GoKawiil
Tech News
A retrospective critique revisits the 1986 animated Transformers: The Movie, praising its opening act — the Autobot City battle, Devastator's formation, and Optimus Prime's climactic duel with Megatron — as nearly flawless filmmaking. The piece also notes a missed opportunity: some scripts reportedly included the giant Autobot Metroplex defending the city, a scene cut for budget or production reasons.
Hasbro has put out a short film titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening,' framed as a piece of fan service aimed at longtime Transformers followers. The release reportedly blends tones oddly, landing somewhere between a nostalgic apology to fans and an unplanned tribute, according to a review of the film.
A new textbook titled Foundation Model Engineering has been released, aimed at AI engineers and research-minded readers who want to understand foundation models beyond basic API use. It ties together topics like attention, mixture-of-experts, RLHF, multimodality, long-context inference, retrieval-augmented generation, and agents into a single engineering narrative, using PyTorch examples, quizzes, and interactive visualizers.
A newly published technical handbook explains FlashAttention, the exact attention algorithm that speeds up Transformer models by minimizing memory traffic rather than reducing computation. It walks through the standard attention implementation's repeated reads and writes to GPU high-bandwidth memory, then details how tiling, online softmax, and recomputation eliminate most of that overhead across FlashAttention-1 through FlashAttention-4.
A newly revealed short titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening' will feature Peter Cullen's final performance as the iconic Transformers character. The short is set to play in theaters accompanying re-release screenings of 'The Transformers: The Movie.'
Analysts examining OpenAI's newly released GPT-6 Astra note it outperforms its GPT-5.6 predecessor across writing, math, coding, and especially 3D rendering tasks, jumping from 7.8% to 99.9% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark. Speculation has emerged that Astra uses a looped or recurrent-depth transformer architecture and may be concealing parts of its chain-of-thought reasoning process from users.
The developer behind the PJON networking protocol spent two months building TERMy, a natural-language terminal assistant that avoids using large language models entirely. The project began as an attempt to train small transformer models from scratch on aging consumer hardware, including a GTX 1050 Ti and an i7-4790K, but those experiments produced incoherent or unsettling text outputs.
An executive order signed by President Trump declares a national emergency over foreign-made bulk-power equipment, giving the Energy Department authority to block or restrict transactions involving certain grid and data center components. Analysts say Chinese suppliers provide significant portions of the transformers, switchgear, batteries and optical technology that power U.S. data centers, exposing a vulnerability in America's AI infrastructure buildout even as U.S. firms lead in chips and compute hardware.
Acer showed off Project DualPlay Mini, a concept device that folds like a mini laptop with a built-in keyboard and flip-up 8-inch screen, but converts into a standard handheld gaming device when closed. The company says it isn't a shipping product yet, though it would use the same Intel chips found in its newly announced Predator Atlas 8 and Atlas 7 handhelds.
Veteran voice actor Peter Cullen has recorded what is being described as his final performance as Optimus Prime for a new short titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening.' The short will screen alongside select theatrical showings of 'The Transformers: The Movie.'
A researcher built and trained a small transformer model from scratch in 1.5 hours on a single RTX 5090 GPU, achieving 44% accuracy on the ARC-AGI-1 public evaluation set and 7% on ARC-AGI-2. The model, an upgraded and cheaper version of a previous open-source release, matches the performance of existing test-time-training approaches like TRM and HRM while using far less compute.
Across decades of reboots, films and animated series, Peter Cullen has consistently returned as the voice of Optimus Prime, providing continuity to the Transformers franchise regardless of who else is involved in a given production. His presence has become a defining thread linking the many different creative visions the property has cycled through.