Author: GT

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s newest AI model, an updated version of the company’s R1 reasoning model, achieves impressive scores on benchmarks for coding, math, and general knowledge, nearly surpassing OpenAI’s flagship o3. But the upgraded R1, also known as “R1-0528,” might also be less willing to answer contentious questions, in particular questions about topics the Chinese government considers to be controversial. That’s according to testing conducted by the pseudonymous developer behind SpeechMap, a platform to compare how different models treat sensitive and controversial subjects. The developer, who goes by the username “xlr8harder” on X, claims that R1-0528 is “substantially” less permissive…

Just ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference next month, Apple on Thursday announced new figures related to the U.S. App Store’s financial success. The company says its U.S. App Store ecosystem has generated $406 billion in developer billings and sales in 2024 — a figure that’s nearly tripled in size since 2019, when it then generated $142 billion. Apple also made a point to note that, for 90% of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store, developers paid no commission. The new figures come from an Apple-funded study conducted by Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School…

Tesla is a business built, in part, on government regulations and incentives, from a Department of Energy loan guarantee in 2009 to the regulatory credits it sells to other automakers, which have driven a third of its $32 billion in profits since 2012.  Now, the company’s energy business — a rare bright spot amid faltering demand for its EVs — is under assault. House Republicans passed a reconciliation bill last week that would undo much of the Inflation Reduction Act, including tax credits for residential solar installations and for clean energy projects. That bill is now before the Senate. If the…

The U.S. government imposed sanctions on Funnull, a company accused of providing infrastructure for cybercriminals running “pig butchering” crypto scams that have led to $200 million in losses for American victims.  On Thursday, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the sanctions, saying Funnull is “linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI.” The press release said that the $200 million in losses results in an average loss of $150,000 per victim, but that the numbers “likely underestimate the total losses, as many victims of scams do not report the crime.” Pig butchering…

DeepSeek’s updated R1 reasoning AI model might be getting the bulk of the AI community’s attention this week. But the Chinese AI lab also released a smaller, “distilled” version of its new R1, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, that DeepSeek claims beats comparably sized models on certain benchmarks. The smaller updated R1, which was built using the Qwen3-8B model Alibaba launched in May as a foundation, performs better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash on AIME 2025, a collection of challenging math questions. DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B also nearly matches Microsoft’s recently released Phi 4 reasoning plus model on another math skills test, HMMT. So-called distilled models like…

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Big Ocean, a three-member K-pop group composed entirely of artists with hearing disabilities, is redefining the limits of music and performance — one beat at a time.When Big Ocean takes the stage, they seamlessly incorporate sign language into their performances. But their polished shows are built on extensive preparation using high-tech tools born from necessity — vibrating smartwatches that pulse with musical beats and LED visual metronomes that flash timing cues during practice sessions. This technological approach represents significant progress in South Korea’s entertainment industry, where career opportunities for people with disabilities have historically been…

YouTube announced on Thursday that it’s bringing Google Lens to YouTube Shorts in the coming weeks. With this integration, viewers will soon be able to use Google Lens to search what they see while watching Shorts. For example, if you’re watching a Short filmed in a location that you’re interested in visiting, you can select a landmark and ask Lens to identify it. From there, you would be able to learn more about the destination’s culture and history. By integrating Lens into Shorts, YouTube is working to enhance visual search capabilities and give users more ways to discover and search…

On Thursday, Anduril and Meta announced news that feels like a fairy tale ending for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The two companies are working together to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military, Anduril announced in a blog post. “I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.” This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS)…

Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine gunning for Google, on Thursday released Perplexity Labs, a tool for subscribers to Perplexity’s $20-per-month Pro plan that can craft reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and more. Perplexity Labs is available on the web, iOS, and Android, and coming soon to Perplexity’s apps for Mac and Windows. “Perplexity Labs can help you complete a variety of work and personal projects,” Perplexity explains in a blog post. “Labs is designed to invest more time — 10 minutes or longer — and leverage additional tools [to accomplish tasks], such as advanced file generation and mini-app creation.” Labs, which arrives the…

Tinder is leaning into dating apps’ reputation for superficiality with the launch of a new feature that lets paid subscribers add their height preferences to their profiles. After a Reddit user posted a photo of the new height setting in the Tinder app, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the discovery setting has been launched as a global test. Tinder Gold and Premium subscribers in the test group will have access to the feature, but not free users, we’re told. In addition, the setting will indicate a preference, rather than functioning as a “hard filter,” the company says. That…