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The great NPU failure: Two years later, local AI is still all about GPUs

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Local AI tools are more powerful than ever, but most of the magic ain't happening on NPUs--much to Microsoft's disappointment, I'm sure. For the last few years, the term "AI PC" has basically meant little more than "a lightweight portable laptop with a neural processing unit (NPU) ." Today, two years after the glitzy launch of NPUs with Intel's Meteor Lake hardware, these AI PCs still feel like glorified tech demos. But local AI is here!


How do snakes move? It's not all slithering.

Popular Science

The reptiles can swim, cartwheel, and even fly. They strike, glide, and even fly. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You know that scene in where Harry accidentally frees a boa constrictor from the zoo? But there's nothing supernatural about how snakes move.


Inside the California 'AI factory' that showcases the contradiction at the heart of the tech race

BBC News

Google's ultra-private CEO Sundar Pichai is showing me around Googleplex, its California headquarters. A walkway runs along the length of it, passing by a giant dinosaur skeleton, a beach volleyball pitch and dozens of Googlers lunching under the hazy November sun. But it's a laboratory, hidden away at the back of the campus behind some trees, that he is most excited to show me. This is where the invention that Google believes is its secret weapon is being developed. Known as a Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU), it looks like an unassuming little chip but, says Mr Pichai, it will one day power every AI query that goes through Google.


Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after Epstein emails made public

BBC News

Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers is stepping down from the board at OpenAI, a week after a tranche of emails between him and late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released. Summers said in a statement to the BBC that he was grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress. Summers, who was also once the president of Harvard University, said on Monday that he would be stepping back from public commitments over his ties to Epstein. The recently released emails showed Summers communicated with Epstein until the day before Epstein's 2019 arrest for the alleged sex trafficking of minors. In a statement, the artificial intelligence company said it respected Summers' decision to resign.


Adjustable Robust Reinforcement Learning for Online 3D Bin Packing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Designing effective policies for the online 3D bin packing problem (3D-BPP) has been a long-standing challenge, primarily due to the unpredictable nature of incoming box sequences and stringent physical constraints.



The Download: de-censoring DeepSeek, and Gemini 3

MIT Technology Review

A group of quantum physicists at Spanish firm Multiverse Computing claims to have created a version of the powerful reasoning AI model DeepSeek R1 that strips out the censorship built into the original by its Chinese creators. In China, AI companies are subject to rules and regulations meant to ensure that content output aligns with laws and "socialist values." As a result, companies build in layers of censorship when training the AI systems. When asked questions that are deemed "politically sensitive," the models often refuse to answer or provide talking points straight from state propaganda. Multiverse Computing specializes in quantum-inspired AI techniques, which it used to create DeepSeek R1 Slim, a model that is 55% smaller but performs almost as well as the original model. It allowed them to identify and remove Chinese censorship so that the model answered sensitive questions in much the same way as Western models.




Young Mormons Built an App to Help Men Quit Gooning

WIRED

The Relay app allows users to track their porn-free streaks and get group support. Its creators say they're taking a stand against porn and AI erotica. Jamie would meticulously schedule his days around finding time alone to watch porn and masturbate--often up to five times a day. The 32-year-old Michigan engineer, who did not want to use his real name due to privacy concerns, first watched porn at the impressionable age of 12, but never realized he had a problem until just after his father's funeral three years ago. "I didn't shed a single tear," he says.