Meta says in its Llama 4 release announcement that it's specifically addressing "left-leaning" political bias in its AI model, distinguishing this effort from traditional bias concerns around race, gender, and nationality that researchers have long documented. "Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models and to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides of a contentious issue," the company said.

"All leading LLMs have had issues with bias -- specifically, they historically have leaned left," Meta stated, framing AI bias primarily as a political problem. The company claims Llama 4 is "dramatically more balanced" in handling sensitive topics and touts its lack of "strong political lean" compared to competitors.

theodp writes: America's National Football League announced that beginning with the 2025 season, Sony's Hawk-Eye virtual measurement technology will assess and identify first downs after a ball spot.

Sony's Hawk-Eye virtual measurement technology, which consists of six 8K cameras for optical tracking of the position of the ball, is operated from the NFL's "Art McNally GameDay Central Officiating Center" in New York and is integrated with the League's existing replay system. It will serve as an efficient alternative to the process of having a three-person chain crew walk chains onto the field and manually measure whether 10 yards have been met after the official has spotted the ball.

However, the chain crew will remain on the field in a secondary capacity.
The NFL's executive VP of football operations says their move brings "world-class on field officiating with state-of-the-art technology to advance football excellence." (The NFL's announcement notes the whole process takes about 30 seconds, "saving up to 40 seconds from a measurement with the chains.")

The move comes a full seven years after Apple introduced its iPhone Measure app...

It's "a milestone for Meta AI and for open source," Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend. "For the first time, the best small, mid-size, and potentially soon frontier [large-language] models will be open source."

Zuckerberg anounced four new Llama LLMs in a video posted on Instagram and Facebook — two dropping this weekend, with another two on the way. "Our goal is to build the world's leading AI, open source it, and make it universally accessible so that everyone in the world benefits."

Zuckerberg's announcement: I've said for a while that I think open source AI is going to become the leading models. And with Llama 4 this is starting to happen.

- The first model is Llama 4 Scout. It is extremely fast, natively multi-modal. It has an industry-leading "nearly infinite" 10M-token context length, and is designed to run on a single GPU. [Meta's blog post says it fits on an NVIDIA H100]. It is 17 billion parameters by 16 experts, and it is by far the highest performing small model in its class.

- The second model is Llama 4 Maverick — the workhorse. It beats GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 on all benchmarks. It is smaller and more efficient than DeepSeek v3, but it is still comparable on text, plus it is natively multi-modal. This one is 17B parameters x 128 experts, and it is designed to run on a single host for easy inference.

This thing is a beast.
Zuck promised more news next month on "Llama 4 Reasoning" — but the fourth model will be called Llama 4 Behemoth. "This thing is massive. More than 2 trillion parameters." (A blog post from Meta AI says it also has a 288 billion active parameter model, outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM benchmarks, and will "serve as a teacher for our new models.")

"I'm not aware of anyone training a larger model out there," Zuckberg says in his video, calling Behemoth "already the highest performing base model in the world, and it is not even done training yet."

"If you want to try Llama 4, you can use Meta AI in WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct," Zuckberg said in his video, "or you can go to our web site at meta.ai." The Scout and Maverick models can be downloaded from llama.com and Hugging Face.

"We continue to believe that openness drives innovation," Meta AI says in their blog post, "and is good for developers, good for Meta, and good for the world." Their blog post declares it's "The beginning of a new era of natively multimodal AI innovation," calling Scout and Maverick "the best choices for adding next-generation intelligence." This is just the beginning for the Llama 4 collection. We believe that the most intelligent systems need to be capable of taking generalized actions, conversing naturally with humans, and working through challenging problems they haven't seen before. Giving Llama superpowers in these areas will lead to better products for people on our platforms and more opportunities for developers to innovate on the next big consumer and business use cases. We're continuing to research and prototype both models and products, and we'll share more about our vision at LlamaCon on April 29...

We also can't wait to see the incredible new experiences the community builds with our new Llama 4 models.
"The impressive part about Llama 4 Maverick is that with just 17B active parameters, it has scored an ELO score of 1,417 on the LMArena leaderboard," notes the tech news site Beebom. "This puts the Maverick model in the second spot, just below Gemini 2.5 Pro, and above Grok 3, GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, and more.

"It also achieves comparable results when compared to the latest DeepSeek V3 model on reasoning and coding tasks, and surprisingly, with just half the active parameters."

Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."

But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly." Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters.
Also on X, legendary game developer John Carmack remembered that Täht "did a great service for online gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he wrote." (Carmack also says he and Täht "corresponded for years".)

Long-time Slashdot reader TheBracket remembers him as "the driving force behind ">the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel."

Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.
Eric Raymond remembered first meeting Täht in 2001 "near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder..."

Raymond said Täht "lived for the work he did" and "bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis." He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking...

In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.
Weeks before his death Täht was still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about "The AI scraperbot scourge", an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot headline.

Täht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about the Bufferbloat project.

Midjourney's new V7 image model features a revamped architecture with smarter text prompt handling, higher image quality, and default personalization based on user-rated images. While some features like upscaling aren't yet available, it does come with a faster, cheaper Draft Mode. TechCrunch reports: To use it, you'll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney "personalization" profile, if you haven't already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney's first model to have personalization switched on by default. Once you've done that, you'll be able to turn V7 on or off on Midjourney's website and, if you're a member of Midjourney's Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the "Version" label.

Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a "totally different architecture" in a post on X. "V7 is ... much smarter with text prompts," Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. "[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details." V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Relax, and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are of lower quality than standard-mode images, but they can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click.

A number of standard Midjourney features aren't available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said, possibly within two months. "This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses" Holz wrote on Discord. "[W]e want to learn from you what it's good and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So play around a bit."

U.S. stock markets suffered their worst day since the Covid pandemic after Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs, triggering a global selloff and wiping out $470 billion in value from tech giants Apple and Nvidia. From a report: The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 6%, while the S&P 500 and the Dow dropped 4.8% and 3.9%, respectively. [...] Meanwhile, the US dollar hit a six-month low, going down at least 2.2% on Thursday morning compared with other major currencies and oil prices sank on fears of a global slowdown. Though the US stock market has been used to tumultuous mornings over the last few weeks, US stock futures -- an indication of the market's likely direction -- had plummeted after the announcement. Hours later, Japan's Nikkei index slumped to an eight-month low and was followed by falls in stock markets in London and across Europe.

Multiple major American business groups have spoken out against the tariffs, including the Business Roundtable, a consortium of leaders of major US companies including JP Morgan, Apple and IBM, which called on the White House to "swiftly reach agreements" and remove the tariffs. "Universal tariffs ranging from 10-50% run the risk of causing major harm to American manufacturers, workers, families and exporters," the Business Roundtable said in a statement. "Damage to the US economy will increase the longer the tariffs are in place and may be exacerbated by retaliatory measures."

Climate startup Aspiration, which boasted a roster of celebrity backers and arranged carbon credits for Meta Platforms, Microsoft and other large companies, filed bankruptcy weeks after its co-founder was arrested on fraud charges. From a report: CTN Holdings, as the company is now known, has about $170 million in debt. The goal of the bankruptcy is to sell its assets as quickly as possible in order to repay creditors, chief restructuring officer Miles Staglik said in a court filing. The pool of potential bidders is small and the nature of the CTN's ventures will likely require more cash and "long term horizons before any potential value could be realized for creditors," Staglik said.

The bankruptcy was filed after co-founder Joseph Sanberg was charged by federal prosecutors with conspiring to defraud two investor funds of at least $145 million, according to a US Department of Justice announcement earlier this month. The charges involve his personal conduct and don't implicate CTN or its affiliates "in any criminal activity," said Staglik, a managing director at CR3 Partners that's been hired as CTN's restructuring adviser.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: A coalition of Washington state business leaders -- which includes Microsoft President Brad Smith and Amazon Chief Legal Officer David Zapolsky -- released a letter Wednesday urging state lawmakers to reconsider recently proposed tax and budget measures. "I actually think it's an almost unprecedented outpouring of support from across the business community," said Microsoft's Smith in an interview. In their letter, which reads in part like it could have been penned by a GenAI Marie Antoinette, the WA business leaders question whether any more spending is warranted given how poorly Washington's 4th and 8th graders compare to children in the rest of the nation on test scores. The letter also laments the increase in WA's homeless population as it celebrates WA Governor Bob Ferguson's announcement that he would not sign a proposed wealth tax.

