AI
Artificial intelligence: LLMs, agents, diffusion, vision, NLP and the latest from top labs.
593 published articles
Enterprise analytics
Alibaba built a data agent that finally understands what 'valid users' means
Alibaba's QwenPaw-Data introduces a three-subsystem architecture, DataBridge, Skill-Hub, and Host, to turn fragmented enterprise data into reusable analytical assets. Early evaluations show substantial gains over existing systems on both public benchmarks and industrial BI workloads.
2026-07-30
AI Sovereignty
Japan's AI sovereignty play is orchestration, not building a new frontier model
Sakana AI's defense chief explains how the startup's orchestration layer lets Japan swap in and out of AI models as needed, reducing dependence on foreign frontier models. The approach focuses on post-training adaptation and multi-model orchestration, not pre-training from scratch.
2026-07-29
AI Geopolitics
Why Small European States Keep Handing Money to the Same Voice AI Startup
Greece and Poland both struck deals with ElevenLabs within weeks of each other, one a public-services contract, one a state investment. Different instruments, same underlying strategy: buying proximity to a winning European AI company rather than trying to build a frontier lab of their own.
2026-07-29
AI Policy
41 Rivals Signed the Same Open-Weight Letter. That's Not Consensus, It's Nerves
Forty-one rival companies signed the same letter arguing open-weight AI is America's best bet, right as Chinese labs matched US benchmarks on capability, not just price. Read together, the letter looks less like confidence and more like a hedge against a coordination problem the signatories haven't actually solved.
2026-07-29
AI Platform Strategy
Who controls AI infrastructure: four very different answers just arrived
From Apple's curated ecosystem to ElevenLabs' European independence, four distinct strategies are vying for control of AI infrastructure. Developers and enterprises face a fragmented field with no single winner.
2026-07-29
Frontier AI
1,224 AI insiders just asked the US to do something the market can't
Over 1,200 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta signed a statement urging the US to develop governance mechanisms to pace automated AI research, warning that competitive pressures make unilateral slowdowns impossible.
2026-07-29
AI in the workspace
Google Docs kills the split-screen: Gemini draws diagrams from your text
Google Docs now lets you generate and edit images, infographics, and diagrams directly using Gemini in the sidebar or bottom bar, leveraging document context for relevance. The rollout started July 28, 2026, for paid Workspace tiers.
2026-07-29
Benchmark analysis
What three AI benchmarks got wrong about real-world performance
AI benchmarks like MMLU are the standard for comparing models, but three recent cases show they miss critical dimensions. Nvidia's Nemotron-4 lacks independent verification, Celeris-1 trades accuracy for speed, and the best pathogen surveillance AI clears only half the tasks. The evidence points to a need for evaluation frameworks that measure what matters in practice.
2026-07-29
AI Governance
France's AI action summit put governance on the global table
Paris hosted the AI Action Summit from February 6 to 11, 2025, featuring scientific days, a cultural weekend, and an international meeting at the Grand Palais. The event aimed to bolster international action for AI serving the public interest, underscoring France's growing role in shaping global AI governance.
2026-07-29
Artificial Intelligence
France's grand AI ambition collides with government inertia
France's state-led AI strategy includes a national plan, a new directorate, startup support, and global summit participation. Critics warn bureaucracy could stall the ambition.
2026-07-29
Creative Production
ElevenLabs just turned video production into a conversation
ElevenLabs' Flows Agent adds an AI assistant to its node-based media canvas, letting users describe desired outputs and get fully built pipelines in return. It represents the shift from manual chaining to agentic orchestration in generative media.
2026-07-29
AI Strategy
Microsoft's in-house AI models are cutting costs by 89% in production
Microsoft's in-house MAI models are live in production, delivering dramatic cost savings across multiple products. The numbers signal a strategic shift: the company is now competing on inference efficiency, not just model quality.
2026-07-29