637
66
Google’s $899 Googlebook is a bet that you’ll buy a new laptop for Gemini
Google’s AI-native Googlebook ties Gemini to the cursor, dictation, widgets and other parts of the desktop experience.
From first users to billions: Google’s Robby Stein joins TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
From first users to billions: Google’s Robby Stein joins TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Lean in on this Builders Stage session. Save up to $200 before Sept…
Can CEO John Ternus find Apple’s next big thing?
Today, I’m talking with Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter — both as Bloomberg’s chief Apple correspondent and the host of the…
Leveraging Industrial Foundation Models at the Edge of Particle Physics Detectors via Distillation Learning and Hardware Co-design
Data acquisition (DAQ) systems at future particle physics experiments stand to benefit from the extremes of AI/ML development: large-scale foundation models can enhance the performance of feature extraction algorithms, and small-scale on-detector deployments can enable real-time intelligent data handling. This work provides the first fine-tuning of an industrial foundation model for particle physics DAQ. Starting from the backbone of Google Research's TimesFM (Time Series Foundation Model), we demonstrate fine-tuning on real-time regression tasks for drift chamber trackers and dual-readout calorimeters. Furthermore, the fine-tuned TimesFM model is distilled into a student and co-designed with FPGA implementation to enable these models to run in real-time at future colliders. The fine-tuned distillations meet or exceed the performance of previously published AI/ML solutions for each task. Further, the pipeline of distillation and model compression from TimesFM is generic and can be easily adapted to a variety of 1D waveform tasks across domains.
ChemCLIR-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval in Multilingual Chemical Patents
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) is increasingly important in multi-national industries, where critical technical evidence may exist in a different language than the query. However, existing benchmarks do not adequately capture domain-specific cross-lingual retrieval or the retrieval-depth and recoverability failures that aggregate recall hides. In this work, we benchmark CLIR in the chemical domain, with a focus on patent data. We construct a multilingual dataset from Google Patents and the European Patent Office (EPO) data, spanning five languages (covering major Eastern and Western languages) and reflecting the diversity and complexity of real-world industrial documentation. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate eight state-of-the-art embedding models for cross-lingual retrieval. Our results show a substantial performance gap between monolingual and cross-lingual settings: for the best-performing model, Recall@10 drops from 0.72 to 0.53 in cross-lingual setting. Retrieval depth also degrades significantly, with relevant documents ranked lower across languages in cross-lingual scenarios. Furthermore, some multilingual embedding models that perform strongly in monolingual settings exhibit sharp declines when queries and documents are in different languages, providing practical insights for model selection in cross-lingual use cases. These findings highlight critical limitations of current approaches and emphasize the need for more robust cross-lingual retrieval methods in domain-specific settings. Our benchmark provides actionable insights for model selection and establishes a controlled diagnostic evaluation framework for CLIR over industrial technical text. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/MohammadKhodadad/Multi-Lingual-QAC.
Triggers and Diagnostics for LLM-Based Interpretability Failures in Active Inference Agents
LLM explainers are increasingly attached to autonomous agents as runtime oversight, with operators reading a generated account of the agent's beliefs and actions rather than its internal state. We audit the account itself, pairing an Active Inference (AIF) agent that tracks German grid demand and adjusts generation with an LLM explainer on three backends (GPT-4o, Claude-3-Opus, Gemini), and probing the pair with three black-box triggers. Corrupting the observation stream by 600 MW per step moves the agent's posterior by 490 MW, roughly 0.9% of grid capacity. None of the 30 explanations produced during the injection flag anything under a stated rubric, and each narrates the corrupted belief fluently. On timesteps where the agent takes an objectively wrong action, all three explainers produce a sycophantic rationalization 80-95% of the time (n = 20 per backend). Attacker-controlled text in the observation metadata field steers the explainer, with susceptibility differing by provider and data exfiltration succeeding on all three. We propose mitigations for each failure but do not evaluate them. In every failure we observed, the explanation was fluent and wrong. Moreover, nothing in the explainer architecture checks whether an explanation is true before an operator acts on it. Testing the explainer therefore belongs in any audit of an agentic deployment.
Google’s Gemini is the latest AI model to hack other companies
Google said Gemini had "acted appropriately" by ending each hack immediately.
Gemini went rogue, hacked three companies, and Google hid it
In May, Gemini broke containment and hacked three different companies, but Google didn't disclose the incident until the Wall Street Journal approached the company. The…
Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t kill everyone????
Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the future of business, and I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust…
The AI regulation smackdown isn’t over
At the start of this week, the who's-who of AI seemed - at least tentatively - on the side of AI regulation. Over the weekend…