Author: Carter

The dilemma You work at an engineering firm and have stumbled upon a lethal secret. The company is carrying out poorly conceived engineering work that has already resulted in a landslide claiming the lives of six contractors. Despite the danger, the company is forging ahead, raising the risk of additional landslides, a disastrous dam collapse, and possible groundwater contamination. Rather than addressing the issue, you have proof that the CEO and general counsel are actively involved in a cover-up. The right thing to do, ethically speaking, would be to voice your concerns through internal channels, wouldn’t it? But that path…

Most search agents grow step by step, with the model deciding how to search while also tracking what it found, which pieces of evidence are important, and which claims it already verified. Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, UC Berkeley, and Chroma believe this places too much burden on a single system. In their view, reinforcement learning ends up trying to optimize both the search strategy and the routine record-keeping at the same time. Their solution is Harness-1, a 20-billion-parameter retrieval subagent built on top of gpt-oss-20b. It was trained using reinforcement learning within a stateful search harness. The…

In brief Opus 4.8 delivered a decisive victory in mathematics and generated the most polished single-prompt game we have ever evaluated. A single coding request consumed our entire Pro token allowance, rendering the model unsuitable for substantial projects without a Max subscription or significant API expenditure. Creative writing showed almost no progress compared to version 4.7. Six weeks following the release of Opus 4.7, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8. Benchmark results have improved, safety ratings have climbed, and the cost remains unchanged at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.We therefore subjected it to the identical…

A cybercriminal outfit known as the Silent Ransom Group is aggressively going after American law firms and professional services companies, using social engineering tricks that can result in stolen data within just a few hours of first contact, according to a fresh analysis from cybersecurity company Mandiant. This new analysis builds on an FBI FLASH alert issued last week, which cautioned that the Silent Ransom Group had been going after U.S. law firms through social engineering schemes and even in-person data theft attempts. Mandiant’s report now sheds more light on the technical mechanics behind these breaches. According to Mandiant, the…

Terry Gerton Inflation is one of those financial topics that seems to be in the news almost every single day. We hear about it from the Federal Reserve, Congress discusses it in the context of affordability, and it even plays a role in the president’s approval ratings. But when we talk about inflation from your perspective, what does it truly mean beyond the simple definition? Art Stein Well, inflation, you know, the basic definition is simply the rise in the cost of goods and services across the United States. That directly impacts our cost of living, which is a related…

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysThe Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is the top-tier RTX Spark laptop introduced at Computex.It comes equipped with the RTX Spark SoC: a 20-core CPU, performance on par with a GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, and as much as 128GB of unified memory.Even with its stunning specifications and high-end construction, several questions are still left unanswered.During Computex 2026, Nvidia revealed its latest RTX Spark processor, an ARM-based chip boasting remarkable performance figures across a range of new devices: up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, a 20-core CPU, and up…

Participants in the challenge tested and debugged robots working on different tasks. | Source: AGIBOT AGIBOT Innovation Technology Co. recently hosted the AGIBOT World Challenge 2026 alongside ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The event gathered 526 research and enterprise teams from 27 countries to compete in two embodied AI categories: “Reasoning to Action” and “World Model.” Shanghai-based AGIBOT noted that the competition underscored a significant shift in how embodied AI is assessed. The company explained that the industry is moving past simulation-based scores toward closed-loop testing on actual robots, real-world tasks, and standardized benchmarks. The competition used a benchmark-driven approach that…

Low-code and no-code platforms have evolved well beyond basic drag-and-drop interfaces into AI-powered development environments. By 2026, the majority of these platforms come equipped with a built-in AI assistant capable of transforming a simple text description into a functional app, agent, or automated workflow. This guide highlights 21 tools that AI practitioners rely on today, organized by their core strengths. Each tool name links to its official website so you can check pricing and features firsthand. App and UI Builders These platforms empower non-developers to create and ship working applications, often from just a single prompt. 1. Atoms* (10% discount…

The issue that pushed me to find a better solution My research involves working with cosmological models — dark energy equations of state, modified gravity theories, tachyonic fields — and answering a key question: what do the observational data actually tell us about the model parameters? The standard approach for answering this is Bayesian inference. Typically, I run dynesty nested sampling, performing anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand likelihood evaluations, depending on how complex the model is. Throughout most of my PhD, I never gave much thought to the ODE solver embedded within the likelihood function, since…

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the early hours of Friday morning, the Senate approved a bill to finance President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies. This came after weeks of setbacks and intense criticism over a separate $1.776 billion settlement fund that nearly caused the legislation to fail. Following months of Democratic opposition, senators voted 52-47 to approve the $70 billion measure. This funding will support Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the next three years, lasting through the remainder of Trump’s term. The bill now moves to the House, where it is anticipated to be addressed next week. The…