AI/ML news, top picks, and generated innovation digests.
8705 matching items
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA 18th May 2026 – The South African AI Association & Western Cape Government launch new provincial AI Cluster collaboration. The Western Cape AI Cluster (WCAIC) will research, support and grow the artificial intelligence opportunity in the province as well as engaging with relevant stakeholders on key themes such as AI Policy, […]
Through a new joint letter, we're calling on Microsoft to publish the findings of its review into the Israeli military’s use of the company services. The post Microsoft: it’s time to come clean about your ties to the Israeli military appeared first on Access Now .
A follow up to our open letter regarding Microsoft’s formal review of recent allegations about Israel’s usage of Azure cloud for the surveillance and targeting of Palestinians. The post Joint letter to Microsoft regarding Israeli military use of Azure cloud and AI services appeared first on Access Now .
In recent weeks, we pointed Mythos and other security-focused LLMs at live code across critical parts of our infrastructure. We share what we observed, the models’ strengths and weaknesses, and what the work around them needs to look like before any of it can scale.
This is the most relevant newsletter I receive in my inbox every week.
An eventful month with one flagship release after another
From Gemma 4 to DeepSeek V4, How New Open-Weight LLMs Are Reducing Long-Context Costs
The first sign of trouble isn’t always performance. Sometimes it’s the invoice. Your team ships a new agent that routes requests, calls tools, runs retrieval, and orchestrates multiple LLM calls to deliver high-quality answers. It looks like a win until the first full-month bill hits, and your LLM spend has quietly tripled. Finance wants answers, […] The post LLM Cost Tracking Solution: How to Monitor and Control AI Spend in Agentic Systems appeared first on Comet .
Advancing Collaborative Research: Introducing URP 3.0 robyn.cherinka… Fri, 05/15/2026 - 14:48 By Kate Tsui, Program Director, University Research Partnerships University Research Program 3.0 Kick-Off Event at TRI HQ At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we believe meaningful innovation happens when industry and academia work side by side. Today, we are introducing the next five-year phase of our University Research Program, called URP 3.0 , which expands our collaboration with leading North American universities and welcomes new partners into the community. Starting in 2026, URP 3.0 supports 69 research projects across 31 universities, bringing together 88 TRI researchers and 104 faculty members . This is the biggest cohort since the program’s inception, with 11 new institutions participating for the first time and bringing fresh perspectives and expertise. The program also continues to build on long-standing relationships with foundational research partners, such as MIT, Stanford, and the University of Michigan. TRI funds collaborative university research projects that are intentionally structured for deep collaboration. Each project is co-led by a university researcher and a TRI co-investigator working as peers to ensure that fundamental research and real-world application evolve together. The portfolio also includes 10 Young Faculty Research projects, continuing TRI’s investment in the next generation of researchers. Although these projects span very different domains, many…
This article was originally published with the wrong date. It was later republished, dated the 15th of May 2026. Kubernetes v1.36 introduces a new alpha counter metric route_controller_route_sync_total to the Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) route controller implementation at k8s.io/cloud-provider . This metric increments each time routes are synced with the cloud provider. A/B testing watch-based route reconciliation This metric was added to help operators validate the CloudControllerManagerWatchBasedRoutesReconciliation feature gate introduced in Kubernetes v1.35 . That feature gate switches the route controller from a fixed-interval loop to a watch-based approach that only reconciles when nodes actually change. This reduces unnecessary API calls to the infrastructure provider, lowering pressure on rate-limited APIs and allowing operators to make more efficient use of their available quota. To A/B test this, compare route_controller_route_sync_total with the feature gate disabled (default) versus enabled. In clusters where node changes are infrequent, you should see a significant drop in the sync rate with the feature gate turned on. Example: expected behavior With the feature gate disabled (the default fixed-interval loop), the counter increments steadily regardless of whether any node changes occurred: # After 10 minutes with no node changes route_controller_route_sync_total 60 # After 20 minutes, still no node changes route_controller_route_sync_total 120 With the feature…
Our recent paper, “LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate”, has generated discussion about the reliability of AI systems in delegated workflows. We appreciate the interest in this work and want to clarify several important points about what the paper does—and does not—claim. The research aims to develop robust evaluation methods for long-horizon delegated and […] The post Further Notes on Our Recent Research on AI Delegation and Long-Horizon Reliability appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Back in Kubernetes 1.28, we introduced the Mixed Version Proxy (MVP) as an Alpha feature (under the feature gate UnknownVersionInteroperabilityProxy ) in a previous blog post . The goal was simple but critical: make cluster upgrades safer by ensuring that requests for resources not yet known to an older API server are correctly routed to a newer peer API server, instead of returning an incorrect 404 Not Found . We are excited to announce that the Mixed Version Proxy is moving to Beta in Kubernetes 1.36 and will be enabled by default! The feature has evolved significantly since its initial release, addressing key gaps and modernizing its architecture. Here is a look at how the feature has evolved and what you need to know to leverage it in your clusters. What problem are we solving? In a highly available control plane undergoing an upgrade, you often have API servers running different versions. These servers might serve different sets of APIs (Groups, Versions, Resources). Without MVP, if a client request lands on an API server that does not serve the requested resource (e.g., a new API version introduced in the upgrade), that server returns a 404 Not Found . This is technically incorrect because the resource is available in the cluster, just not on that specific server. This can lead to serious side effects, such as mistaken garbage collection or blocked namespace deletions. MVP solves this by proxying the request to a peer API server that can serve it. sequenceDiagram parti…
Wall St is finally grasping AI inference demand
The German Energy Efficiency Act is under review. The government should change the rules for data centers. As they stand, a data center can be labeled “green” even if it runs entirely on fossil gas.
