AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment…
Cohere AI has released Rerank 5, a new reranker family in Pro and Fast tiers. Cohere Rerank 5 is a retrieval model that reorders search results before they reach an LLM. It adds 2 developer features: Context Focus, which returns relevant passages inside each document, and calibrated relevance scores. For RAG and agent builders, the…
During Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, the company revealed its board had approved a new class of non-voting stock, called Class C common stock. The shares give the holder an ownership stake but no vote on company decisions. This class takes effect in January. Meta says it will use the stock for capital raising, employee…
Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Andruil’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. That idea, on Thursday, announced its emergence from stealth as Warhound, armed with $200 million in funding from investors including In-Q-Tel, Sequoia, and 8VC. The round values the…
Gradium has open-sourced Phonon, a family of small text-to-speech models built to run on the device. The Gradium Phonon on-device TTS model comes in 31M and 40M sizes. The English Phonon 31m ships under Apache 2.0 and fits in a 64.5 MB file. Developers get natural speech with no cloud…
The AI platform Hugging Face on Thursday released a new open model for understanding DNA that can run locally on a laptop. Developed in collaboration with researchers at Zhongguancun Academy in China and the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, the model is trained on genomic sequences and natural language so that people can…
I’m not even going to try to pretend I don’t have a bit of a girl-crush on Shoshana Berger. She’s a former WIRED editor turned editorial leader for companies like Notion and Ideo. She’s super smart and chic. And she’s the cofounder, with Nina Willdorf, of the Aged Intelligence Society, a buzzy events startup that…
Liquid AI just announced Liquid RIPL, short for Real-time Inference Pipeline. RIPL is a low-latency engine that serves Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) inside a live request path. It returns complete generated responses end-to-end in under 50 ms. It also claims that latency holds while traffic arrives continuously at peak load….
Elon Musk has invested approximately $1 billion in the newly formed media company Skydance, according to a new report from Semafor. News of the investment comes a few weeks after Paramount completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery to create the combined company. Co-CEOs David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz are tasked with bringing…
The bad week for cybersecurity just got worse for thousands more companies, who were spied on by Chinese hackers following the breach of IT management and remote access giant ConnectWise. Security researchers at Microsoft say the China state-aligned hackers broke into ConnectWise’s cloud backup service and stole application credentials that are used to establish data…
