Notice: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) and large multi-modal models (LMMs) have achieved unprecedented breakthrough, showcasing remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and complex reasoning. This transformative potential has positioned them as key enablers for 6G autonomous communications among machines, vehicles, and humanoids. In this article, we provide an overview of task-oriented autonomous communications with LLMs/LMMs, focusing on multimodal sensing integration, adaptive reconfiguration, and prompt/fine-tuning strategies for wireless tasks. We demonstrate the framework through three case studies: LMM-based traffic control, LLM-based robot scheduling, and LMM-based environment-aware channel estimation. From experimental results, we show that the proposed LLM/LMM-aided autonomous systems significantly outperform conventional and discriminative deep learning (DL) model-based techniques, maintaining robustness under dynamic objectives, varying input parameters, and heterogeneous multimodal conditions where conventional static optimization degrades. Driven by the huge success of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread attention, reshaping various fields by solving problems with zero-shot or few-shot prompting. Recently, large multimodal models (LMMs) extend this capability by embracing various modalities such as images, videos, and audio. These models can handle changing objectives and input variations using diverse multimodal observations.

The emergence of open-source large language models (LLMs) has expanded opportunities for enterprise applications; however, many organizations still lack the infrastructure to deploy and maintain large-scale models. As a result, small LLMs (sLLMs) have become a practical alternative despite inherent performance limitations. While Domain Adaptive Continual Pretraining (DACP) has been explored for domain adaptation, its utility in commercial settings remains under-examined. In this study, we validate the effectiveness of a DACP-based recipe across diverse foundation models and service domains, producing DACP-applied sLLMs (ixi-GEN). Through extensive experiments and real-world evaluations, we demonstrate that ixi-GEN models achieve substantial gains in target-domain performance while preserving general capabilities, offering a cost-efficient and scalable solution for enterprise-level deployment.

HAPS are emerging as key enablers in the evolution of 6G wireless networks, bridging terrestrial and non-terrestrial infrastructures. Operating in the stratosphere, HAPS can provide wide-area coverage, low-latency, energy-efficient broadband communications with flexible deployment options for diverse applications. This survey delivers a comprehensive overview of HAPS use cases, technologies, and integration strategies within the 6G ecosystem. The roles of HAPS in extending connectivity to underserved regions, supporting dynamic backhauling, enabling massive IoT, and delivering reliable low-latency communications for autonomous and immersive services are discussed. The paper reviews state-of-the-art architectures for terrestrial and non-terrestrial network integration, highlights recent field trials. Furthermore, key enabling technologies such as channel modeling, AI-driven resource allocation, interference control, mobility management, and energy-efficient communications are examined. The paper also outlines open research challenges. By addressing existing gaps in the literature, this survey positions HAPS as a foundational component of globally integrated, resilient, and sustainable 6G networks.

SoftBank has raised at least $24 billion in loans and bonds so far in 2025 and is seeking to raise more in the overseas bond market. SoftBank Group is returning to the overseas bond market for the second time this year amid an aggressive fundraising push for artificial intelligence, led by its bet on OpenAI. The Japanese technology investment giant is looking to raise about $1.5 billion to $2 billion in the dollar debt market, and about €500 million ($580 million) from euro-denominated notes, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for SoftBank said the bond deal size hasn't been finalized, declining to comment further. With a heavy emphasis on new AI investments, SoftBank's billionaire founder Masayoshi Son has pledged as much as $500 billion for a project known as Stargate and announced a planned $30 billion stake in OpenAI earlier this year.

Open RAN introduces a flexible, cloud-based architecture for the Radio Access Network (RAN), enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML)-driven automation across heterogeneous, multi-vendor deployments. While EXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) helps mitigate the opacity of AI models, explainability alone does not guarantee reliable network operations. In this article, we propose a lightweight verification approach based on interpretable models to validate the behavior of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents for RAN slicing and scheduling in Open RAN. Specifically, we use Decision Tree (DT)-based verifiers to perform near-real-time consistency checks at runtime, which would be otherwise unfeasible with computationally expensive state-of-the-art verifiers. We analyze the landscape of XAI and AI verification, propose a scalable architectural integration, and demonstrate feasibility with a DT-based slice-verifier. We also outline future challenges to ensure trustworthy AI adoption in Open RAN.

