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Not everyone is buying Elon Musk’s vision for orbital data centers.

Margaret Atwood onstage at Detroit Opera House on January 26, 2026 | Photo: Monica Morgan/Getty Images Maraget Atwood, the storied author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, was interviewed as part of the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As it usually does at these things, the issue of AI came up, and Atwood didn't mince words. According to Deadline's recap, Atwood said she'd used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic's Claude, and came away unimpressed. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown and, well: "Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn't know it was lying because it's not a human being; it's a large language model… It had skimmed a … Read the full story at The Verge.

DeepSeek open-sourced DSpark, a speculative decoding framework that attaches a draft module to existing DeepSeek-V4 weights. It pairs a parallel draft backbone with a lightweight Markov head to cut suffix decay, then adds confidence-scheduled verification that tailors how many tokens get checked to real-time GPU load. Offline, accepted length rises 16–31% over DFlash and Eagle3; in production it speeds per-user generation 57–85% over the MTP-1 baseline, losslessly. The training repo, DeepSpec, ships under MIT. The post DeepSeek Releases DSpark, a Speculative Decoding Framework That Accelerates DeepSeek-V4 Per-User Generation 60–85% Over MTP-1 appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI’s hardware team.

As tech firms make huge profits and investors fear losing out, both are doing their best to hold off the day of reckoning OpenAI staggers AI model release after White House request Every couple of decades, investors will ask themselves how long can the stock market keep climbing. Is it safe to buy more shares? Is their pension or equity portfolio vulnerable should financial markets, and especially those in the US, come crashing down to earth? When stock markets rise to historically high levels – and beyond the level when normal profits can sustain share prices – a few “experts” typically warn of an impending crash. Continue reading...

A team cut their AI inference bill by more than half. Three months later, customer satisfaction was dropping and the cost savings were tied to the quality loss. Cost-optimization routing layers are a Pareto trap, and here's the detection methodology that catches them in days instead of months. The post We Built a Routing Layer to Cut Our AI Costs. It Broke the Product. appeared first on Towards Data Science.

When confronted with cancer, Connor Christou fed everything tied tied to his regime — blood results, scan data, wearable output, journal entries — into Claude.

Tim Cook recently said price increases were "unavoidable" and described the company's pricing as "unsustainable." The 16-inch MacBook Pro saw its price go up by $300. The 11-inch iPad Air went from $599 to $749. Even the HomePod Mini got a $30 bump to $129. Cook squarely placed the blame at the feet of the AI industry, which is not surprising. RAMageddon has already come for your desktop PCs and gaming consoles. The Xbox has seen its price climb nearly 25 percent depending on the model, and Nothing even canceled an entire phone launch. Apple is just the most recent to jack up prices and point the finger at AI. The price hikes are "basic eco … Read the full story at The Verge.

Use coding agents to power your knowledge base The post How to Build a Powerful LLM Knowledge Base appeared first on Towards Data Science.

At Cannes Lions, marketers grappled with how to influence A.I. chatbots.

New models are launching in Asia that promise Mythos-like capabilities without fear of an export ban. U.S. AI labs may never recover this enormous market.

Using Open-Weight Models in Local Coding Harnesses as an Alternative to Claude Code and Codex Subscriptions

Microsoft is continuing its push to bring generative AI (genAI) into Excel, with new Microsoft 365 Copilot skills designed to automate common processes and a “plan” mode to provide more control over Copilot’s outputs when handling financial data. Microsoft made Microsoft 365 Copilot generally available in Excel in late 2024 and since then has added several capabilities, including agentic tools, a Copilot function within Excel, and Python support for advanced data analysis.   On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled a skills feature that lets users define processes Copilot can perform in Excel — such as building a discounted cash flow, Microsoft suggested, preparing a variance analysis, or refreshing a monthly reporting model.   “Instead of starting from scratch each time, a skill guides Copilot through the steps, applying the right structure and formatting, and helping produce an output that is easier to review, reuse, and trust,” Brian Jones, vice president for Excel at Microsoft, said in a bl

Thanks to AI, one of the key pillars of scientific evidence — stunning imagery that often defies belief — is crumbling.

As lawmakers and federal officials move to restrict access to advanced models, critics warn that a rushed security regime could leave the public and private sectors in the dark.

Two men in their 20s were found within five hours thanks to an artificial intelligence-powered drone, which used thermal imaging to locate them. Two hikers veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park, New South Wales, on Tuesday, and were found about half a kilometre off the track. It was the first time the FRNSW drone’s AI detection system had been used to rescue missing people Hikers lost in Kosciuszko national park rescued within five hours by AI drone Continue reading...

By feeding centuries-old nursery rhymes and folklore recordings into their own model, linguists in Louisiana hope to help a community control its digital destiny.

Meta released Astryx, an open-source React design system built on StyleX. It pairs a CSS-variable theme cascade with a CLI and MCP server, so both engineers and AI agents build using the same API. The project is in Beta, MIT-licensed, and grew inside Meta over eight years. The post Meta’s Astryx Brings a CLI and MCP Server to an Open-Source React Design System Agents Can Read appeared first on MarkTechPost.

As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay At Dave Eggers’s suggestion, we’re starting the interview by life drawing together. The novelist dropped out of art school but has been drawing for decades, and his new book is set in the art world. Prudence, our model, stands before us with her palms open, nude but for a pair of black knee-high socks. This, unsurprisingly, is an interview first for me. Eggers shows me how to hold my pencil at arm’s length and use my thumb to measure Prudence’s proportions. Since the pandemic, he’s been organising regular life‑drawing sessions in the book-lined offices of McSweeney’s, the publishing house and literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1998. He loves the element of chance in figure drawing – you never know which sketch will work out – and believes it helps cultivate empathy. How so, asks Prudence, helpfully inter

A Gates Foundation-funded clinical trial found that a generative AI tool used by frontline clinicians in Kenya was safe and improved clinical decision-making, but did not significantly improve short-term patient outcomes. According to the researchers from the University of Birmingham, the study, published in Nature Medicine, is one of the first randomized controlled trials to […]