Plus: OpenAI and Nvidia's circular deals are drawing some heat The US Department of Energy appears poised to terminate funding for a pair of large carbon-sucking factories that were originally set to receive more than $1 billion in government grants, according to a department-issued list of projects obtained by and circulating among federal agencies. One of the projects is the South Texas Direct Air Capture Hub, a facility that Occidental Petroleum's 1PointFive subsidiary planned to develop in Kleberg County, Texas. The other is Project Cypress in Louisiana, a collaboration between Battelle, Climeworks, and Heirloom. AI toys are all the rage in China--and now they're appearing on shelves in the US too Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children's playthings with chatbots and voice assistants. It's a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts that the sector will surpass ¥100 billion ($14 billion) by 2030, growing faster than almost any other branch of consumer AI.

Three killed in latest Ukrainian strike on Russia's Belgorod region Three people have been killed and at least nine others injured in Ukraine's latest attack on the Russian border region of Belgorod, according to its governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. The deaths happened following a strike on the village of Maslova Pristan early on Wednesday, Gladkov said. Emergency workers were continuing to search for people feared trapped under rubble. It is the third consecutive day that Ukraine has struck the region, leaving thousands of people without power and at least two other people dead. Ukraine has not commented on the attacks but has repeatedly struck targets inside Russia, including Belgorod, during the conflict, which is now in its fourth year.

The Bank of England says'equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence'. The Bank of England says'equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence'. Possibility of'sharp market correction has increased', says Bank's financial policy committee The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a "sudden correction" in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies. Policymakers said there were also threats of a "sharp repricing of US dollar assets" if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump's continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

Recent advances in attention-free sequence models rely on convolutions as alternatives to the attention operator at the core of Transformers. In particular, long convolution sequence models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many domains, but incur a significant cost during auto-regressive inference workloads - naively requiring a full pass (or caching of activations) over the input sequence for each generated token - similarly to attention-based models. In this paper, we seek to enable O (1) compute and memory cost per token in any pre-trained long convolution architecture to reduce memory footprint and increase throughput during generation. Concretely, our methods consist in extracting low-dimensional linear state-space models from each convolution layer, building upon rational interpolation and model-order reduction techniques. We further introduce architectural improvements to convolution-based layers such as Hyena: by weight-tying the filters across channels into heads, we achieve higher pre-training quality and reduce the number of filters to be distilled. The resulting model achieves 10 higher throughput than Transformers and 1 .5 higher than Hyena at 1 .3