From the letter: "We have long partnered with you in many areas, including education funding. Despite more than doubling K-12 spending and increasing teacher salaries to some of the highest rates in the nation, 4th and 8th grade assessment scores in reading and math are among the worst in the country. Similarly, we have collaborated with you to address housing and homelessness. Despite historic investments in affordable housing and homelessness prevention since 2013, Washington's homeless population has grown by 71 percent, making it the third largest in the nation after California and New York, according to HUD. These outcomes beg the question of whether more investment is needed or whether we need different policies instead."

Back in 2010, Smith teamed with then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to fund an effort to defeat an initiative for a WA state income that was pushed for by Bill Gates Sr. In 2023, Bezos moved out of WA state before being subjected to a 7% tax on gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, a move that reportedly saved him $1.2 billion in WA taxes on his 2024 Amazon stock sales.

Substack has announced it will legally support foreign writers lawfully residing in the U.S. who face government targeting over their published work, partnering with the nonprofit FIRE to expand its existing Defender program. The Verge reports: In their announcement, Substack and FIRE mention the international Tufts University student who was arrested by federal agents last week. Her legal team links her arrest to an opinion piece she co-wrote for the school's newspaper last year, which criticized Tufts for failing to comply with requests to divest from companies with connections to Israel. "If true, this represents a chilling escalation in the government's effort to target critics of American foreign policy," Substack and FIRE write.

The initiative builds on Substack's Defender program, which already offers legal assistance for independent journalists and creators on the platform. The company says it has supported "dozens" of Substack writers facing claims of defamation and trademark infringement since it launched the program in the US in 2020. It has since brought Substack Defender to writers in Canada and the UK.

Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an IPO aiming for a $5 billion valuation. It marks the company's second attempt at going public amid renewed momentum in the crypto sector and signs of recovery in tech IPO markets. CNBC reports: A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance, including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York.

Circle reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. The company reported net income last year of about $156 million., down from $268 million a year earlier. A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent pure-play crypto companies to list on a U.S. exchange. Coinbase went public through a direct listing in 2021 and has a market cap of about $44 billion.

Mozilla plans to introduce a suite of paid professional services for its open-source Thunderbird email client, transforming the application into a comprehensive communication platform. Dubbed "Thunderbird Pro," the package aims to compete with established ecosystems like Gmail and Office 365 while maintaining Mozilla's commitment to open-source software.

The Pro tier will include four core services: Thunderbird Appointment for streamlined scheduling, Thunderbird Send for file sharing (reviving the discontinued Firefox Send), Thunderbird Assist offering AI capabilities powered by Flower AI, and Thundermail, a revamped email client built on Stalwart's open-source stack. Initially, Thunderbird Pro will be available free to "consistent community contributors," with paid access for other users.

Mozilla Managing Director Ryan Sipes indicated the company may consider limited free tiers once the service establishes a sustainable user base. This initiative follows Mozilla's 2023 announcement about "remaking" Thunderbird's architecture to modernize its aging codebase, addressing user losses to more feature-rich competitors.

California has 11.3% of America's population — but bought 30% of America's new zero-emission vehicles. That's according to figures from the California Air Resources Board, which also reports 1 in 4 Californians have chosen a zero-emission car over a gas-powered one... for the last two years in a row.

But what about chargers? It turns out that California now has 48% more public and "shared" private EV chargers than the number of gasoline nozzles. (California has 178,000 public and "shared" private EV chargers, versus about 120,000 gas nozzles.) And beyond that public network, there's more than 700,000 Level 2 chargers installed in single-family California homes, according to the California Energy Commission.

Of the 178,000 public/"shared" private chargers, "Over 162,000 are Level 2 chargers," according to an announcement from the governor's office, while nearly 17,000 are fast chargers. (A chart shows a 41% jump in 2024 — though the EV news site Electrek notes that of the 73,537 chargers added in 2024, nearly 38,000 are newly installed, while the other 35,554 were already plugged in before 2024 but just recently identified.) California approved a $1.4 billion investment plan in December to expand zero-emission transportation infrastructure. The plan funds projects like the Fast Charge California Project, which has earmarked $55 million of funding to install DC fast chargers at businesses and publicly accessible locations.

"I've been dreaming of this moment for 20 years," says Aptera co-CEO Steve Fambro. Aptera's solar-powered electric car just drove 300 miles on a single charge.

"We're one step closer to a future where every journey is powered by the sun," Aptera says in their announcement.

