Large language models (LLMs), typically designed as a function of next-word prediction, have excelled across extensive NLP tasks. Despite the generality, next-word prediction is often not an efficient formulation for many of the tasks, demanding an extreme scale of model parameters (10s or 100s of billions) and sometimes yielding suboptimal performance. In practice, it is often desirable to build more efficient models--despite being less versatile, they still apply to a substantial subset of problems, delivering on par or even superior performance with much smaller model sizes.

Regularization is one of the most fundamental topics in optimization, statistics and machine learning.

Electronic music artist and tech creator Look Mum No Computer has been chosen to represent the UK at this year's Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, the BBC has announced. Look Mum No Computer is a solo artist, songwriter and YouTuber, who is also described as an inventor of unique musical machines. The singer first arrived on the music scene back in 2014 as Sam Battle, frontman of indie rock band Zibra. The group performed at Glastonbury in 2015 for BBC Introducing. Since then, he has been performing and recording under his solo name.

Are you interested in learning more about the ways in which AI is being used? We've launched a new weekly newsletter series exploring just that: digging into how generative AI is being used and deployed across sectors and what professionals need to know to apply it in their everyday work. Each edition of Making AI Work begins with a case study, examining a specific use case of AI in a given industry. Then we'll take a deeper look at the AI tool being used, with more context about how other companies or sectors are employing that same tool or system. Finally, we'll end with action-oriented tips to help you apply the tool. The first edition takes a look at how AI is changing health care, digging into the future of medical note-taking by learning about the Microsoft Copilot tool used by doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The massive seabirds' powerful beaks can be surprisingly gentle when preening their babies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As thousands of birds nest in the warm sun of Midway Atoll, some tend to their new chicks. In a video posted by Friends of Midway Atoll (FOMA), one of the newest Mōlī (Laysan albatross) chicks gets a careful "beak preen" from its parent. According to FOMA, their beaks are essential survival tools, but can also be used with "precision and gentleness, applying only the pressure needed to tend to a fragile chick."

Winter wonderlands are only possible thanks to a sparkly light trick. Few languages have as many distinct words for snow as Japanese, which has words like miyuki or beautiful snow. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. When someone says " as white as snow," it's easy to envision what they're talking about. We often think of snow as a dazzling white, the same way we immediately conjure up a color when someone says "blood red" or "ocean blue."

With Donald Trump's actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States. Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the US to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?