A research paper, entitled “Nanofiber-based platform for quantitative analysis of human oligodendrocyte ensheathment with pharmacological perturbations,” was published in Stem Cell Reports. The research team includes Haruhisa Inoue, Senior
TL;DR Background: Marketing Across Marketplace and Storefront Instacart operates across two distinct commerce experiences: Instacart Marketplace, our first-party consumer marketplace Storefront Pro, our white-label e-commerce platform for retailers For years, our marketing automation infrastructure was built primarily to support Marketplace use cases. That model worked well in a first-party environment, where the product experience, customer relationship, and brand were all centrally managed by Instacart. Storefront Pro introduced a very different set of requirements. As the platform scaled to more than 350 retailers, we needed to support hundreds of independent brands, each with its own brand identity, customer base, and marketing strategy. Retailers wanted the same level of personalization and lifecycle marketing sophistication that is available on the Instacart Marketplace, but in a way that preserved their own brand and operational independence. That raised a core architectural challenge. How do we deliver Marketplace-grade personalization and lifecycle marketing capabilities to hundreds of retailers without sacrificing tenant isolation, performance, or ease of use? To succeed, the platform needed to let retail marketers: Launch onboarding, winback, and promotional campaigns Customize branding and messaging Target specific customer segments Measure performance and iterate quickly At the same time, we could not simply extend a single-tenant marketing system to a multi-ten…
What providers and deployers must do by August 2026
The .spec.externalIPs field for Service was an early attempt to provide cloud-load-balancer-like functionality for non-cloud clusters. Unfortunately, the API assumes that every user in the cluster is fully trusted, and in any situation where that is not the case, it enables various security exploits, as described in CVE-2020-8554 . Since Kubernetes 1.21, the Kubernetes project has recommended that all users disable .spec.externalIPs . To make that easier, Kubernetes also added an admission controller ( DenyServiceExternalIPs ) that can be enabled to do this. At the time, SIG Network felt that blocking the functionality by default was too large a breaking change to consider. However, the security problems are still there, and as a project we're increasingly unhappy with the "insecure by default" state of the feature. Additionally, there are now several better alternatives for non-cloud clusters wanting load-balancer-like functionality. As a result, the .spec.externalIPs field for Service is now formally deprecated in Kubernetes 1.36. We expect that a future minor release of Kubernetes will drop implementation of the behavior from kube-proxy , and will update the Kubernetes conformance criteria to require that conforming implementations do not provide support. A note on terminology, and what hasn't been deprecated The phrase external IP is somewhat overloaded in Kubernetes: The Service API has a field .spec.externalIPs that can be used to add additional IP addresses that a Ser…
Humanoid Robots Hit a Turning Point as Their Brains Catch Up robyn.cherinka… Thu, 05/14/2026 - 13:28 In this article from IEEE Spectrum , TRI CEO Gill Pratt says humanoid robots are advancing as AI “brains” improve, but warns that real reasoning, data limits, and hype cycles still challenge meaningful, scalable deployment. Read the full article here . Image Apr 2, 2026 Robotics 1 Minute Read
How the GitHub Issues team used client-side caching, smart prefetching, and service workers to make navigation feel instant. The post From latency to instant: Modernizing GitHub Issues navigation performance appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
University of Hong Kong's Professor Brian Wong discusses U.S.-China relations and how to practice strategic empathy without succumbing to moral relativism.