"This go around, Aptera took to the highway for the first time ever..." writes the EV blog Electrek. "At one point, Aptera's video noted that its solar EV was pulling over 545 watts of solar input, even though it was overcast."

"Less time searching for chargers," Aptera says in their announcement, adding that their "production-intent" car proved "that a solar EV isn't just a concept for the future, but a real-world solution ready for the present" — while turning Route 66 into "a test bed for a vehicle built to thrive independently..." "The panoramic windshield gives you this incredible view of the landscape," Steve said [in a video accompanying the announcement], describing the drive. "It's like a big picture window into the future."

The final stretch took the team back into California, where they reflected on the journey, the data, and the excited reactions from drivers who caught a glimpse of the vehicle on the road. "Almost everyone we passed had their phones out filming us," Steve laughed. "It's clear that Aptera's design stops traffic — without needing to stop for a charge."
"I was struck by how normal this trip seemed, except for all the gawking from fellow travelers," writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. "Best of luck to Aptera to reach their funding and production goals this year for this remarkable vehicle."

They drove on highways to Lake Havasu, and then to California's Imperial Valley — starting in Flagstaff, Arizona on symbolic Route 66. It was 100 years ago that Route 66 was proposed to link Chicago and Los Angeles, which Fambro credits to a visionary who believed in "something bigger than the road itself — believing in what it could unlock for the world." "And they did it. Route 66 became one of the most iconic highways in America, proving that what once seemed improbable could become inevitable.

"I think about that alot with Aptera. We're building something people say can't be done. History shows us the boldest ideas, the ones that challenge that status quo are the ones that truly change the world.
They take their futuristic, tear-dropped shaped "Jetsons" car to a drive-through wildlife refuge named Bearizona. They stop at a general store for some beef jerky. "We're just having a fun time seeing all the sights."

"I've been dreaming of this moment for 20 years," says Aptera co-CEO Steve Fambro. "Driving in the most efficient vehicle on the road. Watching the sights go by. I got emotional just taking it all in." "This company. This idea. It's real. It's visceral. And I'm just so proud of each and every person who helped make this dream a reality.

"We have the chance to make a real change in how the world moves. The road hasn't been easy. It's been painful, difficult. And it's brought me to my breaking point sometimes. But being in this moment right now? I can say it's all been worth it...

"I feel we're at the forefront of something truly revolutionary. We're not fighting an uphill battle any more. We're standing at the edge of something incredible. Ready to break through.

"To all of you who supported us, my commitment is this. We're not stopping. We're moving forward with more energy and more passion than ever. The road ahead is an open highway. And the future is ours to shape."
To celebrate Aptera is holding a giveaway for a camping kit, a $100 gift card to their online store, and a free Aptera pre-order to a winner chosen at random from those who subscribe/watch/comment on their new video...

Despite recent test failures, NASA has added SpaceX's Starship to its Launch Services Program contract, allowing it to compete for future science missions once it achieves a successful orbital flight. Florida Today reports: NASA announced the addition Friday to its current launch provider contract with SpaceX, which covers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This opens the possibility of Starship flying future NASA science missions -- that is once Starship reaches a successful orbital flight.

"NASA has awarded SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, a modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings," NASA's statement reads. Th announcement is simply an onboarding of Starship as an option, as the contract runs through 2032. However, SpaceX is under pressure to get Starship operational by next year as the company plans not only to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars by late 2026, but the NASA Artemis III moon landing is fast approaching. Should it remain the plan with the current administration, Starship will act as a human lander for NASA's Artemis III crew.

"The NLS II contracts are multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, with an ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032. The contracts include an on-ramp provision that provides an opportunity annually for new launch service providers to add their launch service on an NLS II contract and compete for future missions and allows existing contractors to introduce launch services not currently on their NLS II contracts," NASA's statement reads.

