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.

This intervention significantly improves the performance of LLaMA models on the TruthfulQA benchmark.

In this episode of, our hosts dive into WIRED's scoop about a secret Trump administration campaign extending right into your backyard. This week, hosts Brian Barrett, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer discuss WIRED's big scoop on ICE's startling plans to expand to nearly every state in the US. Plus, a WIRED writer lets the viral AI assistant OpenClaw run his life for a week to give listeners a peek of what AI agents can and can't do. ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . I want to continue a conversation that we started yesterday in Slack after work hours for some of us. And this is about the men's short program-- But very specifically want to pick up on the conversation where Zoë had very strong feelings about the results of men's figure skating. I feel like we need to back up because you and Leah authentically care about the Olympics so much and I think just know more about sports than I do. I deeply have never engaged with sports ever, just as a whole rule, as a category. It doesn't exist in my life. Say the lines, say the lines, Zoë, or I'm going to read them verbatim from slack. Wait, I don't even know what you're talking about. I was merely surprised when I watched because the Americans went, I thought, wow, that guy basically fell over and was clumping around the ice, and then Japan went, and they were sailing around like little swans, and then when the gold medal came, it went to the Americans. I couldn't believe what had happened. No one else seemed outraged. For a little backup for our non-ice skating Olympic fans, I was always referring to Ilia Malinin, who a number of publications and sports experts say might actually be one of the greatest figure skaters of all time.

The Winter Olympics Are Here. Is the Sports Betting World Ready? For the 2026 Winter Games, sportsbooks and betting platforms are watching for illicit activity while testing new ways to get people to bet. For all their prestige and gravitas, the Olympic Games have lately proven to be a hotbed for scandals. From a famous judging controversy in 2002 to bid bribery probes and even the resignation of a top Olympic official who was filmed offering to sell tickets for the 2012 London games on the black market, the modern Games have always felt vulnerable to bad actors.

Recent memoirs by the retired bookie Art Manteris and the storied gambler Billy Walters provide a glimpse of an industry in its fledgling form--and a preview of the DraftKings era to come. Las Vegas is no longer the seat of the sportsbook gods. In most states, it's now legal, and extremely popular, to place bets using apps or websites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. From your couch, you can wager on everything from the results of snooker championships to the color of the Gatorade poured over the victorious coach after the Super Bowl. The N.F.L., along with the other major-league American sports associations, has officially partnered with sports-betting sites, and their alliance has proved so lucrative that other industries want in on the action; last month, the Golden Globes made a deal with Polymarket, a predictions-market platform, to encourage wagering (or "trading," if you prefer) on the outcomes of its awards race.

An autonomous vehicle in California hit a student near an elementary school, but there were no injuries reported, according to the Santa Monica Police Department.

Participants take part in a skijoring race in Zab, Poland, on January 25, 2026. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The high-adrenaline winter sport of skijoring, derived from the Norwegian word for "ski driving," takes so many forms that it even defies uniform pronunciation. "If you go to France, it's skijoering, pronounced SKEE-zhor-ing. In German, it's skijöring, pronounced SHEE-yuh-ring," says Loren Zhimanskova, founder of Skijor International and Skijor USA.

We consider the problem of graph matching for a sequence of graphs generated under a time-dependent Markov chain noise model. Our edgelighter error model, a variant of the classical lamplighter random walk, iteratively corrupts the graph $G_0$ with edge-dependent noise, creating a sequence of noisy graph copies $(G_t)$. Much of the graph matching literature is focused on anonymization thresholds in edge-independent noise settings, and we establish novel anonymization thresholds in this edge-dependent noise setting when matching $G_0$ and $G_t$. Moreover, we also compare this anonymization threshold with the mixing properties of the Markov chain noise model. We show that when $G_0$ is drawn from an Erdős-Rényi model, the graph matching anonymization threshold and the mixing time of the edgelighter walk are both of order $Θ(n^2\log n)$. We further demonstrate that for more structured model for $G_0$ (e.g., the Stochastic Block Model), graph matching anonymization can occur in $O(n^α\log n)$ time for some $α<2$, indicating that anonymization can occur before the Markov chain noise model globally mixes. Through extensive simulations, we verify our theoretical bounds in the settings of Erdős-Rényi random graphs and stochastic block model random graphs, and explore our findings on real-world datasets derived from a Facebook friendship network and a European research institution email communication network.

Environment Animals Wildlife Sharks Megalodon could become Maryland's official state shark The 66,000-pound prehistoric predator once stalked the Bay State's waters. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In a state better known for its delicious seafood and as the home of the United States Navy, there's a new effort to create the country's first state shark. Earlier this month, Maryland State Senator Jack Bailey and House Delegate Todd Morgan filed SB135 to designate the megalodon () as the official state shark. While the mighty megalodon is not swimming along the shores of the Bay State now, the enormous prehistoric shark relative once dominated the shallow seas that covered Maryland and the rest of the Atlantic coastal plain .

Science Space Deep Space Amazon's 180 internet satellites are already too bright. A new study determined 92% of Amazon Leo's satellites may currently impede research. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Amazon is racing to catch up to Starlink in the battle for satellite internet dominance, and it's creating problems for everyone else. Only 180 of the proposed 3,236 Amazon Leo satellites are currently in low Earth orbit, but they're already routinely bright enough to disrupt astronomical research, according to a forthcoming study .