The post Moving from Theory to Action in AI Risk Management appeared first on Partnership on AI .
all apps will become dev tools
The post Costa Rican dairy cooperative turns AI agents into coworkers appeared first on Source .
U.S. Congressman Don Beyer returns to Practical AI for another far-reaching conversation with Chris about many of the most important AI challenges facing America and the world. Blending political savvy and statesmanship with his unique technical understanding as an active Ph.D student in AI at George Mason University (making him the coolest member of Congress!) , the congressman shares his perspective about the really hard AI concerns that you would have asked him yourself. Together, Congressman Beyer and Chris explore AI regulation, cybersecurity concerns sparked by advanced models like Mythos, bipartisan AI governance efforts, and the growing AI race between the U.S. and China. They fearlessly dived headfirst into AI-driven job displacement, mass surveillance, autonomous weapons, existential risk, and the philosophical questions surrounding consciousness and superintelligence as AI continues to accelerate. This is an unusual and insightful conversation you don't want to miss! Congressman Beyer was previously on Practical AI episode 271 on May 29, 2024: AI in the U.S. Congress Featuring: Congressman Don Beyer – Congress , LinkedIn , Bluesky , X Chris Benson – Website , LinkedIn , Bluesky , GitHub , X Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here ! Midwest AI Summit 2026
Short note linking a talk on implementing LLM architectures from scratch and comparing new open-weight model implementations against references.
Tokenization makes or breaks hybrid search. See how Weaviate's accent folding, custom stopwords, and /v1/tokenize endpoint power multilingual BM25.
AI/ML and batch workloads introduce unique scheduling challenges that go beyond simple Pod-by-Pod scheduling. In Kubernetes v1.35, we introduced the first tranche of workload-aware scheduling improvements, featuring the foundational Workload API alongside basic gang scheduling support built on a Pod-based framework, and an opportunistic batching feature to efficiently process identical Pods. Kubernetes v1.36 introduces a significant architectural evolution by cleanly separating API concerns: the Workload API acts as a static template, while the new PodGroup API handles the runtime state. To support this, the kube-scheduler features a new PodGroup scheduling cycle that enables atomic workload processing and paves the way for future enhancements. This release also debuts the first iterations of topology-aware scheduling and workload-aware preemption to advance scheduling capabilities. Additionally, ResourceClaim support for workloads unlocks Dynamic Resource Allocation ( DRA ) for PodGroups. Finally, to demonstrate real-world readiness, v1.36 delivers the first phase of integration between the Job controller and the new API. Workload and PodGroup API updates The Workload API now serves as a static template, while the new PodGroup API describes the runtime object. Kubernetes v1.36 introduces the Workload and PodGroup APIs as part of the scheduling.k8s.io/v1alpha2 API group , completely replacing the previous v1alpha1 API version. In v1.35, Pod groups and their runtime states we…
mimalloc is an open-source, modern, scalable memory allocator that is a drop-in replacement for malloc and free. It is relatively small (~12K lines), with clear internal data structures, and is easy to build and integrate into other projects. It provides bounded worst-case allocation times (up to OS primitives), bounded space overhead, low internal fragmentation, and minimal contention by relying almost exclusively on atomic operations. The post mimalloc: A new, high-performance, scalable memory allocator for the modern era appeared first on Microsoft Research .
We quantify China’s efficiency moat and what it means for the future of AI
❤️ Check out Lambda here and sign up for their GPU Cloud: https://lambda.ai/papers 📝 The paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24954 https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-omni-powers-multimodal-agent-reasoning-in-a-single-efficient-open-model/ https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/nemotron-3-nano-omni-multimodal-intelligence Our Patreon if you wish to support us: https://www.patreon.com/TwoMinutePapers 🙏 We would like to thank our generous Patreon supporters who make Two Minute Papers possible: Adam Bridges, Benji Rabhan, B Shang, Cameron Navor, Charles Ian Norman Venn, Christian Ahlin, Eric T, Fred R, Gordon Child, Juan Benet, Michael Tedder, Owen Skarpness, Richard Sundvall, Ryan Stankye, Shawn Becker, Steef, Taras Bobrovytsky, Tazaur Sagenclaw, Tybie Fitzhugh, Ueli Gallizzi My research: https://cg.tuwien.ac.at/~zsolnai/ Thumbnail design: https://felicia.hu #nvidia
Introducing GridSFM, a small foundation model that can predict AC optimal power flow in milliseconds, boosting efficiency and unlocking cost savings. Learn how GridSFM gives grid operators direct visibility into congestion, stability, and system health. The post GridSFM: A new, small foundation model for the electric grid appeared first on Microsoft Research .
