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50 of the best Memorial Day deals and sales already live: Mattresses, headphones, outdoor furniture, and more

Mashable

Somehow, we've already reached the unofficial start of summer: the Memorial Day 2025 deals are here. Though Memorial Day isn't technically until May 26, plenty of brands kicked off their sales early. Leading the way are mattress deals, followed by home and kitchen deals. Below, we've gathered all the best deals so far ahead of Memorial Day, and will be adding to this list as more deals go live.


The Download: the desert data center boom, and how to measure Earth's elevations

MIT Technology Review

In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities nearby. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired more than 225 acres of undeveloped property, and Apple is expanding its existing data center just across the Truckee River from the industrial park. The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert--and it's just far enough away from Nevada's communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny. This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future--our new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence revolution.


Who's to Blame When AI Agents Screw Up?

WIRED

Over the past year, veteran software engineer Jay Prakash Thakur has spent his nights and weekends prototyping AI agents that could, in the near future, order meals and engineer mobile apps almost entirely on their own. His agents, while surprisingly capable, have also exposed new legal questions that await companies trying to capitalize on Silicon Valley's hottest new technology. Agents are AI programs that can act mostly independently, allowing companies to automate tasks such as answering customer questions or paying invoices. While ChatGPT and similar chatbots can draft emails or analyze bills upon request, Microsoft and other tech giants expect that agents will tackle more complex functions--and most importantly, do it with little human oversight. The tech industry's most ambitious plans involve multi-agent systems, with dozens of agents someday teaming up to replace entire workforces.



OpenAI's Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear

The Atlantic - Technology

Sam Altman is done with keyboards and screens. Earlier today, OpenAI announced its intentions to solve this apparent problem. The company is partnering with Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, who did pioneering work on products such as the iMac G3, the iPod, and, most famously, the iPhone. Together, Altman and Ive say they want to create hardware built specifically for AI software. Everyone, Altman suggested in a highly produced announcement video, could soon have access to a "team of geniuses"--presumably, ChatGPT-style assistants--on a "family of devices."


The Image Local Autoregressive Transformer

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, AutoRegressive (AR) models for the whole image generation empowered by transformers have achieved comparable or even better performance compared to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unfortunately, directly applying such AR models to edit/change local image regions, may suffer from the problems of missing global information, slow inference speed, and information leakage of local guidance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel model - image Local Autoregressive Transformer (iLAT), to better facilitate the locally guided image synthesis. Our iLAT learns the novel local discrete representations, by the newly proposed local autoregressive (LA) transformer of the attention mask and convolution mechanism. Thus iLAT can efficiently synthesize the local image regions by key guidance information. Our iLAT is evaluated on various locally guided image syntheses, such as pose-guided person image synthesis and face editing. Both quantitative and qualitative results show the efficacy of our model.


Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble: Enhancing Certified Robustness through Transitivity Andrew C. Cullen 1 Paul Montague 2 Sarah M. Erfani 1

Neural Information Processing Systems

In response to subtle adversarial examples flipping classifications of neural network models, recent research has promoted certified robustness as a solution. There, invariance of predictions to all norm-bounded attacks is achieved through randomised smoothing of network inputs. Today's state-of-the-art certifications make optimal use of the class output scores at the input instance under test: no better radius of certification (under the L


Everything Unveiled at Google I/O 2025

Mashable

See all the highlights from Google's annual 2025 Developers Conference in Mountain View, California. Check out the latest updates from Android XR to Gemini Live, and more. Topics Android Artificial Intelligence Google Google Gemini Latest Videos Everything Announced at AMD's 2025 Computex Keynote in 19 Minutes Watch highlights from AMD's Computex press conference. 1 hour ago By Mashable Video'Caught Stealing' trailer sees Zoรซ Kravitz and Austin Butler's cat-sitting gone awry Darren Aronofsky's swaggering new film looks like a rollicking time. Loading... Subscribe These newsletters may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. By clicking Subscribe, you confirm you are 16 and agree to ourTerms of Use and Privacy Policy.


Android XR Glasses Unveiled at Google I/O 2025

Mashable

Topics Android Artificial Intelligence Google Google Gemini Latest Videos Everything Announced at AMD's 2025 Computex Keynote in 19 Minutes Watch highlights from AMD's Computex press conference. 1 hour ago By Mashable Video'Caught Stealing' trailer sees Zoรซ Kravitz and Austin Butler's cat-sitting gone awry Darren Aronofsky's swaggering new film looks like a rollicking time. Loading... Subscribe These newsletters may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. By clicking Subscribe, you confirm you are 16 and agree to ourTerms of Use and Privacy Policy. See you at your inbox! Mashable is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis and may not be used by third parties without express written permission.


Report: Creating a 5-second AI video is like running a microwave for an hour

Mashable

You've probably heard that statistic that every search on ChatGPT uses the equivalent of a bottle of water. And while that's technically true, it misses some of the nuance. The MIT Technology Review dropped a massive report that reveals how the artificial intelligence industry uses energy -- and exactly how much energy it costs to use a service like ChatGPT. The report determined that the energy cost of large-language models like ChatGPT cost anywhere from 114 joules per response to 6,706 joules per response -- that's the difference between running a microwave for one-tenth of a second to running a microwave for eight seconds. The lower-energy models, according to the report, use less energy because they uses fewer parameters, which also means the answers tend to be less accurate.