Tech

Apple has trained a custom large language model specifically for the Chinese market, with support from Alibaba, according to three people familiar with the matter. The move breaks with Apple’s earlier approach of relying on outside models for its AI features in the country, and it comes as Apple prepares to roll out its on-device […]

A developer named Erik Ziegenbald has built a service that does something Linux users have long had to learn by hand: assembling a custom distribution. OpenFactory takes a plain-English description of the operating system you want, validates it, builds the image in the cloud, and hands back a bootable ISO you can burn to a […]

Liquid AI has released LFM2.5-VL-3B, its most capable vision-language model to date, built for on-device and edge deployment. The 3.1-billion-parameter model uses a non-reasoning architecture that answers directly rather than generating chains of thought, keeping latency low for real-time applications. The company says it delivers vision performance competitive with models twice its size while running […]

On Sunday, August 16, DeepSeek will replace its flat per-token API pricing with peak and off-peak billing, the first time-based surcharge any Chinese AI lab has introduced and a sharp reversal for the company that built its global reputation on making frontier-adjacent intelligence almost free. The new rates, published on DeepSeek’s official pricing page, raise […]

Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash on Thursday, three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, which followed 3.5 Flash in July. Google described the new model as its most capable workhorse for coding and agents, built on developer feedback and algorithmic improvements rather than a full architectural overhaul. The headline improvements are in software engineering. On DeepSWE […]

President Donald Trump has signed a national security presidential memorandum that lets private cybersecurity firms conduct offensive operations against foreign criminal networks, moving a function long reserved for the federal government into commercial hands. The memorandum, first reported by Bloomberg, directs the National Coordination Center to establish a program in which vetted US companies can […]

Nine PBS, the public broadcaster serving St. Louis, is suing Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover a roughly 50-terabyte archive spanning more than 70 years of the station’s history, after the cloud storage vendor it had contracted with went defunct and left the data stranded in a Denver facility. The case, filed in Denver District […]

Dolby has confirmed that Dolby Vision 2, its next-generation HDR format now rolling out to the first televisions, can technically run on existing 4K Blu-ray players and disc hardware. The catch, based on TechRadar’s conversations with Dolby executives, is that making it work requires firmware updates from player manufacturers, and the industry’s appetite for that […]

More than half of UK technology leaders now consider network resilience a business-critical issue, with outages expected to hit revenue, operations, or customers, according to research from internet provider Zen Business. The survey of 500 senior technology decision-makers, conducted by Censuswide, found that 51 percent describe network resilience as business critical and 94 percent say […]

Virgin Galactic is inviting the public to name its next spaceship. The company opened a vote on Tuesday for one of four finalist names for the first vehicle in its Delta class, the successor to the SpaceShipTwo line that carried founder Richard Branson and 31 other people on a dozen short suborbital hops. The poll […]