Xi seeks to buy time as he meets Trump in Beijing H.Seidl Wed, 05/13/2026 - 17:29 picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Mark Schiefelbein Comment May 13, 2026 5 min read Xi seeks to buy time as he meets Trump in Beijing With a grand bargain highly unlikely, the US and China face a choice between a marginal deal or no deal at all, argue Helena Legarda and Jacob Gunter. The imminent meeting of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump has inevitably triggered speculation about who will come out on top. A “grand bargain” covering the fundamentals of trade, technology, Taiwan and other geopolitical tensions (like Iran) is highly unlikely. Instead, one appealing option for the world’s two most powerful leaders is to make a marginal deal on immediate challenges like maintaining China’s access to the US market and stabilizing China’s export controls on rare-earth flows to the US. The main goal of the summit for Xi is to stabilize China’s relationship with the US and buy time – to keep the US from again ratcheting up tariffs, export controls and other measures which he believes are being used to contain China’s rise. Buying time is crucial for the sweeping self-reliance efforts that have been a hallmark of Xi’s agenda – reducing dependence on foreign technology, finance, and supply chains while strengthening China’s ability to withstand external pressure. From energy security and technological breakthroughs aimed at overcoming US chokeholds on China to fully m…
Chinese investment rises to 7-year high - Chinese FDI in Europe: 2025 Update c.groth Wed, 05/13/2026 - 12:39 Download (pdf - 1.28 MB) Report May 20, 2026 20 min read Chinese investment rises to 7-year high - Chinese FDI in Europe: 2025 Update Report by Rhodium Group and MERICS Key findings Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe (EU and UK) rose for the second consecutive year, reaching its highest level since 2018. It increased by 67 percent to EUR 16.8 billion in 2025. M&A activity drove the rebound, rising 89 percent year-on-year to EUR 7.9 billion. But greenfield investment remained the primary channel for Chinese FDI in Europe, increasing by 51 percent to a record EUR 8.9 billion. Europe made up nearly a quarter of global Chinese FDI in 2025, up from 17 percent in 2024. While Hungary remains the primary destination for Chinese FDI in Europe, more investment is once again flowing into Germany and France. Hungary attracted Chinese investments worth EUR 3.9 billion in 2025, up from EUR 3.2 billion in 2024. Germany (EUR 2.5 billion) and France (EUR 1.9 billion) ranked second and third. Germany’s share of total Chinese FDI in Europe rose to 15 percent from 10 percent in 2024, while France’s increased to 12 percent from 5 percent. The automotive sector attracted more Chinese FDI in 2025 than any other industry. Investments in the sector totaled EUR 7.6 billion, with 93 percent of them focused on the EV supply chain. The auto sector’s share of total Chinese FDI in Eu…
Media Briefing on the Trump-Xi Meeting J.Heller Wed, 05/13/2026 - 11:31 Video May 13, 2026 1 min read Media Briefing on the Trump-Xi Meeting US President Donald Trump is set to meet Xi Jinping in his first visit to China since 2017. The meeting, originally delayed due to the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, arrives at a moment of deep structural tension between the world's two largest economies, with disputes over trade tariffs, rare earth access, Taiwan, and AI technology still unresolved. What makes this summit uniquely complex is the Iran war looming over the agenda. The ongoing conflict has inadvertently strengthened China's negotiating hand, and Washington is pressing Beijing to use its leverage with Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. MERICS Heads of Program Jacob Gunter (Economy and Industry) and Helena Legarda (Foreign Relations) assess what this summit means for the trajectory of US-China relations, the outlook for global trade, and the broader implications of an Iran conflict that is reshaping great power dynamics. The session is moderated by Claudia Wessling , Director of Communications & Publications at MERICS. Related content about US-China Trump's remarks after China Summit compromise Taiwan's security Tracker Jun 18, 2026 China in 26: Diplomatic strength, economic weakness, investment increase Podcast May 22, 2026 US-China summit: Xi warns Trump about Taiwan (ZDF) External publication May 15, 2026
The mouse pointer 🖱️ has been a constant companion on computer screens, across every website, document and workflow. Despite how technologies have changed, the pointer has barely evolved in more than half a century. We’ve been exploring new AI-powered capabilities and ways of working to help the pointer not only understand what it’s pointing at, but also why it matters. See how to try it out @ https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer ___ Subscribe to our channel https://www.youtube.com/@googledeepmind Find us on X https://twitter.com/GoogleDeepMind Follow us on Instagram https://instagram.com/googledeepmind Add us on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/deepmind/
AIMIP is a new open benchmark and dataset for evaluating AI climate models, showing they can match or beat conventional models on some historical climate metrics while still struggling to generalize reliably to long-term warming trends and unseen climate scenarios.