--The unabated growth in AI workload demands is driving the need for concerted advances in compute, memory, and interconnect performance. As traditional semiconductor scaling slows, high-speed interconnects have emerged as the new scaling engine, enabling the creation of larger logical GPUs by linking many GPUs into a single, low-latency, high-bandwidth compute domain. While initial scale-up fabrics leveraged copper interconnects for their power and cost advantages, the maximum reach of passive electrical interconnects (approximately 1 meter) effectively limits the scale-up domain to within a single rack. The advent of 3D-stacked optics and logic offers a transformative, power-efficient scale-up solution for connecting hundreds of GPU packages (thousands of GPUs) across multiple data center racks. This work explores the design tradeoffs of scale-up technologies and demonstrates how frontier LLMs necessitate novel photonic solutions to achieve aggressive power and performance targets. We model the benefits of 3D CPO (Passage) enabled GPUs and switches within the scale-up domain when training Frontier Mixture of Experts (MoE) models exceeding one trillion parameters. Our results show that the substantial increases in bandwidth and radix enabled by 3D CPO allow for an 8X increase in scale-up capability. The race to build larger, more sophisticated AI models is pushing the limits of existing infrastructure. At the chip and package level, GPUs are constrained by shoreline, yields and power. These challenges have led to the development of large high-bandwidth, low-latency scale-up pods. These pods effectively combine hundreds of GPUs into a single logical GPU to facilitate a variety of parallelism strategies (e.g. Approaches like Mixture of Experts (MoE) [1] have pushed scale-up networks to their limits due to copper reach (1 meter), which constrains the number of GPUs that can be connected within a single network hop. With MoEs, an ensemble of specialized sub-networks work together through sparse activations to increase model capacity without significantly increasing computational requirements. The output of the selected experts are combined to create the final result.

This work introduces Probabilistic Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (P-KAN), a novel probabilistic extension of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for time series forecasting. By replacing scalar weights with spline-based functional connections and directly parameterizing predictive distributions, P-KANs offer expressive yet parameter-efficient models capable of capturing nonlinear and heavy-tailed dynamics. We evaluate P-KANs on satellite traffic forecasting, where uncertainty-aware predictions enable dynamic thresholding for resource allocation. Results show that P-KANs consistently outperform Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) baselines in both accuracy and calibration, achieving superior efficiency-risk trade-offs while using significantly fewer parameters. We build up P-KANs on two distributions, namely Gaussian and Student-t distributions. The Gaussian variant provides robust, conservative forecasts suitable for safety-critical scenarios, whereas the Student-t variant yields sharper distributions that improve efficiency under stable demand. These findings establish P-KANs as a powerful framework for probabilistic forecasting with direct applicability to satellite communications and other resource-constrained domains.

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the frequent transmission of large amounts of data over wireless networks should meet the stringent timeliness requirements. Particularly, the freshness of packet status updates has a significant impact on the system performance. In this paper, we propose an age-of-information (AoI)-aware multi-base station (BS) real-time monitoring framework to support extensive IIoT deployments. To meet the freshness requirements of IIoT, we formulate a joint task offloading and resource allocation optimization problem with the goal of minimizing long-term average AoI. Tackling the core challenges of combinatorial explosion in multi-BS decision spaces and the stochastic dynamics of IIoT systems is crucial, as these factors render traditional optimization methods intractable. Firstly, an innovative branching-based Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (Branching-D3QN) algorithm is proposed to effectively implement task offloading, which optimizes the convergence performance by reducing the action space complexity from exponential to linear levels. Then, an efficient optimization solution to resource allocation is proposed by proving the semi-definite property of the Hessian matrix of bandwidth and computation resources. Finally, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm for efficient joint task offloading and resource allocation to achieve optimal average AoI performance. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed Branching-D3QN algorithm outperforms both state-of-the-art DRL methods and classical heuristics, achieving up to a 75% enhanced convergence speed and at least a 22% reduction in the long-term average AoI.

Plus: Omega Moon watches land and Coros has a new mountain watch, July unveils a trackable suitcase, Fujifilm has a new Instax, GrapheneOS will work on non-Pixel phones soon, and Roku leans into AI. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Honor, a Chinese phone brand that primarily sells its devices in Europe and Asia, announced a new smartphone in its Magic series this week, dubbed the Magic8 . It's notable because it's one of the first phones to be powered by the recently unveiled Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 --that's the flagship processor that will power many of the top Android phones in 2026.

This paper studies user localization aided by a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS). A feedback link from the Base Station (BS) to the user is adopted to enable dynamic power control of the user pilot transmissions in the uplink. A novel multi-agent algorithm for the joint control of the RIS phase configuration and the user transmit power is presented, which is based on a hybrid approach integrating NeuroEvolution (NE) and supervised learning. The proposed scheme requires only single-bit feedback messages for the uplink power control, supports RIS elements with discrete responses, and is numerically shown to outperform fingerprinting, deep reinforcement learning baselines and backpropagation-based position estimators.