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Tech News
A tech publication compiled a list of 10 iPad apps designed to help with habits and daily routines, excluding Apple's own first-party apps and Adobe's subscription tools. All the apps are free to start, though most offer paid upgrades for additional features. The selections emphasize clean design that makes use of the full iPad screen and limit AI use mostly to search and transcription rather than image or text generation.
A technical team detailed a new GPU-accelerated method for synchronizing model weights between trainers and samplers in reinforcement learning systems, built around Blackwell's hardware Decompression Engine. Using delta weight updates, massively parallel GPU compression and a curated double-compression scheme, the system reportedly achieves sampler pause times under 0.23 seconds and full weight sync under 4 seconds, tested on an NVFP4 GLM-5.3 model with 445 GB of weight tensors in their 'Ampersand' production configuration.
Linguist Noam Chomsky had argued that statistical machine learning approaches to language merely approximate data without producing scientific understanding, calling this a novel and flawed notion of success. In response, Peter Norvig wrote an essay examining Chomsky's claims point by point, questioning whether engineering success in language modeling is truly irrelevant to science and whether Chomsky's characterization of statistical models is accurate.
Google announced that starting next year, AI features like Gemini and Gemini Notebook will be turned off by default for K-12 student accounts, requiring school administrators to manually enable them. However, schools that choose to keep AI disabled will also lose access to Google Search for those student accounts, since the company says the two are deeply integrated.
Following the November 1 end of daylight saving time in the US, many Google Nest Hub and Nest Learning Thermostat owners report their devices' clocks shifted back an hour even in regions that don't observe the time change, according to user complaints gathered by Android Authority. The glitch has thrown off alarms, automations, and thermostat schedules, with reports surfacing from across Canada including British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba.
JIVX lets users paste a link to a Japanese-language YouTube video and converts its spoken lines into practice sentences that learners can type or speak aloud, with each attempt graded for accuracy. Users can also choose from videos already added to the platform by others rather than submitting their own.
A letter in Nature responds to Marc Schmitt's argument that universities should train students to actively argue with AI models and grade that interaction. The correspondence contends that assessing only AI-assisted performance is incomplete, citing a randomized trial of secondary-school math students in which chatbot access boosted practice scores but reduced scores on a later unassisted exam.
Trajectory, an 18-person startup founded by three Stanford alumni, has raised $45 million in a Series A round at a $300 million valuation, led by Sequoia with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures. The platform lets businesses connect open source AI models to their applications, collecting feedback that is used to retrain and improve those models for specialized tasks over time. Legal tech company Harvey and financial analysis firm Rogo are already using the platform to post-train open source models for their respective industries.
An analysis of Frieren and seven other anime found that knowing the 500 most common words gives a viewer 85.9% 'coverage' of spoken words, but only 38.4% of the first 3,000 lines are fully understandable with that vocabulary. The gap arises because a single unknown word in a line of several words blocks full comprehension, even when most individual words are familiar.
Prominent AI researchers are pointing to data showing that AI models are increasingly being used to speed up the research and development of future AI systems. The trend, framed around a widely circulated chart, suggests AI tools are now contributing meaningfully to improving successor models rather than just being built by human engineers alone.
A research team built a physics-based RL simulation of Tesla's flying Roadster, complete with wind gusts and the ramp-flip and Cybertruck kickflip stunts from the reveal, then had several leading LLMs try to pilot it. Models including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Nemotron 3.5 Super, Muse Spark Open, Beam 1.0, and GPT-6 Astra mostly crashed, landing few or none of the maneuvers even with unlimited thinking time, while a small 4B model fine-tuned with reinforcement learning landed reliably, including in a 33 m/s storm.
The fourth-generation Nest Learning Thermostat is discounted by $60 to $219.99 across Amazon, Best Buy and The Home Depot in all three colors, matching its best price this year and nearing its all-time low. The device includes a bundled remote temperature sensor, an adaptive display, and broader HVAC compatibility than its predecessor.