Ubisoft is launching a new subsidiary focused on Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, backed by a 1.16 billion-euro investment from Tencent. "The as-yet-unnamed subsidiary will fold in the teams working on those three series, including Ubisoft studios in Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, Saguenay, Barcelona and Sofia," reports Engadget. From the report: This new business will receive an investment of 1.16 billion-euro (roughly $1.25 billion) from its longstanding partner Tencent, granting the conglomerate a minority ownership stake. Following the transaction, Ubisoft will narrow focus to its other franchises, such as The Division and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. [...] There is some extra good news in the announcement. The description of the new subsidiary does specify that "it will drive further increases in quality of narrative solo experiences." So while we can expect to also see multiplayer and free-to-play offerings from the Ubisoft umbrella, they aren't giving up on single-player games. "Today Ubisoft is opening a new chapter in its history," CEO and Co-Founder Yves Guillemot said. "As we accelerate the company's transformation, this is a foundational step in changing Ubisoft's operating model that will enable us to be both agile and ambitious."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: No matter the manufacturer, every Android phone has one thing in common: its software base. Manufacturers can heavily customize the look and feel of the Android OS they ship on their Android devices, but under the hood, the core system functionality is derived from the same open-source foundation: the Android Open Source Project. After over 16 years, Google is making big changes to how it develops the open source version of Android in an effort to streamline its development. [...] Beginning next week, all Android development will occur within Google's internal branches, and the source code for changes will only be released when Google publishes a new branch containing those changes. As this is already the practice for most Android component changes, Google is simply consolidating its development efforts into a single branch.

This change will have minimal impact on regular users. While it streamlines Android OS development for Google, potentially affecting the speed of new version development and bug reduction, the overall effect will likely be imperceptible. Therefore, don't expect this change to accelerate OS updates for your phone. This change will also have minimal impact on most developers. App developers are unaffected, as it pertains only to platform development. Platform developers, including those who build custom ROMs, will largely also see little change, since they typically base their work on specific tags or release branches, not the main AOSP branch. Similarly, companies that release forked AOSP products rarely use the main AOSP branch due to its inherent instability.

External developers who enjoy reading or contributing to AOSP will likely be dismayed by this news, as it reduces their insight into Google's development efforts. Without a GMS license, contributing to Android OS development becomes more challenging, as the available code will consistently lag behind by weeks or months. This news will also make it more challenging for some developers to keep up with new Android platform changes, as they'll no longer be able to track changes in AOSP. For reporters, this change means less access to potentially revealing information, as AOSP patches often provide insights into Google's development plans. [...] Google will share more details about this change when it announces it later this week. If you're interested in learning more, be sure to keep an eye out for the announcement and new documentation on source.android.com. Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman says Google is "committed to publishing Android's source code, so this change doesn't mean that Android is becoming closed-source."

"What will change is the frequency of public source code releases for specific Android components," says Rahman. "Some components like the build system, update engine, Bluetooth stack, Virtualization framework, and SELinux configuration are currently AOSP-first, meaning they're developed fully in public. Most Android components like the core OS framework are primarily developed internally, although some features, such as the unlocked-only storage area API, are still developed within AOSP."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released a new large language model that's already sending ripples through the artificial intelligence industry -- not just for its capabilities, but for how it's being deployed. The 641-gigabyte model, dubbed DeepSeek-V3-0324, appeared on AI repository Hugging Face today with virtually no announcement (just an empty README file), continuing the company's pattern of low-key but impactful releases. What makes this launch particularly notable is the model's MIT license -- making it freely available for commercial use -- and early reports that it can run directly on consumer-grade hardware, specifically Apple's Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip.

"The new DeepSeek-V3-0324 in 4-bit runs at > 20 tokens/second on a 512GB M3 Ultra with mlx-lm!" wrote AI researcher Awni Hannun on social media. While the $9,499 Mac Studio might stretch the definition of "consumer hardware," the ability to run such a massive model locally is a major departure from the data center requirements typically associated with state-of-the-art AI. [...] Simon Willison, a developer tools creator, noted in a blog post that a 4-bit quantized version reduces the storage footprint to 352GB, making it feasible to run on high-end consumer hardware like the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip. This represents a potentially significant shift in AI deployment. While traditional AI infrastructure typically relies on multiple Nvidia GPUs consuming several kilowatts of power, the Mac Studio draws less than 200 watts during inference. This efficiency gap suggests the AI industry may need to rethink assumptions about infrastructure requirements for top-tier model performance. "The implications of an advanced open-source reasoning model cannot be overstated," reports VentureBeat. "Current reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 represent the cutting edge of AI capabilities, demonstrating unprecedented problem-solving abilities in domains from mathematics to coding. Making this technology freely available would democratize access to AI systems currently limited to those with substantial budgets."

