Nomadic raises $8.4 million to wrangle the data pouring off autonomous vehicles

To build the autonomous machines of the future, sometimes your model needs a model.  Companies developing self-driving cars, robots manipulating the physical environment, or autonomous construction equipment collect thousands, if not millions, of hours of video data for evaluation and training.  Organizing and cataloging that video is now a job for humans, who have to … Read more

Midjourney engineer debuts new vibe coded, open source standard Pretext to revolutionize web design

For three decades, the web has existed in a state of architectural denial. It is a platform originally conceived to share static physics papers, yet it is now tasked with rendering the most complex, interactive, and generative interfaces humanity has ever conceived. At the heart of this tension lies a single, invisible, and prohibitively expensive … Read more

SXSW rebounds as a top networking, ideas festival for founders and VCs

The air felt different at this year’s SXSW, the annual March festival where tech meets pop culture in Austin. I was reminded of the 2019 SXSW when people packed downtown, and snake lines formed out of local ventures.  Attendees said it was like that again this year, though my friend, who lives in the area and … Read more

Watch the trailer for Science Saru’s Ghost in the Shell anime series

A new trailer has given us our best look yet at the upcoming The Ghost in the Shell anime. While it might not tell us all that much about the direction the show will go in plot-wise, it sure is aesthetically pleasing, with a throwback art style that looks a lot more like the original … Read more

IndexCache, a new sparse attention optimizer, delivers 1.82x faster inference on long-context AI models

Processing 200,000 tokens through a large language model is expensive and slow: the longer the context, the faster the costs spiral. Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai have built a technique called IndexCache that cuts up to 75% of the redundant computation in sparse attention models, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token and 1.48x faster … Read more

Apple says no one using Lockdown Mode has been hacked with spyware

Almost four years after launching a security feature called Lockdown Mode, Apple says it has yet to see a case where someone’s device was hacked with these additional security protections switched on.  “We are not aware of any successful mercenary spyware attacks against a Lockdown Mode-enabled Apple device,” Apple spokesperson Sarah O’Rourke told TechCrunch on … Read more

Google Gemini now lets you import your chats and data from other AI apps

Google is adding a pair of new features to Gemini aimed at making it easier to switch to the AI chatbot. Personal history and past context are big components to how a chatbot provides customized answers to each user. Gemini now supports importing history from other AI platforms. Both free and paid consumer accounts can … Read more

The Best Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Alternative? » JaypeeOnline

If you’ve ever spent hours gaming with standard Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons and felt uncomfortable, you’re definitely not alone. Many players find them too small, not very ergonomic, and less ideal for long sessions. That’s exactly where the NYXI Hyperion 2 wireless controller steps in. Designed as a premium Joy-Con alternative for Nintendo Switch, the NYXI … Read more

Google's new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more

As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand their context windows to process massive documents and intricate conversations, they encounter a brutal hardware reality known as the "Key-Value (KV) cache bottleneck." Every word a model processes must be stored as a high-dimensional vector in high-speed memory. For long-form tasks, this "digital cheat sheet" swells rapidly, devouring the … Read more

How soap opera-TikTok hybrids became a billion-dollar business

Over the past few years, a new category of mobile apps has quietly exploded into a multi-billion dollar business. They’re called “micro dramas” — short-form, mobile-first scripted shows designed to be watched vertically on your phone. Think soap opera meets TikTok, complete with secret billionaire romances, disapproving werewolf mothers-in-law, and cliffhangers engineered to keep users tapping. The leading … Read more