A Slack bot triages every GitHub advisory, posts a rocket-to-trigger ask in the channel, and on one human reaction runs the full content pipeline: detection queries, blog scaffold, social drafts, a 35-second auto-cut demo. The operator's remaining job is to read the drafts and decide whether they're honest.
Hyperscalers will spend $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The users they are spending it on are now actively rejecting the output. Gartner finds 50% of US consumers prefer brands that don't use generative AI. Wikipedia just banned AI-generated content 44-2. Stack Overflow's new-question volume has fallen 78% year over year. Google AI Overviews have collapsed top-page CTR by 58%. This is the structural tension running through every story below: capacity is being added fastest in exactly the parts of the market where buyers are most visibly walking away.
Read our translation of a Chinese draft regulation mandating ethics reviews for AI technology that could endanger humans or sway public opinion. The post (Trial) Measures for Artificial Intelligence Technology Ethics Management Services (Draft for Public Feedback) appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology .
By Adam Wolf and Damian Erangey The previous posts in this series built the security model layer by layer: identity, configuration governance, service account automation, compute policies, and production model serving. This final post covers what holds all of it together: the monitoring and audit layer that records every action, every API call, and every […]
Since its original implementation in the Linux kernel in 2018, Pressure Stall Information (PSI) has provided users with the high-fidelity signals needed to identify resource saturation before it becomes an outage. Unlike traditional utilization metrics, PSI tells the story of tasks stalled and time lost, all in nicely-packaged percentages of time across the CPU, memory, and I/O. With the recent release of Kubernetes v1.36, users across the ecosystem have a stable, reliable interface to observe resource contention at the node, pod, and container levels. In this post, we will dive into the improvements and performance testing that proved its readiness for production. Beyond utilization: why PSI? Monitoring CPU or memory usage alone can be misleading. A node may report XX% (below 100%) CPU utilization while certain tasks are experiencing severe latency due to scheduling delays. PSI fills this gap by providing: Cumulative Totals : Absolute time spent in a stalled state. Moving Averages : 10s, 60s, and 300s windows that allow operators to distinguish between transient spikes and sustained resource tension. Proving stability: performance testing at scale A common concern when graduating telemetry features is the resource overhead required to collect and serve the metrics. To address this, SIG Node conducted extensive performance validation on high-density workloads (80+ pods) across various machine types. Our testing focused on two primary scenarios to isolate the impact of the Ku…
The post Partnership on AI Receives $500K Investment From Collaborative Philanthropic Initiative to Advance AI Transparency and Accountability appeared first on Partnership on AI .
Further reflections on China's high-participation, open-first AI ecosystem.
CSET’s Jacob Feldgoise shared his expert insight in an article published by The New York Times. The article examines how China is accelerating efforts to build a domestic A.I. ecosystem as companies like DeepSeek and Huawei develop alternatives to American chips amid ongoing U.S. export controls. The post China Seeks A.I. Independence, Weakening Trump’s Leverage appeared first on Center for Security and Emerging Technology .
Climate goals for officials + Textile sector + Alcohol industry c.groth Tue, 05/12/2026 - 15:54 picture alliance / CFOTO Download (pdf - 576.54 KB) MERICS Briefs MERICS China Industries May 13, 2026 15 min read Climate goals for officials + Textile sector + Alcohol industry MERICS' Top 5 1. New State Council measures tie officials’ careers to climate goals At a glance: The State Council has released measures to evaluate progress on carbon reduction at the provincial level during the 15th Five-year Plan (2026-2030). A new accountability system ties the career prospects of top provincial party and state officials to carbon reduction. Key features include: The introduction of five control indicators, e.g., total carbon emissions, carbon emission intensity and total coal consumption, plus nine supporting indicators, including green transportation (see exhibit 1) Provinces that miss one control indicator or three supporting indicators in annual assessments must propose corrective actions within 30 days. Senior officials who fail to comply will face disciplinary interviews Annual assessment results will be part of senior provincial officials’ performance reviews Officials showing gross violations of duty will face disciplinary action from, for instance, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (the party-state’s main body for investigating corruption). MERICS comment: China’s performance evaluation system for public officials contains complex and sometimes contradictory in…