner display and 5.4-inch outer display, dual 48-megapixel cameras with simultaneous front-and-rear capture, up to 24 hours of battery life, and Apple's A20 Pro chip, starting at roughly $2,000.
Feyn launched MultiMatte, a background removal tool that lets users type a word or phrase to isolate a specific object in an image while removing everything else. The model fine-tunes Meta's SAM 3 using LoRA, adjusting only 19.49M of its 860M parameters (2.27%), and swaps SAM 3's binary masks for continuous alpha mattes that can render soft edges like hair or translucent objects. On DIS benchmarks, MultiMatte scores 0.893-0.923 compared to SAM 3's 0.649-0.703.
A new analysis finds Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet collected roughly $28 billion in federal contracts between 2018 and 2022, with the five largest tech contracts from 2019-2022 carrying combined ceilings of at least $53 billion. Separately, venture capital poured nearly $100 billion into defense tech startups from 2021 to 2023, a 40 percent jump over the prior seven years combined.
Amazon has dropped the price of the 13-inch iPad Air with M2 chip, 256GB storage and cellular connectivity to $885, a $164 discount off its usual price. The listing matches the model's previous all-time low, matching an earlier discount seen on the same configuration.
A developer built and released a free tool for practicing technical interview questions, including real problems sourced from companies like Google, after finding existing paid interview prep services unaffordable. The tool lets users try problems like 'Two Sum' immediately without requiring signup.
Jacob Coxon, who moved from OpenAI to Anthropic earlier this year specifically for its safety-focused reputation, has now left the AI field entirely, saying the industry is on a path toward building systems humans may not be able to control. He told the Wall Street Journal that even Anthropic cannot safely pursue advanced AI without government regulation or a broader industry slowdown, predicting things could spiral by the end of next year. Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger publicly backed Coxon, estimating a greater than 10% chance AI could cause human extinction within a decade.
A developer has built a custom animation set for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 that mimics the smooth folding transitions expected on Apple's rumored foldable iPhone, sometimes called the iPhone Fold or iPhone Duo. The recreation shows how Apple's anticipated software polish could look when applied to Samsung's existing foldable hardware.
A user posting on Hacker News says OpenAI's account setting that disables use of chat data for model training has reverted to 'on' after being turned off, despite no action from the user. They say this has happened more than once, and they only caught it by deliberately tracking when they last disabled the option.
A new four-hour documentary by Alex Gibney, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, includes interviews with Elon Musk's first wife Justine Musk, who says he referred to the mothers of his children as interchangeable "breeders." She also described incidents of gaslighting, including Musk misremembering who was holding their infant son when he died of SIDS, and recalled him calling himself "the alpha" at their wedding. Musk has publicly dismissed the film as a "hit piece."
Austin startup Tern has secured an $11.26 million U.S. Army contract to install its GPS-alternative navigation system in military vehicles. The technology uses a device connected to a vehicle's diagnostics board, paired with a tablet, to calculate location and routing by passively analyzing data the vehicle already generates, rather than relying on satellite signals.
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