The biggest AI model release of the past few days, at least among the developers and AI power users on social media, wasn’t a frontier cloud model from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. It was a 27-billion-parameter model from Alibaba: Qwen3.8-27B landed on Hugging Face on Friday under an enterprise-friendly, open source Apache 2.0 license, giving […]

Thee black holes, as seen in the newly discovered galaxy J0148-4214. Credit: Hannah Übler Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have released new observations of galaxy J0148-4214, a whopping 12.5 billion light-years away. For reference, the Big Bang itself occurred a little less than 14 billion years ago. All three black holes […]

Meta has spent much of this year trying to calm concerns about facial recognition coming to its smart glasses. But the company doesn’t look ready to give up on the idea, and a newly public patent application shows just how seriously Meta has continued exploring the technology. First reported by Patentlyze, the application was filed […]

You might be looking at the Apple Watch Ultra 3 or Garmin Fenix 8 and balking at the cost of fitness watches these days, but tracking your health doesn’t have to empty your wallet. There are plenty of terrific budget options, and below we’ve listed six of the best, all of which you can find […]

Following California and Ohio, Apple Wallet is getting another driver’s license, with North Carolina preparing to bring digital IDs to the iPhone. The state is currently developing its mobile ID program, but residents won’t be able to add their license directly to Apple Wallet at launch. Instead, North Carolina will first roll out its own […]

A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system is built to answer strictly from the documents it retrieves. But when engineers optimize these AI pipelines end-to-end, the reader module can learn a shortcut: instead of relying on retrieved evidence, it starts answering from its own internal memory — while the system’s overall accuracy keeps climbing. This is the […]

Spotify today announced an expansion of its recently released User Notes feature. While User Notes are limited to songs, the new Playlist Notes also let users add context to podcast episodes and audiobooks in their playlists. Here are the details. ’Capture a memory, share a recommendation, or explain why a pick made the cut’ Last […]

Firefox’s iOS app comes with a new built-in ad blocker It stops all kinds of ads, but there are some exceptions The move could convince me to finally switch from Safari I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for 20 years now, but that’s only been true for the desktop app. Despite Firefox being one of […]

It would have been easy to crop this out, if you were okay with losing some of the lake. Credit: Google Google has started rolling out a setting that lets some Gemini users turn off visible watermarks on AI-generated images, videos, and music. The controversial change means these users can more easily pass off AI […]

Apple’s MagSafe wallet is likely the default option for most people looking to carry a driver’s license, a credit card, and a little cash on the back of their iPhone. Apple’s Find My integration is nice, but that convenience comes at a price, literally, since it costs about double what most third-party MagSafe wallets cost. […]