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This high-tech exoskeleton lets you hike longer and run faster

Mashable

Every weekend warrior knows the drill -- you sit in front of a computer all week, and when the weekend hits, you bike, hike, and run yourself ragged. Your body feels destroyed on Monday. If this sounds like you -- or even if you're a casual exerciser who wants to walk and bike longer distances without getting tired -- the future has arrived. The world's first-ever outdoor exoskeleton, Hypershell X, can help max out your physical abilities with minimal effort. Hypershell X is causing a buzz among both outdoorsy types and robotics enthusiasts, and it won the Best of Innovation in Robotics award at CES 2025.


Meghan Markle reveals facial feature that cost her beauty campaigns

FOX News

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo provides a review of'With Love, Meghan' on'The Ingraham Angle.' Meghan Markle found early fame for starring on a popular television show, but her early auditioning days didn't always land success. The Duchess of Sussex admitted beauty brands were reluctant to hire her due to her natural, freckled complexion. Markle, 43, starred as Rachel Zane for seven years on the legal series "Suits," but prior to hitting it big in entertainment, her commercial agent hit major roadblocks. MEGHAN MARKLE SHOOTS DOWN PRINCE HARRY DIVORCE RUMORS, ADMITS ROYAL COUPLE ARE FINALLY IN'HONEYMOON' PHASE Meghan Markle admitted she couldn't land a beauty commercial due to her natural features. The As Ever lifestyle brand founder, who went makeup-free to record the chat, discussed challenges in the beauty industry during an episode of "The Jamie Kern Lima Show."


Meta has finally launched its ChatGPT competitor

Mashable

In the thick of Meta's first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit the launch button on Meta AI -- the company's full-throttle answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to Meta's April 29 press release, the new standalone AI app is built on the company's latest Llama 4 model. It's pitched as a hyper-personalized assistant for users already living inside the Meta ecosystem: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook -- you know the drill. In a choice Instagram video, Zuckerberg, framed in a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses, pitched the app as a product built for voice-first conversations. One standout feature is the Discover feed.


Wait, did Siris voice just change?

Mashable

Maybe you've noticed: Siri doesn't quite sound like Siri anymore. However, it's just enough to make you pause and ask, "Hey, Siri, did your voice change?" Occasionally, Google search trends light up with people wondering whether Siri's voice is different -- or, rather, whether the voice assistant's many voices are different. Across the internet, users are reporting that Siri's voice has turned flat, unnatural, stern, and oddly disengaged. Gone is the upbeat, more conversational tone we're used to.


OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT an ass-kissing weirdo

Engadget

OpenAI is rolling back a recent update to GPT-4o, the default model that powers ChatGPT, following complaints from users that it made the chat bot act like a weirdo. "The last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a X post spotted by TechCrunch. As of midday Tuesday, Altman said ChatGPT was running on an older, less sycophantic version of GPT-4o for all free users. The company hopes to get paid users back on an older release of the model by later today. "We're working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming days," Altman said, adding OpenAI would share more information about what went wrong "at some point."


Meta's new AI app delivers a chatbot with a social media twist

ZDNet

Meta has unveiled a new AI app that combines chatbot features with a social media experience. Launched on Tuesday for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, the Meta AI app offers most of the usual aspects of an AI app. You can get information, generate content, and analyze photos and other images. "Meta AI is built to get to know you, so its answers are more helpful," Meta said in a news release. "It's easy to talk to, so it's more seamless and natural to interact with. It's more social, so it can show you things from the people and places you care about. And you can use Meta AI's voice features while multitasking and doing other things on your device, with a visible icon to let you know when the microphone is in use."


Meta has a plan to bring AI to WhatsApp chats without breaking privacy

Engadget

As Meta's first-ever generative AI conference gets underway, the company is also previewing a significant update on its plans to bring AI features to WhatsApp chats. Buried in its LlamaCon updates, the company shared that it's working on something called "Private Processing," which will allow users to take advantage of generative AI capabilities within WhatsApp without eroding its privacy features. According to Meta, Private Processing is an "optional capability" that will enable people to "leverage AI capabilities for things like summarizing unread messages or refining them, while keeping messages private." WhatsApp, of course, is known for its strong privacy protections and end-to-end encryption. That would seem incompatible with cloud-based AI features like Meta AI.


GenDP: A Framework of Dynamic Programming Acceleration for Genome Sequencing Analysis

Communications of the ACM

Genomics is playing an important role in transforming healthcare. Genetic data, however, is being produced at a rate that far outpaces Moore's Law. Many efforts have been made to accelerate genomics kernels on modern commodity hardware, such as CPUs and GPUs, as well as custom accelerators (ASICs) for specific genomics kernels. While ASICs provide higher performance and energy efficiency than general-purpose hardware, they incur a high hardware-design cost. Moreover, to extract the best performance, ASICs tend to have significantly different architectures for different kernels.


Meta is making it easier to use Llama models for app development

Engadget

Meta is releasing a new tool it hopes will encourage developers to use its family of Llama models for their next project. At its inaugural LlamaCon event in Menlo Park on Tuesday, the company announced the Llama API. Available as a limited free preview starting today, the tool gives developers a place to experiment with Meta's AI models, including the recently released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick systems. It also makes it easy to create new API keys, which devs can use for authentication purposes. "We want to make it even easier for you to quickly start building with Llama, while also giving you complete control over your models and weights without being locked to an API," the company said in a blog post published during the event.


WhatsApp Is Walking a Tightrope Between AI Features and Privacy

WIRED

The end-to-end encrypted communication app WhatsApp, used by roughly 3 billion people around the world, will roll out cloud-based AI capabilities in the coming weeks that are designed to preserve WhatsApp's defining security and privacy guarantees while offering users access to message summarization and composition tools. Meta has been incorporating generative AI features across its services that are built on its open source large language model, Llama. And WhatsApp already incorporates a light blue circle that gives users access to the Meta AI assistant. But many users have balked at this addition, given that interactions with the AI assistant aren't shielded from Meta the way end-to-end encrtyped WhatsApp chats are. The new feature, dubbed Private Processing, is meant to address these concerns with what the company says is a carefully architected and purpose-built platform devoted to processing data for AI tasks without the information being accessible to Meta, WhatsApp, or any other party.