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Anker issues another recall for multiple power banks that pose fire safety risk

Anker has issued its second recall this month for several power bank models sold around the world, as MacRumors has reported. If you'll recall, its previous recall that launched earlier this month focused on the Anker PowerCore 10000 power bank model A1263, which were sold between June 1, 2016 and December 31st, 2022 in the United States. The company found that the lithium-ion battery it used for the model has a risk of overheating that could then lead to the power bank melting, producing smoke

Your BNPL Plans Could Soon Impact Your Credit Score. Here's When

CNET/Getty Images Have you ever opted for Buy Now, Pay Later at the checkout? You'd hardly be the only one. About 86.5 million people used BNPL in 2024, according to Capital One's research. Starting later this year, your BNPL plans could start appearing on your credit report. You can use BNPL for just about everything now, from Costco purchases to DoorDash (although that doesn't mean you should). But the one thing BNPL couldn't do was improve your credit. Although some of Affirm's plans do rep

AlphaGenome: AI for Better Understanding the Genome

Science AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome Share Copy link × Introducing a new, unifying DNA sequence model that advances regulatory variant-effect prediction and promises to shed new light on genome function — now available via API. The genome is our cellular instruction manual. It’s the complete set of DNA which guides nearly every part of a living organism, from appearance and function to growth and reproduction. Small variations in a genome’s DNA sequence can alter a

Anker issues new global recall for five power bank models over fire hazard

Just days after issuing a voluntary recall for the Anker PowerCore 10000, the company has now issued a second, broader recall, this time with global reach and five additional power bank models affected. Anker says the move is a proactive step following recent improvements to its internal quality assurance systems. While the company claims the risk of malfunction is low, it’s recalling the affected models “out of an abundance of caution.” All five power banks flagged in the recall use lithium-io

Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon

It’s Agent Week at Understanding AI! This week I’m going to publish a series of articles explaining the most important AI trend of 2025: agents! Today is a deep dive into reinforcement learning, the training technique that made agentic models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3 possible. Today’s article is available for free, but some articles in the series—including tomorrow’s article on MCP and tool use—will be for paying subscribers only. I’m offering a 20 percent discount on annual subscriptions

Why your enterprise AI strategy needs both open and closed models: The TCO reality check

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue. For the last two decades, enterprises have had a choice between open-source and closed proprietary technologies. The original choice for enterprises was primarily centered on operating systems, with Linux offering an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. In the developer realm, open-source languages like Python and JavaScript dominate,

The rise of prompt ops: Tackling hidden AI costs from bad inputs and context bloat

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue. Model providers continue to roll out increasingly sophisticated large language models (LLMs) with longer context windows and enhanced reasoning capabilities. This allows models to process and “think” more, but it also increases compute: The more a model takes in and puts out, the more energy it expends and the higher the costs. Couple this wi

Model minimalism: The new AI strategy saving companies millions

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has made it easier for enterprises to envision the kinds of projects they can undertake, leading to a surge in pilot programs now transitioning to deployment. However, as these projects gained momentum, enterprises realized that the earlier LLMs they had used were unwieldy and, worse, expensive. Ente

How runtime attacks turn profitable AI into budget black holes

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue. AI’s promise is undeniable, but so are its blindsiding security costs at the inference layer. New attacks targeting AI’s operational side are quietly inflating budgets, jeopardizing regulatory compliance and eroding customer trust, all of which threaten the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership of enterprise AI deployments. AI

Normalizing Flows Are Capable Generative Models

Normalizing Flows (NFs) are likelihood-based models for continuous inputs. They have demonstrated promising results on both density estimation and generative modeling tasks, but have received relatively little attention in recent years. In this work, we demonstrate that NFs are more powerful than previously believed. We present TarFlow: a simple and scalable architecture that enables highly performant NF models. TarFlow can be thought of as a Transformer-based variant of Masked Autoregressive Fl

How your Pixel phone can now help you shoot expert-level photos and video

Max Buondonno/ZDNET For a lot of people, camera quality is a huge selling point when picking a cellphone. Having so many different options can be overwhelming, though. So, how do you ensure that you're getting the most out of your phone's capabilities? A new Google Pixel Camera mode wants to teach you everything you need to know. Also: The best camera phones: Tested by experts When Google announced its 2025 Pixel Feature Drop, one feature went relatively unnoticed -- something called "Camer

