GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform, has announced a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool. The free version will be available to all users, with limitations on usage, and will also ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. This move aims to make AI coding tools more accessible to developers…
collaboration on The Soothsayer / page 3
Cohere, a prominent AI startup, has been working with Palantir to deploy its AI models to enterprise customers. This partnership has been quietly gaining traction, with Palantir customers already using Cohere’s models for various tasks, including inference in Arabic. The collaboration highlights the growing demand for AI solutions in the enterprise sector and the increasing…
The European Union has appointed a new research head, Ekaterina Zaharieva, to reshape the world’s biggest collaborative research programme and help stop the bloc’s economic and technological downward slide. The focus will be on strengthening industry involvement in the scheme to boost innovation, with a particular emphasis on increasing private investment in research and improving…
The US Treasury Department has sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company, Sichuan Silence Information Technology, and one of its researchers, Guan Tianfeng, for a 2020 cyberattack that targeted 81,000 firewalls worldwide, including 23,000 in the US. The malware was designed to steal data and deploy ransomware, potentially causing serious injury or loss of human life. The…
Researchers at Aoyama Gakuin University and the University of Tokyo have made a groundbreaking discovery in understanding the behavior of squishy particles, which can deform by more than 10% of their size. By studying the flow and jamming of these particles, the team has developed a new model that explains how they respond to external…
Google has announced the release of Gemini 2.0 Flash, a next-generation AI model capable of generating text, images, and audio. This new model is designed to compete with OpenAI’s offerings and is expected to have a significant impact on various industries, including content creation, education, and entertainment. Gemini 2.0 Flash will be available through the…
Mathematicians Ben Green and Mehtaab Sawhney have made a groundbreaking discovery in the field of number theory, proving that there are infinitely many prime numbers that can be written as the sum of squares of other prime numbers. This breakthrough, which uses a powerful tool called the Gowers norm, has significant implications for our understanding…
A recent study by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) collaboration has confirmed the existence of a “cooling break” in the energy spectrum of cosmic ray electrons and positrons at around 1 TeV. The research, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that the origins of these particles are still hotly debated, with possible explanations including…
Physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute and Peking University have made a groundbreaking discovery in particle physics, revealing that xenon nuclei change shape as they collide. Using simulations of experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the researchers found that the nuclei transform from soft, oval-shaped particles to rigid, spherical ones. This finding could lead to…
The tech industry has been hit with a wave of layoffs in 2024, with over 130,000 job cuts across 457 companies. Major players like Tesla, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all conducted significant layoffs, while smaller startups have also been impacted. The layoffs are a result of a combination of factors, including economic uncertainty, increased…