GoKawiil
Tech News
A growing number of Chinese computer science graduates are opting to remain in China for AI research rather than pursue PhDs in the United States, as the capability gap between the two countries narrows. China now produces more AI researchers than the US, and firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are building models that rival top US systems at much lower cost.
Researchers at the University of Oxford launched a project in 2022 to explore how academic teams can produce timely scientific insights in partnership with various stakeholders. Their experiments aim to demonstrate more agile and transparent research practices suited for urgent decision-making contexts. These efforts follow the successful COVID-19 response, which showcased rapid scientific collaboration and innovation.
NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.
Nature interviewed eight higher-education leaders and consultants about the condition of UK universities as roughly 518,000 new students, including around 300,000 aged 18, begin term this week. Nearly 40% of institutions are forecast to run a deficit this financial year amid falling funding and shifting enrollment patterns. While the panel disagreed on whether degrees still offer value and whether the situation constitutes a full-blown crisis, they converged on two points: the current financial model cannot continue, and universities are not prepared for the disruption artificial intelligence will bring.
Responding to Ming Li's proposal to separate academic 'titles' from resource allocation in Chinese universities, a Nature correspondence argues the reform is unlikely to succeed. The author agrees that suppressed performance indicators tend to resurface under different labels, but contends university administrators benefit from the current metric-based system and thus have little incentive to change it.
Canada has hired 48 scholars away from top American universities in a coordinated recruitment push. The move brings established researchers and their expertise into Canadian institutions, bolstering the country's academic and research capacity.
Shodan, a search engine that indexes internet-connected devices rather than web pages, has surpassed 3 million registered users worldwide. Its user base now includes 89% of Fortune 100 companies, five of the top six cloud providers, and more than 1,000 universities.