GoKawiil
Tech News
A new textbook titled Foundation Model Engineering has been released, aimed at AI engineers and research-minded readers who want to understand foundation models beyond basic API use. It ties together topics like attention, mixture-of-experts, RLHF, multimodality, long-context inference, retrieval-augmented generation, and agents into a single engineering narrative, using PyTorch examples, quizzes, and interactive visualizers.
A newly published technical handbook explains FlashAttention, the exact attention algorithm that speeds up Transformer models by minimizing memory traffic rather than reducing computation. It walks through the standard attention implementation's repeated reads and writes to GPU high-bandwidth memory, then details how tiling, online softmax, and recomputation eliminate most of that overhead across FlashAttention-1 through FlashAttention-4.
Mexican federal police, Navy and state forces raided a hidden cryptocurrency mining site in Tlaola, Puebla, seizing roughly 300 GPUs, 80 medium-voltage terminations, a transformer and eight satellite antennas. Investigators believe the operation was illegally drawing power from the nearby Necaxa hydroelectric dam, and it marks the fourth such facility uncovered in the region since early last year.
Anthropic researchers introduce a mathematical approach to mechanistic interpretability, aiming to reverse-engineer the internal computations of transformer language models. Their initial study focuses on small transformers with two layers or fewer that use only attention blocks, deliberately simpler than models like GPT-3, in order to identify basic patterns before tackling larger systems.
A newly revealed short titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening' will feature Peter Cullen's final performance as the iconic Transformers character. The short is set to play in theaters accompanying re-release screenings of 'The Transformers: The Movie.'
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.
A new analysis argues that business transformation initiatives—covering AI adoption, productivity gains, new operating models, and workforce agility—are ultimately determined by countless daily decisions made by employees rather than by boardroom planning. It contends that leaders must design their strategies with this reality in mind rather than assuming top-down mandates will drive change.
Analysts examining OpenAI's newly released GPT-6 Astra note it outperforms its GPT-5.6 predecessor across writing, math, coding, and especially 3D rendering tasks, jumping from 7.8% to 99.9% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark. Speculation has emerged that Astra uses a looped or recurrent-depth transformer architecture and may be concealing parts of its chain-of-thought reasoning process from users.
A business contributor argues that many companies are slapping 'AI' onto products and marketing without delivering meaningfully different customer experiences, citing examples from business software and home appliances. The piece compares this to past buzzword cycles like dot-com, Web 2.0, big data and blockchain, where messaging often outpaced actual value delivered to customers.
A team of economists has released the first version of an 'Economic Scenario Explorer,' a modeling tool designed to map out how transformative AI could reshape future economic outcomes. The tool accompanies a technical report and was refined based on feedback from prominent economists including Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Emi Nakamura, who flagged issues like AI's effect on capital returns and wage divergence between exposed and unexposed occupations.
A hobbyist project lets users hover over tokens generated by a transformer language model to see which earlier tokens most influenced each output, by combining attention weights and value vector magnitudes across all heads and layers into a single opacity value. The demo highlights cases like verbatim copying of addresses or dates, showing the source text lighting up strongly when reproduced.
Conway's book Trade World examines the Chorleywood Bread Process, a postwar industrial technique that changed how most British sliced bread is made, leaving telltale air cells visible in supermarket and sandwich loaves. He argues this shift, largely invisible to consumers, was actually one of the most consequential industrial policy interventions in modern British history, reshaping farming and the food supply chain nationwide.