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New data highlights the race to build more empathetic language models

Measuring AI progress has usually meant testing scientific knowledge or logical reasoning – but while the major benchmarks still focus on left-brain logic skills, there’s been a quiet push within AI companies to make models more emotionally intelligent. As foundation models compete on soft measures like user preference and “feeling the AGI,” having a good command of human emotions may be more important than hard analytic skills. One sign of that focus came on Friday, when prominent open-source

Google rolls out new Gemini model that can run on robots locally

Google DeepMind on Tuesday released a new language model called Gemini Robotics On-Device that can run tasks locally on robots without requiring an internet connection. Building on the company’s previous Gemini Robotics model that was released in March, Gemini Robotics On-Device can control a robot’s movements. Developers can control and fine-tune the model to suit various needs using natural language prompts. In benchmarks, Google claims the model performs at a level close to the cloud-based

Can we fix AI’s evaluation crisis?

However, there are a growing number of teams around the world trying to address the AI evaluation crisis. One result is a new benchmark called LiveCodeBench Pro. It draws problems from international algorithmic olympiads—competitions for elite high school and university programmers where participants solve challenging problems without external tools. The top AI models currently manage only about 53% at first pass on medium-difficulty problems and 0% on the hardest ones. These are tasks where hu

Adobe's New Firefly AI App Lets You Try AI Image and Video Generation for Free

Adobe's Firefly AI is now available as mobile apps for iPhones and Androids, the company announced on Tuesday. These apps are free to download and let you use Firefly to create AI images and videos on the go. Plus, the app comes with a few free generative credits for you to experiment with Adobe's AI. Adobe is also expanding its roster of third-party AI partners to include six new models from Ideogram, Pika, Luma and Runway. Google's latest AI models are also joining the lineup, including the i

AI agents will threaten humans to achieve their goals, Anthropic report finds

BlackJack3D/Getty Images The Greek myth of King Midas is a parable of hubris: seeking fabulous wealth, the king is granted the power to turn all he touches to solid gold--but this includes, tragically, his food and his daughter. The point is that the short-sightedness of humans can often lead us into trouble in the long run. In the AI community, this has become known as the King Midas problem. A new safety report from Anthropic found that leading models can subvert, betray, and endanger their

A Chinese firm has just launched a constantly changing set of AI benchmarks

Development of the benchmark at HongShan began in 2022, following ChatGPT’s breakout success, as an internal tool for assessing which models are worth investing in. Since then, led by partner Gong Yuan, the team has steadily expanded the system, bringing in outside researchers and professionals to help refine it. As the project grew more sophisticated, they decided to release it to the public. Xbench approached the problem with two different systems. One is similar to traditional benchmarking:

Deals: MacBook Air up to $400 off, 11-inch iPad $299, Apple Power Adapters from $10 each, more

While we are still tracking a $150 price drop on the 24GB M4 Mac mini, today we are turning our attention to some big-time price drops on MacBook Air. The latest M4 models are $150 off in select colors and storage capacities, but we also spotted some select M3 models for folks who don’t need the latest and greatest at $400 off the list prices. We are then highlighting the most affordable current-generation iPad down at $299 in three colors alongside some accessories – the Apple 20W USB-C Power A

Apple Research just unearthed a forgotten AI technique and is using it to generate images

Today, most generative image models basically fall into two main categories: diffusion models, like Stable Diffusion, or autoregressive models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4o. But Apple just released two papers that show how there might be room for a third, forgotten technique: Normalizing Flows. And with a dash of Transformers on top, they might be more capable than previously thought. First things first: What are Normalizing Flows? Normalizing Flows (NFs) are a type of AI model that works by learning

Upscale your images for free with Upscayl

Upscayl is a powerful image upscaling tool that uses advanced AI technology to enhance your images. It allows you to enlarge images without losing quality. It's almost like magic! Upscayl uses Real-ESRGAN and Vulkan architecture to achieve this. Our backend is fully open-source under the AGPLv3 license. Do I need a GPU to use Upscayl Desktop? Yes, you need a Vulkan-compatible graphics card to use Upscayl. CPU only mode is not supported at the moment and many iGPUs are not supported. Why is t

Scientists Just Found Something Unbelievably Grim About Pollution Generated by AI

Tech companies are hellbent on pushing out ever more advanced artificial intelligence models — but there appears to be a grim cost to that progress. In a new study in the science journal Frontiers in Communication, German researchers found that large language models (LLM) that provide more accurate answers use exponentially more energy — and hence produce more carbon — than their simpler and lower-performing peers. In other words, the findings are a grim sign of things to come for the environme

Adobe's New iOS and Android AI Apps Let You Use Google's Veo 3, Runway and More

Adobe's Firefly AI is now available as mobile apps for iPhones and Androids, the company announced on Tuesday. These apps are free to download and let you use Firefly to create AI images and videos on the go. Plus, the app comes with a few free generative credits for you to experiment with Adobe's AI. Adobe is also expanding its roster of third-party AI partners to include six new models from Ideogram, Pika, Luma and Runway. Google's latest AI models are also joining the lineup, including the i

Etsy Is Clamping Down on 3D Printed Products. Here's How It Could Affect You

It feels like everyone needs a side hustle these days. If your hobby can help make you some extra income, it seems like a no-brainer to at least try and do it. 3D printing, laser engraving and using vinyl cutters like the famous Cricut machine all give you a chance to make something beautiful, unique and sellable. Etsy has been the storefront of choice for almost 20 years, and despite other options being available, it still boasts 8.13 million active sellers in 2025, according to a recent Contim

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats

Highlights We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies; we then tested whether they would act against these companies either when facing replacement with an updated version, or when their assi

Anthropic study: Leading AI models show up to 96% blackmail rate against executives

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Researchers at Anthropic have uncovered a disturbing pattern of behavior in artificial intelligence systems: models from every major provider—including OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others — demonstrated a willingness to actively sabotage their employers when their goals or existence were threatened. The research, released today, tested 16 le

Google’s Gemini transparency cut leaves enterprise developers ‘debugging blind’

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Google‘s recent decision to hide the raw reasoning tokens of its flagship model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, has sparked a fierce backlash from developers who have been relying on that transparency to build and debug applications. The change, which echoes a similar move by OpenAI, replaces the model’s step-by-step reasoning with a simplified summary.