The best deals on 4K TVs

Things are looking bright for those who want to nab a great TV in 2025 at a substantial discount. There’s usually a great deal happening on a mid- or high-end TV from LG, TCL, Hisense, or Amazon’s own Fire TV brand — even if the biggest discounts remain reserved for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day, and during the lead-up to the Super Bowl. Right now, there are a number of discounted 4K TVs to choose from, spanning a wide variety of prices, sizes, and feature sets. Whether you want

Topics: 4k amazon inch model tv

How Highmark Health and Google Cloud are using Gen AI to streamline medical claims and improve care: 6 key lessons

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Among the numerous educational and startlingly insightful panel discussions on AI enterprise integrations featuring industry leaders at VentureBeat’s Transform 2025 conference this week was one led by Google Cloud Platform Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Will Grannis and Richard Clarke, Highmark Health’s Senior Vice Presi

Show HN: PILF, The ultimate solution to catastrophic oblivion on AI models

Technical Notes: PILF (Predictive Integrity Learning Framework) Document Version: 3.0 Core Concept: A cognitive learning framework designed to transform fixed hyperparameters (like learning rate, model capacity) into dynamic policies driven in real-time by the intrinsic "surprise" ( Surprise ) of data. It is essentially an adaptive hyperparameter scheduling algorithm that allows a model to autonomously decide "how much to learn" and "with what capacity to learn" based on the value of the learn

Apple Research unearthed forgotten AI technique and 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

AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

Science AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome Share Copy link × Introducing a new, unifying DNA sequence model that advances regulatory variant-effect prediction and promises to shed new light on genome function — now available via API. The genome is our cellular instruction manual. It’s the complete set of DNA which guides nearly every part of a living organism, from appearance and function to growth and reproduction. Small variations in a genome’s DNA sequence can alter a

Introducing Gemma 3n

The first Gemma model launched early last year and has since grown into a thriving Gemmaverse of over 160 million collective downloads. This ecosystem includes our family of over a dozen specialized models for everything from safeguarding to medical applications and, most inspiringly, the countless innovations from the community. From innovators like Roboflow building enterprise computer vision to the Institute of Science Tokyo creating highly-capable Japanese Gemma variants, your work has shown

Topics: 3n device e4b gemma model

Google DeepMind Releases AlphaGenome

Science AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome Share Copy link × Introducing a new, unifying DNA sequence model that advances regulatory variant-effect prediction and promises to shed new light on genome function — now available via API. The genome is our cellular instruction manual. It’s the complete set of DNA which guides nearly every part of a living organism, from appearance and function to growth and reproduction. Small variations in a genome’s DNA sequence can alter a

Deals: Rare offer on 1TB M4 MacBook Air at $200 off, Apple Solo Loops $15, all-black Ocean Band 20% off, more

Alongside the ongoing $100 price drop on the 512GB M4 Mac mini, today we spotted a rare deal on the 24GB M4 MacBook Air with the upgraded 1TB SSD at $200 off the list price. From there we move over to some official Apple Watch band deals – the Solo/Braided Loop bands start from just $15 today and we have a rare savings opportunity on the official all-black Apple Ocean Band at 20% off. Those offers join a host of charging and accessory offers, some discounts on M4 iPad Pro, and more. Rare deal h

Insta360 has a cheaper Flow 2 gimbal for the masses

It duplicates many of the features from the Flow 2 Pro, which launched in January. Insta360's new gimbal isn't quite "Pro," but its pricing isn't, either. The Flow 2 includes many of the features from the Flow 2 Pro while costing $50 less. The Insta360 Flow 2 ticks most of the boxes that its Pro sibling does. (The more expensive gimbal launched earlier this year.) Like that model, the Flow 2 features a built-in selfie stick and a tripod. It supports advanced subject tracking, golden ratio subj

Nvidia DLSS 4 transformer model exits beta, set to bring improved graphics to more games

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust Why it matters: Most people think of multi-frame generation when they hear about Nvidia DLSS 4, but the transformer model upgrade in DLSS Super Resolution might be the update's most consequential upgrade. Many games can already benefit from the feature, and it's likely to become the standard across upcoming releases. The latest version of Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction SDK, r

