This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet a mouse whose brain cortex is made up of human cells Multiple cameras tracked a mouse as it wandered around a small arena. A computer charted its position and speed,…
A fast-track vote died on the Senate floor Wednesday, and it took less than a minute. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked for unanimous consent to move his AI “kill switch” bill straight to passage. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) objected, and the request collapsed on the spot, according to Politico. That single objection is now the…
Apple is preparing a return to a business it walked away from 15 years ago: building its own servers. According to a report from The Information, relayed on September 16, 2026 by MacDailyNews, Apple is developing enterprise AI inference systems built around forthcoming M8 Ultra chips and is in talks with Nvidia about using its…
Conversational Large Language Models are post-trained on language that expresses specific behavioural traits, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy, and values, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. This is done to increase utility, ensure safety, and improve the experience of the people interacting with the model. However, values are complex and inter-related – inducing one…
Diffusion large language models are a compelling alternative to autoregressive models, yet existing RL methods for diffusion treat all denoising steps as equally important and rely on biased, high-variance likelihood estimates. We identify two fundamental weaknesses: the absence of temporal credit assignment across the denoising trajectory, and the systematic bias of mean-field likelihood estimates used…
Enterprise data lakes accumulate tables faster than human stewards can document or classify them, leaving columns with missing descriptions and unassigned governance labels. This documentation debt undermines data discovery, access control, and regulatory compliance. We present Glyph, a production system that frames two coupled problems, column description generation and column type annotation for data classification,…
AI agents are moving from cloud data centers to vehicles, robots, and other edge devices. Unlike a chatbot that answers a single prompt, an agent works through…