2026-08-06
AMD Buys Taalas to Put Hard-Wired AI Models in Its Accelerator Roadmap
AMD has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup whose chips are custom-built around individual AI models, the company announced on August 6, 2026. The deal folds specialized inference silicon into an accelerator lineup AMD has spent the past year expanding, and it gives the chipmaker an engineering team that has spent three years attacking the cost of serving AI m [...]
2026-08-06
Microsoft Opens 26 Open Models to Startups Through Fireworks AI on Foundry
Microsoft is pushing its newly generally available Fireworks AI integration at the startup segment, publishing a deployment blueprint on August 4, 2026 that pairs a reference architecture for running open models on Microsoft Foundry with a billing perk: members of the Microsoft for Startups program can apply their Azure credits to Fireworks model deployments, and the program advertises up to $150, [...]
2026-08-06
Quote of the day by computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton on AI: 'It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things' — a pessimistic take on the domination of new technologies by those with ulterior motives
A pessimistic take on the domination of AI tools by those with ulterior motives [...]
2026-08-06
No cloud, no GPUs, no problem: Liquid AI's new model LFM2.5-2.6B brings powerful AI agents to devices as small as a Raspberry Pi
Earlier this week, the AI startup Liquid, formed in 2023 by former MIT computer scientists, debuted LFM2.5-2.6B, a new open-weight language model designed specifically for agentic workloads. In release materials and a recent interview with VentureBeat, Liquid's researchers said LFM2.5-2.6B can run entirely on local hardware — from smartphones and laptops down to a Raspberry Pi — without r [...]