Author: Carter

Training cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) using FP8 precision has become the norm, but dropping down to 4-bit floating point has been a persistent challenge. The issue is that narrower formats squeeze the dynamic range and magnify quantization errors over long sequences of tokens. A new study from NVIDIA introduces a pretraining approach built on NVFP4, a 4-bit microscaling format with native support in Blackwell Tensor Cores. The team validated this method by training a 12-billion-parameter hybrid Mamba-Transformer model on 10 trillion tokens. According to the researchers, this represents the longest publicly documented 4-bit precision training run so far. The…

In brief KuCoin, a major cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding its footprint in Australia by meeting regulatory requirements and rolling out new offerings. With recent data showing that roughly 22% of Australians currently own digital currencies, the company has introduced its crypto debit card, KuCard, in the country, allowing users to spend directly via Mastercard’s worldwide payment network. Rolled out first as a virtual card, KuCard supports payments in USDC, with 37 stablecoin trading pairs available from day one. Cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin is making a significant push into Australia, increasing its investments and introducing new tools aimed at helping people use…

Japan’s top online brokerages are stepping into the digital asset space. SBI Securities and Rakuten Securities are creating their own Bitcoin and Ethereum investment trusts aimed at everyday investors. This move could transform how millions of Japanese investors access cryptocurrency. Here’s what the plan looks like and why it matters right now. SBI and Rakuten Are Developing Their Own Bitcoin and Ethereum Investment Trusts in Japan A crypto investment trust is a regulated fund that holds digital currencies such as Bitcoin, allowing investors to purchase fund shares rather than buying the coins directly. At present, most Japanese investors still need…

A security researcher has published a working exploit for a previously unpatched Windows privilege escalation flaw called “MiniPlasma.” This exploit allows attackers to gain full SYSTEM-level access on Windows systems that are completely up to date with the latest security patches. The exploit was shared by a researcher who goes by the name Chaotic Eclipse, also known as Nightmare Eclipse. They uploaded both the source code and a pre-compiled version on GitHub. The researcher claims Microsoft did not properly fix a vulnerability that was originally reported back in 2020. According to the researcher, the weakness lies in the ‘cldflt.sys’ Cloud…

TL;DR A complete, working implementation in pure Python, backed by real benchmark data. Most teams assess LLM outputs by reading them and making rough guesses. That approach falls apart the instant you try to scale. The core issue isn’t that models hallucinate. It’s that nothing flags the confident ones — the responses scoring 0.525, clearing your threshold, yet being silently wrong. I built a scoring layer that breaks faithfulness into two separate signals: attribution and specificity. High specificity paired with low attribution is the hallmark of a hallucination. A single score will miss it every single time. This isn’t an…

Here is the paraphrased version of the article in HTML format: Zyphra, the San Francisco-based AI lab behind the ZAYA1 model family, has released ZAYA1-8B-Diffusion-Preview — an early look at its work in diffusion-language models. The release shows that an existing autoregressive language model can be transformed into a discrete diffusion model without any significant drop in evaluation performance, while achieving major inference speedups on AMD hardware. The Problem With Autoregressive Decoding To grasp why this is important, it helps to first understand how most language models produce text today. Standard large language models use autoregressive decoding: they generate one…

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The views and analysis presented are solely his own and do not represent those of Decrypt. Be sure to watch our new daily news show covering the top stories in just 5 minutes, available for download on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.GM!Here are today’s major headlines: Top cryptocurrencies are in the red today despite higher Treasury yields; Bitcoin sits at $80.5K Trump-Xi meeting wraps up with progress on trade issues, but a warning about Taiwan Senate Banking Committee approves the Clarity Act, sending it to the Senate floor Coinbase is now…

View the full conversation here. Government agencies are under growing pressure to deliver better benefits and services to the public. Evan Davis, executive managing director for strategic growth at Maximus, says agencies need to fundamentally rethink how they approach customer experience to keep up with these rising expectations. “The way services will be delivered in the future — how agencies interact with the people they serve — will become less expensive, quicker, simpler to navigate, and far more anticipatory,” Davis explained. Shifting to anticipatory services Anticipatory services can significantly ease the burden on the people who reach out to agencies.…

Creating software that functions within the real-world limitations of manufacturing and engineering is no simple task. Downtime carries a heavy price, and production settings are rarely straightforward. Unlike office-based applications, a factory can’t rely on cloud-based services in the same way—so simply launching a SaaS product won’t address every challenge.That doesn’t mean software providers aren’t tackling quality and reliability issues in industrial facilities. In fact, several strong platforms exist that could appeal to operations leaders aiming to boost productivity and quality.However, a key difference in this market lies in the phrase “software companies.” It might seem natural for a software…

As data storage needs have grown, local storage solutions are more important than ever. However, local storage poses risks because hard drives can fail, and this is where network-attached storage (NAS) systems come in. NAS utilizes RAID technology to distribute data across multiple drives, protecting you against drive failures and enhancing performance. With NAS, you can ensure your data remains secure and accessible, providing peace of mind in an increasingly data-driven world. The range of NAS solutions in the market can be overwhelming. There are a lot of choices out there, and defining the best NAS is like naming the best vehicle…