GoKawiil
Tech News
Volvo is bringing back the plug-in hybrid version of its XC40 after a three-year absence, pairing it with a refreshed exterior, new headlight and grille design, and a larger 11.2-inch infotainment screen running Google's Gemini assistant. The updated model, arriving at dealerships early next year, also adds a new sensor-based safety suite and diamond-cut wheel options in three sizes.
Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a feature that divides AI tasks between cloud-based models and models running locally on a user's device. It flags files or data containing personal information and lets users choose to process those locally while sending the rest of the task to the cloud, or send everything to the cloud. The feature currently works only in the Perplexity app on Apple Silicon Macs, supporting local models like Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen 3.6 alongside cloud options such as Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
Perplexity has rolled out Hybrid Compute in its Mac app, letting its Computer assistant start tasks in the cloud and shift sensitive steps, like those touching personal files, to a local model running on the Mac itself. An on-device classifier detects personal details such as names and account numbers, replaces them with placeholders before any cloud processing, and restores them once results return. The feature requires Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later, and at least 24GB of unified memory, with 32GB recommended, and uses no cloud credits or API key.
Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a new feature within its Perplexity Computer platform that divides a single task between a cloud-based frontier model, such as Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol, and a smaller model running locally on a user's Mac. The system automatically flags sensitive files or data and routes them to the local model, while less sensitive parts of the task go to the cloud for stronger reasoning power. Users can review and adjust which files are kept local before the task runs, and choose from local options including Gemma E4B and two Qwen 3.6 variants.
A review of Dave Green's live-action/animated hybrid 'Coyote vs. Acme' describes it as a heartfelt homage to classic Looney Tunes humor. The film blends real actors with animated characters, reportedly capturing the subversive, chaotic spirit of the original cartoons despite the project's uncertain release status.
A technical guide argues that most retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) implementations are over-engineered, with teams reaching for embeddings, vector databases and reranking before checking if simpler tools suffice. It lays out decision factors—data freshness, corpus size and churn, query patterns, scale and team ML skill—to determine which retrieval approach fits, starting with plain full-text search like BM25, Elasticsearch or Postgres search before adding complexity.
JOCO, a New York-based mobility company backed by roughly $7.5 million in venture funding, has built one of the largest urban e-bike infrastructure networks in the country, serving enterprise clients like Amazon, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart and Gopuff. Its rise reflects a broader shift among startups away from pure software scaling toward capital-efficient, infrastructure-heavy business models as investor scrutiny tightens.
At Hot Chips 2026, SK hynix's Jaesik Lee said hybrid bonding won't be ready in time for HBM4E and will instead debut with HBM5, as current HBM4 packages are already constrained by a 775-micron thickness ceiling matching standard logic wafers. To keep scaling within that limit, 16-Hi HBM4 stacks now use dies thinned to about 50 microns with half the interlayer gap of 12-Hi designs, while SK hynix continues using its existing MR-MUF bonding method through upcoming Nvidia Rubin-generation products.