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Tech News
A developer testing an AI model at maximum effort settings found that most requests produced little or no chain-of-thought reasoning tokens. Even when extended reasoning occurred, it fell well short of the levels seen in the model's published benchmark results.
A hobbyist project called Mini-AGI has been shared on Hacker News as a byte-level language model that builds its own architecture and trains from scratch on a single consumer GPU with 8GB of VRAM. Rather than keeping all parameters in memory, it stores weights as disk files and loads them as needed, letting it expand or prune capacity while it continuously reads and learns from a text corpus without forgetting prior knowledge. The creator says it's currently a toy-scale demonstration, not a competitive model, and weights won't be released until the current training pass over its corpus finishes in a few weeks.
Angle Health, a Y Combinator alum from 2020 that helps small businesses manage level-funded health plans, announced a $200 million Series C round plus a $400 million tender offer allowing employees to sell shares. The round, valuing the company at $2.7 billion, was led by Vitruvian Partners with participation from Town Hall Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Portage Ventures, PruVen Capital, and Y Combinator, and is expected to close later this month. Angle says it now serves over 5,000 businesses and is profitable.
One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, revealed that its upcoming Soulslike title Valor Mortis will cost $40/€40 when it launches on October 13. The game offers a roughly 20-hour story set in a supernatural reimagining of Napoleon's war in Eastern Europe, and the studio says it spent a year deciding on this price point.
Google has released stable versions of its AndroidX Security State and Security State Provider libraries, giving apps a way to check the security status of individual Android components rather than relying solely on the device's overall security patch date. Apps can now determine which specific fixes are installed, which updates are pending, and whether known vulnerabilities have been addressed, even if the broad patch level hasn't changed.
A new report published in Scientific Data finds that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica have shed roughly 12.5 trillion tons of ice since 1979, enough to cover the continental United States in five feet of water. Researchers found that most of this loss—about five-sixths—comes not from warmer air but from ocean water eroding ice sheets from below and along their edges. Scientists cite examples like Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier, which is now retreating up to 164 feet daily.
A Center for an Urban Future analysis of New York City hiring data found postings for entry-level 'computer and mathematical' roles have fallen 49 percent since 2022. The nonprofit's director, Jon Bowles, says the traditional first rung of the tech career ladder is under intense pressure, with similar declines showing up in administrative, financial, media and education entry-level postings.
NOAA announced on September 14 that El Niño has officially crossed the threshold to become a 'very strong event' for the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter of 2026-27, a designation known as a Super El Niño. Forecasters say this could become the strongest El Niño on record, with effects lingering into 2027 and potentially raising sea levels along California's coast by up to a foot.
A new scientific analysis finds that the polar ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland have shed more than 11 trillion tons of ice since the 1970s. Researchers say the primary cause of this loss is not surface melting from warmer air, but glaciers accelerating and discharging ice into the ocean more quickly.
Electric vehicle owners can charge at home either through a standard household outlet or by installing a faster Level 2 charger. The choice depends on factors like battery size, the car's maximum AC charging speed, and daily driving distance, rather than a need to always charge to full like a phone. Home charging remains far cheaper than gasoline, roughly a third of the cost, even before factoring in a Level 2 upgrade.
An opinion piece features students weighing whether a college degree still holds value as AI systems increasingly handle tasks once assigned to entry-level workers. The discussion centers on shifting expectations for new graduates entering a job market reshaped by automation.
Google has released XLS, an Apache 2.0-licensed toolchain that converts high-level functional descriptions into synthesizable Verilog and SystemVerilog hardware designs. The tool lets engineers write logic once and run it both as native host software and as generated hardware, with correctness guarantees ensuring the two versions behave identically.