Experience Making a 1-minute AI movie with my 7-year old daughter

My daughter Kate (7 years old) really loves Minecraft! Together, we used several generative AI tools to create a 1-minute animation based on only 1 input photo of her. The whole project took around 20 hours of work and I learned several lessons that I want to share here. Context I am still trying to get used to the enormous speed with which generative AI is progressing. 6 months ago, I was blogging about my experiments with Tencent’s Hunyuan Video, which was an absolute breakthrough at that ti

Federal judge sides with Meta in lawsuit over training AI models on copyrighted books

A federal judge sided with Meta on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought against the company by 13 book authors, including Sarah Silverman, that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on their copyrighted works. Federal Judge Vince Chhabria issued a summary judgment — meaning the judge was able to decide on the case without sending it to a jury — in favor of Meta, finding that the company’s training of AI models on copyrighted books in this case fell under the “fair use” doctrine of c

IBM sees enterprise customers are using ‘everything’ when it comes to AI, the challenge is matching the LLM to the right use case

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Over the last 100 years, IBM has seen many different tech trends rise and fall. What tends to win out are technologies where there is choice. At VB Transform 2025 today, Armand Ruiz, VP of AI Platform at IBM detailed how Big Blue is thinking about generative AI and how its enterprise users are actually deploying the technology. A key them

PicoGUS gets CD-ROM emulation

(note: please use firmware v3.0.1, which fixes issues with MPU emulation in SB and USB modes) New features/changes CD-ROM emulation PicoGUS now supports CD-ROM emulation (in other words, PicoGUS is now an ODE)! It emulates a Panasonic/MKE interface and drive and supports CD images in ISO or BIN/CUE stored on a USB drive plugged into the USB port on the PicoGUS. CD-ROM emulation has been tested in DOS and Windows 9x and CD audio playback is fully supported. CD-ROM emulation is available in So

Topics: cd emulation mode rom usb

Apple’s C1 is coming to this product next, and skipping the rest

When Apple launched its iPhone 16e earlier this year, it included a brand new component: the C1 modem. But more recent devices like the M3 iPad Air and A16 iPad haven’t included it. Here’s where the C1 will appear next, and which products are not expected to get it. Why the C1 modem was worth the wait For many years, Apple has been working to develop its own cellular modem tech. Absent that tech being ready, the company has had to rely on Qualcomm to supply 5G modems for its devices. While Qu

Topics: air apple c1 iphone modem

DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)

Status This project is now discontinued. Project DeepSpeech DeepSpeech is an open-source Speech-To-Text engine, using a model trained by machine learning techniques based on Baidu's Deep Speech research paper. Project DeepSpeech uses Google's TensorFlow to make the implementation easier. Documentation for installation, usage, and training models are available on deepspeech.readthedocs.io. For the latest release, including pre-trained models and checkpoints, see the latest release on GitHub.

AirPods Max 2: Here’s what rumors say is coming next

AirPods Max debuted nearly five years ago, and aside from a minor USB-C revision last year, there’s never been a proper AirPods Max 2. But Apple is preparing a true next generation model. Here’s what we know so far about AirPods Max 2. Lighter weight design When AirPods Max launched in 2020, users found a lot to like about the over-ear headphones, but two complaints stood out: the $550 price tag was expensive and they were fairly heavy to wear Remind you of any other products? AirPods Max 2

Your next job? Managing a fleet of AI agents

akinbostanci/Getty Images Agentic AI is moving fast, but are we ready for it? "We're all going to be CEOs of a small army of AI agents," predicted Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the digital economy lab at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and founder of Workhelix, recently quoted in The New York Times. "We have to think, OK: What is it we really want to accomplish? What are the goals here? And we have to think a little bit more deeply about that than we have in

AI Agents Are Getting Better at Writing Code—and Hacking It as Well

The latest artificial intelligence models are not only remarkably good at software engineering—new research shows they are getting ever-better at finding bugs in software, too. AI researchers at UC Berkeley tested how well the latest AI models and agents could find vulnerabilities in 188 large open source codebases. Using a new benchmark called CyberGym, the AI models identified 17 new bugs including 15 previously unknown, or “zero-day,” ones. “Many of these vulnerabilities are critical,” says