"If DeepSeek-R2 follows the trajectory set by R1, it could present a direct challenge to GPT-5, OpenAI's next flagship model rumored for release in coming months. The contrast between OpenAI's closed, heavily-funded approach and DeepSeek's open, resource-efficient strategy represents two competing visions for AI's future."

Firefly Aerospace has teamed up with Blue Origin's Honeybee Robotics unit to deploy a rover on its 2028 lunar mission to study the Gruithuisen Domes -- rare volcanic formations that may reveal insights into the moon's geology and potential resources. The announcement follows Firefly's successful Blue Ghost Mission 1, which outlasted all prior commercial lunar landings. Reuters reports: The Gruithuisen Domes, located on the moon's near side, are unusual volcanic formations believed to be rich in silica -- a composition rare on the lunar surface -- and studying them could unlock clues about the moon's geological history and potential resources for future human missions. [...] The upcoming mission, part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, will use Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and Elytra Dark orbital vehicle, alongside the Honeybee Robotics rover, to explore the domes, building on the success of its debut effort, Firefly said.

"For developers and organisations that require a custom software image, a flexible and transparent build system is essential," according to an announcement Friday at Raspberry Pi.com.

"[T]o support these customers, we have created rpi-image-gen, a powerful new tool designed to put you in complete control of your Raspberry Pi images." If you're building an embedded system or an industrial controller, you'll need complete control over the software resident on the device, and home users may wish to build their own OS and have it pre-configured exactly the way they want... rpi-image-gen is an alternative to pi-gen, which is the tool we use to create and deploy the Raspberry Pi OS distribution. rpi-image-gen... offers a very granular level of control over file system construction and software image creation... [B]eing able to help reduce software build time, provide guaranteed ownership of support, and reuse standard methodologies to ensure authenticity of software were all of paramount importance, and among the reasons why we created a new home-grown build tool for Raspberry Pi devices...

There is a small number of examples in the tree which demonstrate different use cases of rpi-image-gen [including the lightweight image slim and webkiosk for booting into browser kiosk mode]. All create bootable disk images and serve to illustrate how one might use rpi-image-gen to create a bespoke image for a particular purpose. The number of examples will grow over time and we welcome suggestions for new ones... Visit the rpi-image-gen GitHub repository to get started. There, you'll find documentation and examples to guide you through creating custom Raspberry Pi images.
Some technical details from the announcement.

• "Similar to pi-gen, rpi-image-gen leverages the power, reliability, and trust of installing a Debian Linux system for the device. However, unlike pi-gen, rpi-image-gen introduces some new concepts [profiles, image layouts, and config] which serve to dictate the build footprint and installation."

• The tool also lets you exclude from your package "things that would otherwise be installed as part of the profile."

• The tool's GitHub repository notes that it also allows you output your software bill of materials (SBOM) "to list the exact set of packages that were used to create the image." And it can even generate a list of CVEs identified from the SBOM to "give consumers of your image confidence that your image does not contain any known vulnerabilities."

Two "groundbreaking research reports" on open source security were announced this week by the Linux Foundation in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Europe. The reports specifically address the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (or CRA) and "highlight knowledge gaps and best practices for CRA compliance."

"Unaware and Uncertain: The Stark Realities of CRA-Readiness in Open Source" includes a survey which found that when it comes to CRA requirements, 62% of respondents were either "not familiar at all" (36%) or "slightly familiar" (26%) — while 51% weren't sure about its deadlines. ("Only 28% correctly identified 2027 as the target year for full compliance," according to one infographic, which adds that CRA "is expected to drive a 6% average price increase, though 53% of manufacturers are still assessing pricing impacts.") Manufacturers, who bear primary responsibility, lack readiness — many [46%] passively rely on upstream security fixes, and only a small portion produce Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs). The report recommends that manufacturers take a more active role in open source security, that more funding and legal support is needed to support security practices, and that clear regulatory guidance is essential to prevent unintended negative impacts on open source development.
The research also provides "an in-depth analysis of how open collaboration can strengthen software security and innovation across global markets," with another report that "examines how three Linux Foundation projects are meeting the CRA's minimum compliance requirements" and "provides insight on the elements needed to ensure leadership in cybersecurity best practices." (It also includes CRA-related resources.)

"These two reports offer actionable conclusions for open source stakeholders to ready themselves for 2027, when the CRA comes into force," according to a Linux Foundation reserach executive cited in the announcement. "We hope that these reports catalyze higher levels of collaboration across the open source community."