One AI module faked 86% of a pipeline's accuracy gains by feeding another the answers

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 shor [...]

CES: So very big, so little sustainability tech

Every third booth at CES showed off some new AI product or other. If you wanted to find a robotic lawn mower, throw a rock. Humanoid robots, smart locks and super thin TVs were everywhere. But if you [...]

New Alibaba AI framework skips loading every tool, cutting agent token use 99%

As enterprise AI systems scale to handle complex workflows, practitioners face the challenge of routing subtasks to the right tools and skills. Agents can have hundreds of tools and skills and get con [...]

Nvidia finds that simple linear math can replace costly AI model handoffs

When an agentic AI system hands a task from a small model to a larger one — or back down again — it pays a steep tax: the receiving model has to recompute the entire conversation from scratch, dri [...]

Amazon’s AI push is undermining its sustainability goals

Amazon’s decarbonization goals are being undermined by its push to be a leader in generative AI. Its most recent sustainability report concedes its overall carbon emissions grew for the first time s [...]

Alibaba's Metis agent cuts redundant AI tool calls from 98% to 2% — and gets more accurate doing it

One of the key challenges of building effective AI agents is teaching them to choose between using external tools or relying on their internal knowledge. But large language models are often trained to [...]

Frontier models are failing one in three production attempts — and getting harder to audit

AI agents are now embedded in real enterprise workflows, and they're still failing roughly one in three attempts on structured benchmarks. That gap between capability and reliability is the defin [...]

Norton VPN review: A VPN that fails to meet Norton's standards

One thing I need to make clear right from the start: this is a review of Norton VPN (formerly Norton Secure VPN, and briefly Norton Ultra VPN) as a standalone app, not of the VPN feature in the Norton [...]

Nvidia researchers unlock 4-bit LLM training that matches 8-bit performance

Researchers at Nvidia have developed a novel approach to train large language models (LLMs) in 4-bit quantized format while maintaining their stability and accuracy at the level of high-precision mode [...]