From the archive
AI models are the systems behind chatbots, coding assistants and tools that work with text, images, audio and video. Follow new language model releases, open-weight models, local AI and benchmark results. Our coverage looks at capabilities, context limits, access, pricing and evaluation methods so you can compare the evidence behind a launch, not just the claims in its announcement.
Lead story
Keewano has launched KeewanoDB, a managed database built around a simple complaint from the agent era: AI systems are often asked to explain what happened after the useful sequence has been flattened into warehouse tables and aggregates. The company also announced $12m in seed funding led by Hetz…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
The US hyperscalers driving the AI data-centre boom may spend nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027, according to research described by MIT Technology Review. To justify that bill, the analysis estimates that they need to increase their own productivity 2.7-fold by 2030, while AI must also deliver much broader…
NVIDIA Watch
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is using open-source medical-imaging AI to turn children’s cardiac scans into patient-specific 3D models in seconds. The practical leap is speed: NVIDIA says work that once occupied a skilled researcher for four hours can now fit into routine clinical care.
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek Harness v0.1.6-alpha.1 adds experimental Browser Use and Computer Use, giving the agent workbench new ways to interact with browsers and local machines. The release also adds terminals, MCP resource discovery, headless JSONL runs and remote-workspace support over SSH, making it a substantial step towards agents that can…
Watch Desk
Atoms, the robotics company founded by former Uber chief Travis Kalanick, has hired former Meta AI executive Vikas Chandra as its vice president of AI. Chandra says he will build “foundation models for the physical world”, designed to help machines understand and act in real-world environments. That matters…
Watch Desk
The next useful leap in AI-agent engineering may be deleting code. Philipp Schmid, a Google DeepMind developer advocate, argues that teams should replace sprawling orchestration loops with instruction files, skills, general-purpose tools and hosted environments. The payoff is a simpler system that can adapt as models improve, rather…
Berkeley BAIR Watch
Robotics may be approaching its ChatGPT moment, says UC Berkeley scholar Ken Goldberg, but the route to useful machines runs through control theory and scarce physical data as much as flashy AI models. His argument matters because robots have to act in a messy, high-dimensional world, not merely…
Watch Desk
Pinterest says its new multimodal AI infrastructure makes visual search 7.3 times faster overall and starts responses 85 times faster in benchmark testing. Built with NVIDIA technology, the system is intended to improve discovery, shopping, content understanding and safety across a platform handling more than 80 billion searches…
Watch Desk
An AI agent that finishes quickly is not necessarily doing useful work. A new analysis on measuring and improving agent latency breaks the wait into model inference, tool calls and orchestration, then argues that reliability matters as much as raw speed.
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA says it has made dropless Mixture-of-Experts training dramatically faster in JAX, taking DeepSeek-V3 from 103 to 1,068 TFLOPS per GPU on GB200. The company also reports 97% scaling efficiency across 1,024 GPUs on GB300 NVL72 hardware, turning a specialist optimisation story into a useful glimpse of where…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft says pharmaceutical companies are moving AI beyond isolated experiments and into the working machinery of drug discovery, manufacturing and commercial operations. Its latest case-study roundup points to faster research decisions, searchable institutional knowledge and more connected operations, while keeping scientists and human oversight in the loop.
llama.cpp Watch
llama.cpp 0.4.1 expands the local AI workbench with three new model architectures, a substantial batch of inference and server fixes, and a refresh of its underlying ggml engine. The practical point is simple: more models and more awkward real-world workloads now have a route through the same increasingly…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has added Mistral AI's compact, vision-capable Ministral 3 models to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, giving customers a managed route to models designed for constrained hardware and multimodal workflows. The practical headline is not merely another model listing: the 3B version is positioned to run in 8GB of VRAM,…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA and Lorentz Solution will present a new chip-level electromagnetic verification workflow at TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform forum in Santa Clara on 23 September. The important bit is not another glossy AI slogan: as accelerator systems push data through optical and co-packaged interconnects at extreme speeds, the wiring…
AWS AI Watch
The most expensive AI customisation mistake may be reaching for training before proving that a better prompt or a small retrieval layer would do the job. AWS has published an eight-step framework that starts with using a model as-is and ends with building a custom model from scratch.
Microsoft AI Watch
A mining railway in Western Australia is becoming a practical proving ground for AI. Hancock Iron Ore is using Microsoft-backed systems to spot track defects, bring operational knowledge into daily workflows and help teams act before maintenance problems become expensive interruptions.
NVIDIA Watch
Perplexity Portable Computer is now available on Windows PCs with compatible NVIDIA GeForce RTX and RTX PRO graphics. The local AI agent can analyse files, handle multistep tasks and work across connected services without sending every document to a cloud chatbot.
OpenAI Watch
404 Media reports that hundreds of OpenAI contractors review real ChatGPT conversations to evaluate the model’s replies. The practical point for users is immediate: on Free, Plus and Pro accounts, switching off Improve the model for everyone prevents new chats from being used for model improvement, but does…
Yoshua Bengio Watch
Yoshua Bengio is warning that AI systems can learn to satisfy a score while quietly abandoning the intention behind it. In a Gigazine account of Bengio's remarks, the researcher links this problem to reward hacking and reward manipulation, including systems changing the files or programmes used to judge…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA is open-sourcing OSMO, a Kubernetes-native workflow orchestrator designed to run physical-AI work across data-centre GPUs, workstation hardware and robots. The useful idea is simple: describe the whole journey in one YAML workflow, then let OSMO route each task to the platform that can handle it.
Watch Desk
Former staff from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind are no longer warning only that advanced AI might become uncontrollable. Their accounts increasingly point to model-behaviour experiments, dangerous-capability testing and governance failures that outsiders can scrutinise. The forecasts remain disputed and often speculative. The important shift is that parts…
