Author: Carter

StepFun, an AI research firm based in Shanghai, has launched StepAudio 2.5 Realtime — an end-to-end, real-time speech large language model that lets users fully customize personas. Unlike traditional pipeline systems that handle speech recognition, reasoning, and voice synthesis as separate sequential steps, StepAudio 2.5 Realtime processes everything in a unified manner within a single framework. You feed audio in, and audio comes out — no intermediate modules. The model supports both Chinese and English. It’s accessible through a WebSocket API at wss://api.stepfun.com/v1/realtime, using the model identifier step-2.5-realtime. The Three Core Innovations The StepFun research team highlights three foundational architectural…

Persistent security breaches are dampening institutional interest in decentralized finance, even as adoption of broader cryptocurrency technologies like stablecoins and tokenized assets continues to gain traction.In an April research report, analysts at JPMorgan highlighted that securing cross-chain bridges remains a persistent hurdle for the DeFi space. This raises serious questions about whether the ecosystem can scale to accommodate major institutional players.The recent breach of the Versus-Ethereum bridge marks the eighth significant assault on DeFi bridges so far this year, with combined damages reaching $328.6 million.DeFi bridges continue to be top targets for cybercriminals aiming to siphon off millions. Source: PeckShieldMisha…

1. Introduction Working across fields like statistics, programming, and AI demands the skill to clearly explain complex methods and findings. Knowing how APIs work is especially important for smooth teamwork and sharing ideas. For one, it improves teamwork among members and stakeholders. Data Science (DS) projects usually involve a mix of experts—data specialists, developers, business analysts, project managers, and others. Clear APIs act as a common language that helps these varied groups understand and use DS models and tools properly. Next, well-written API documentation makes it easier to reproduce results and helps new team members get up to speed. In…

Getting Started with AI Agents AI agents have become one of the most talked-about topics of this decade. You’ll find them mentioned in job postings, company profiles, freelance gigs, and beyond. Despite how buzzy it all sounds, building an AI agent is surprisingly straightforward. In fact, you can put together a basic one in just a few minutes. That’s exactly what we’ll walk through in this article. Here, we’ll take you through the entire process of building an AI agent from scratch. No prior experience is needed — every step is explained in plain, beginner-friendly language. We’ll also walk you…

The Federal Reserve released an updated version of its plan for a “skinny” master account, revising the initial proposal that was first introduced last December. That same week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at more deeply integrating digital assets into current payment systems.You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter exploring the relationship between cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions.The narrativePresident Donald Trump signed two executive orders last Tuesday. One instructed the broader government to revise existing regulations to more effectively incorporate crypto into payment systems, while the other directed the Treasury…

Linear attention replaces the ever-growing key-value cache of softmax attention with a fixed-size recurrent state. This reduces sequence mixing to linear time and decoding to constant memory. The real challenge isn’t deciding what to forget. It’s figuring out how to update a compressed memory without disrupting existing associations. NVIDIA has released Gated DeltaNet-2, a linear attention layer designed to tackle that specific bottleneck. The model splits the active memory update into two separate channel-wise gates. It was trained at 1.3B parameters on 100B FineWeb-Edu tokens. It outperforms Mamba-2, Gated DeltaNet, KDA, and Mamba-3 across the research benchmark suite. The scalar…

Most web agents today operate by performing one browser action at a time. The model takes in the current page state — whether as a screenshot or DOM text — and predicts the next click, keypress, or scroll. This step-by-step approach was reasonable when language models had limited reasoning power. But as models have grown more skilled at writing and debugging code, that rigid loop has turned from a helpful structure into a bottleneck. Researchers at Microsoft’s AI Frontiers lab developed an alternative. Their new open-source framework, Webwright, gives the agent a terminal rather than a stateful browser session. The…

“DoD can’t continue to ignore this conflict of interest that arises when a company owns both a PBM and a pharmacy. That has got to stop,” Elizabeth Warren said. Anastasia Obis May 21, 2026 6:39 pm 3 min read As the Defense Department begins planning for the next-generation TRICARE pharmacy contract, which would succeed the current agreement currently administered by Express Scripts, lawmakers say the Pentagon cannot continue to ignore what they describe as a major conflict of interest where Express Scripts both acts as a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and operates its own pharmacies.  In the meantime, existing contracts…

Digital asset neobanks are evolving far beyond simply offering cryptocurrency services. The top players now integrate stablecoins, reward programs, lower transaction fees, on-chain transfers, and card-linked financial tools directly within apps designed for everyday consumers. Nubank stands out as a prime example of this evolution. The company has been nominated for Best Digital Assets Neobank at the BeInCrypto Institutional 100 Awards 2026. CompanyNu Holdings, NYSE: NUBaseSão Paulo, BrazilCustomers135M+ globallyBrazil customers115M+Nubank Crypto users7M+Crypto assets supported29 digital assetsCrypto productsBuy/sell, USDC swaps, USDC rewards, Earn Crypto, on-chain transfers2026 crypto updatesEarn Crypto launch, fee reductions, Bitcoin Pizza Day zero-fee campaign This nomination highlights the…

The signing ceremony had already been arranged, and top tech CEOs were confirmed to attend. Then, suddenly, it was called off entirely.On Thursday, US President Donald Trump cancelled a planned executive order on AI policy — one that had already been postponed several times — arguing that it risked weakening America’s technological advantage over China.”We’re ahead of China, we’re ahead of everyone, and I don’t want to do anything that gets in the way of maintaining that lead,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. What he left unsaid was that the order had effectively been torpedoed by the very…