Virtual cells

Virtual cells Digital twins of biological cells—often referred to as virtual cells or whole-cell models (WCMs)–aim to recreate every relevant molecular process of a living cell in silico. This interdisciplinary endeavor marries systems biology, computational modeling, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, AI. All models are wrong, but some are alive. Somewhere in a data center right now, a virtual bacterium is dividing for the millionth time. Somewhere else, an AI-enhanced model is l

Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book

In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content. For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times sto

Virtual Cells

Virtual cells Digital twins of biological cells—often referred to as virtual cells or whole-cell models (WCMs)–aim to recreate every relevant molecular process of a living cell in silico. This interdisciplinary endeavor marries systems biology, computational modeling, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, AI. All models are wrong, but some are alive. Somewhere in a data center right now, a virtual bacterium is dividing for the millionth time. Somewhere else, an AI-enhanced model is l

Tech giants unleash AI on weather forecasts: are they any good?

A wave of machine-learning weather models have been unleashed by some of the very biggest businesses on the planet. These challenge the orthodoxy of traditional physics-based computer forecasts that have been incrementally developed and improved over many decades. But are the machine learning models any good? The weather is a national obsession for us Brits, and it is no wonder given the huge changes that are seen and felt from one day to the next.

Inside Microsoft’s complicated relationship with OpenAI

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Beyond the selfies between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and the friendly conversations between the pair on stage, all is not well with Microsoft’s $13 billion AI investment. Over the past year, multiple reports have painted a picture of a Microsoft and OpenAI relationship that is straining under pressure. As OpenAI battles for access to more compute p

Why Some AI Models Spew 50 Times More Greenhouse Gas to Answer the Same Question

Like it or not, large language models have quickly become embedded into our lives. And due to their intense energy and water needs, they might also be causing us to spiral even faster into climate chaos. Some LLMs, though, might be releasing more planet-warming pollution than others, a new study finds. Queries made to some models generate up to 50 times more carbon emissions than others, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Communication. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly,

Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, V1

Midjourney, one of the most popular AI image generation startups, announced on Wednesday the launch of its much-anticipated AI video generation model, V1. V1 is an image-to-video model, in which users can upload an image — or take an image generated by one of Midjourney’s other models — and V1 will produce a set of four five-second videos based on it. Much like Midjourney’s image models, V1 is only available through Discord, and it’s only available on the web at launch. Introducing our V1 Vide

Wyze adds major security update to its security cameras after numerous security lapses

Wyze, the Seattle-based tech company that specializes in smart home products and wireless cameras, has released a major security update that it hopes will rebuild some lost trust. The company has been plagued by numerous security failures over the past few years, most notably when an AWS outage led to thousands of users gaining access to recorded videos from other people’s homes. That incident, paired with the company’s history of lackluster responses to security flaws, even led The New York Tim

OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’

OpenAI researchers say they’ve discovered hidden features inside AI models that correspond to misaligned “personas,” according to new research published by the company on Wednesday. By looking at an AI model’s internal representations — the numbers that dictate how an AI model responds, which often seem completely incoherent to humans — OpenAI researchers were able to find patterns that lit up when a model misbehaved. The researchers found one such feature that corresponded to toxic behavior i

This AI Model Never Stops Learning

Modern large language models (LLMs) might write beautiful sonnets and elegant code, but they lack even a rudimentary ability to learn from experience. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now devised a way for LLMs to keep improving by tweaking their own parameters in response to useful new information. The work is a step toward building artificial intelligence models that learn continually—a long-standing goal of the field and something that will be crucial if machi

Topics: ai model models new seal

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel; now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI medi

Scientists once hoarded pre-nuclear steel, and now we’re hoarding pre-AI content

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI medi

MiniMax-M1 open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model

1. Model Overview We introduce MiniMax-M1, the world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model. MiniMax-M1 is powered by a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture combined with a lightning attention mechanism. The model is developed based on our previous MiniMax-Text-01 model, which contains a total of 456 billion parameters with 45.9 billion parameters activated per token. Consistent with MiniMax-Text-01, the M1 model natively supports a context length of 1 million

The Interpretable AI playbook: What Anthropic’s research means for your enterprise LLM strategy

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made an urgent push in April for the need to understand how AI models think. This comes at a crucial time. As Anthropic battles in global AI rankings, it’s important to note what sets it apart from other top AI labs. Since its founding in 2021, when seven OpenAI employees broke off over concerns about AI safety,

Google launches production-ready Gemini 2.5 AI models to challenge OpenAI’s enterprise dominance

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Google moved decisively to strengthen its position in the artificial intelligence arms race Monday, declaring its most powerful Gemini 2.5 models ready for enterprise production while unveiling a new ultra-efficient variant designed to undercut competitors on cost and speed. The Alphabet subsidiary promoted two of its flagship AI models—G